Regenerate!

Learning Leadership skills or improving them requires important changes in the ‘wiring’ of our brains. Thinking like walking style  is driven by habits formed.

Some of the important changes required in thinking of leaders are:

-capturing reality comprehensively and  while avoiding various biases and pre-conceived notions. By habit we take a very narrow and biased view.

-zero based thinking or thinking based on first principles. But we find it easier start with some ‘known’ base and come to conclusions fast.

-developing clarity and conviction about values. We are in agreement with values in general but we are used to applying them real situations.

-being in touch with own and others feelings and generating energy from them. Our education (most of it) is heavily biased towards left brain thinking. Our right brains need to be wired in!

-ability to dream big

-communicate and communicate. We always underestimate this need.

-bias for action.

These thinking habits can be formed by ‘thinking’ in above ways in relation to own work.

Miskin sent me an intersting article on unlearning & learning

This article says that generally unlearning (not really unlearning) happens through non-use and for this new thinking habits need to be formed and practiced. Very relevant.

Learning Leadership programs and coaching help learners in all this. Coaching is particularly useful since only a neutral and knowledgeable person can help one with observing and correcting thinking habits.

Take a look.

Many thanks Miskin for a nice article.

Leadership is often described in terms of vision, inspiration, courage, passion, dynamism, motivation, change & transformation, mobilization etc. While all these are important outcomes or facets of leadership they do not offer many clues about how to get there if one wants to develop leadership skills.

When I think about leadership, I can think about feeling responsible and doing something about it. If I think of leadership in the context of organizations I can say that to improve leadership skills one needs to get better at a range of competencies.

A leader should be able to grasp and face reality in all its complexities. The reality must cover ‘own and internal’ reality. The leader should be able to both handle and harness emotions well. He \ she should be able to identify and implement values.  The leader should be able to generate and harness small and big ideas, generate excitement and develop them into overarching vision. The leader should be able to connect with the organization’s goals and generate breakthroughs in projects and processes. He \ she should be able to learn quickly and teach for developing people. The leader should be able to develop an agenda covering all above and should be able to communicate it simply and directly.

At different points of an executive’s career and depending on the organization’s situation the emphasis would shift, but I have come to believe that above competencies remain core.

Having defined the competencies in these specific terms it easier to think about ways of getting there.

There are many facets of leadership -vision, values, transformation, and others. Leadership competencies include ability to understand reality, ability to see the larger picture, ability to marshal resources, passion for developing people, and more.

But if I am asked,  “what is a leader’s ‘output’” or “what is the ‘outcome’ of leadership?”, I will say that on a day-today basis the outcome of ‘good’ leadership is inspiring people to accomplish something, making a routine job worthwhile.

And what is ‘inspiration’? It is feeling which gives that booster dose of energy. If the primary outcome of good leadership is inspiration, can there be able leadership without good emotional capabilities?

Emotional capability is that X-factor behind successful leadership. Emotional capability is not just emotional intelligence.

Without the ability to understand emotions, without the ability to deal with them, and without the ability to harness them, much of a leader’s thinking will remain just thinking and every action will need exercise of formal authority. No matter, what position a leader occupies there are many crucial aspects that are beyond his formal powers. He or she must have that X-factor.

Given the way in which people get their education and ‘training’ on the job, most have learned and have come to believe that emotions are bad, particularly in business or in serious work. This becomes a major factor that hinders capable people from realising full potential -theirs’ and others’.

Development of this X-factor, therefore, is one of the cornerstones of developing leadership skills.

I conducted a workshop “Leadership -How to Regenerate & Rejuvenate Your Business?” at the Indian Merchants’ Chamber, Mumbai on August 1, 2009. It was a day full of interactions with senior level participants from industries like financial services, logistics services, mineral trading, manufacturing, and others.

There was a huge interest in the emotional aspects of leadership, something that never fails to surprise me. Display of emotions is considered a taboo at work -this was apparent when one of the participant made distinction between being passionate and being emotional. But how does one reconcile this with the fact that great leaders are passionate about their work and that passion, excitement, pride and other similar feelings are central to leadership? What happens when you equate display of emotions with emotions themselves?and end up in suppressing them? Participants said that the workshop showed them the ways of dealing with emotions and using their emotional abilities as strength.

On another plane, thinking about their own work processes helped them apply various leadership principles to day-to-day work. How to leverage work related values was also tried by them. All this work led to their own agendas.

When their attention was turned to ideas that would make big difference to their businesses, the “creative tension” in the air was palpable. Various workouts help them draw ideas from ground realities and yet use imagination to question the status quo.

For me the big take-away from the workshop is to learn in what ways leadership principles work across a diverse range of industries. Another take-away was when you provide means of focusing on various aspect of work, how almost everyone can come up with good solid thinking and tangible actions for improving things. It just shows that all of us have huge untapped potential.

It is our right and obligation to discover our potential. It was very satisfying to me that I could be of help in this.