John Quincy Adams, an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer and diarist who served as the 6th president of the USA, once said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader“.
Leaders are often explicated by qualities like passion, compassion, inspiration and decisions. They’ve this inherent enthusiasm to learn continuously and create a better world. Their strong but flexible and realistic principles inspire others in their organizations to be like them. Leaders see beyond the visible, they see the big picture and they are at least five steps ahead of what the others in the group are thinking, which is why they show people the way for the way-forward. Their clear communication-skills and the ability to keep the message simple help them articulate their vision easily and effectively.
Enhanced clarity on strengths and development-areas for his organization and teams is a specific trait of a business-leader. The depth of his self-awareness comes handy when the future course of the organization has to be decided. The ability to understand his own reaction to a situation, prepare the appropriate response and put it into practice under pressure, stands on his dexterity to grasp the strengths and weaknesses of his organization and teams. In fact, business-leaders will need to be motivated by personal values, rather than just financial results, in order to meet the goals of their respective organizations. They have to demonstrate the commitment to their views and principles to extract sustained efforts from their people. They ought to reconnect to their inner core through imagination and experiential learning. Domain-expertise has diminishing value for leaders now. They must expand their perspective to look beyond the confines of their industry and may be, even beyond the spheres of business.
Leadership is about making disruptions and making people believe in those disruptions. A business-leader brings in his opinions and thoughts to the table to make changes happen for the larger good. But to give the best to his organization, he needs the full-on support of his teams. A leader is at his best when he injects the sense of ambition, purpose and shared journey into his teams. In fact, the best way to assess leadership-capability is the assessment of the team-capability. A leader has to trust his team and see his people as successful individuals with innovative and brilliant ideas. Only through developing and maintaining an excellent talent-base, a leader can go on bringing in great business-outcomes. Team-deliverability gives him the kick every day to move forward. Helping people and grooming them for the next level to extract a bigger contribution for his organization brings to him the ultimate fulfilment.
Going forward in the same breath, it can easily be said that leaders should recruit people to replace them. The best scenario for any organization can happen when its leaders take a back-seat and still the organization keeps growing in a natural progression. The greatest business-leaders have this knack to identify the times to collaborate and follow, while their teams take charge of the proceedings. They know that apt delegation of responsibilities goes a long way to bring positive results for organizations and they don’t have to be at the front of the pack always. The integral aspect of leadership is inspiration, not power. When organizations are structured bottom-up, decentralized and interdependent with multi-functional divisions, they conjure up superior long-term performance. In delegating responsibilities or starting a new division, there is always an element of nerves and anxiety. Hiring the right people, building a brand or developing a customer-base, has always been a challenge. But true leaders know for the fact that more than the idea or approach to anything, it is the consistency towards it that works. Staying versatile at work helps them to push the boundaries to find the right solution for challenges.
A leader has got to inculcate in himself a profound sense of care and fairness for his team-members. Employees or the team-members of an organization want nothing more than to be seen, understood and recognized for who they are and what they do. Fairness from a leader works as a magical motivator for his team-members. It is not always ‘first him and then others’. A leader does a world of good by not putting his stature in front of other team-members’ interests. Not only he has to be essentially a team-member himself, but it must also seem that he is a team-player. Seeing their leader committed to shares purpose and shared vision, employees get encouraged to stick to their organizational ethical commitments.
New-age leadership is certainly about leading with the heart, not with data and analysis. Business-leaders have to serve organizations rather than make decisions and pass orders. They’ve to be change-agents, foster innovational agility and bear resoluteness in ever-changing business-ecosystems. Ethical practices and business-ethos have to be on top of their respective agendas. They’ll have to make sure that their organizations have assimilated sustainable development in the regular activities. In fact, ingraining economic incentives in sustainability and unfolding its newer horizons to respond to the needs of future will have to be a key attribute for the 21st century business-leaders.
