Influential Leaders have several components in place, working together, which I call the leadership formula, which compels people to join in with and embrace their leadership.
The leadership formula usually involves a number of fairly simple concepts. Yet, despite the simplicity of such concepts, there still appears to be a dearth of great leadership at a business, political and world level. Even though there seems to be some “modest” improvements on employee engagement reported by the Hay Group 2013 there is still much to be done.
In their most recent research, “”, Hays have concluded leaders need to improve on three levels, cognitive, emotional and behavioural
[pullquote style="left" quote="dark"]Cognitive Leaders need new forms of contextual awareness, based on strong conceptual and strategic thinking capabilities. They need to be able to conceptualize change in an unprecedented way, again based on conceptual and strategic thinking. Leaders need to exhibit new forms of intellectual openness and curiosity.Emotional Overall, leaders will need to be much more sensitive to different cultures, generations and genders. They will need to demonstrate higher levels of integrity and sincerity and adopt a more ethical approach to doing business. They must also tolerate far higher levels of ambiguity.
Behavioural Leaders must create a culture of trust and openness. As post-heroic leaders they must rethink old concepts such as loyalty and retention and personally create loyalty. Collaboration – cross-generational, cross-functional and cross-company – will be their watchword. They must lead increasingly diverse teams.”[/pullquote]
While the research shows a marked progression and depth to the skill set required of a leader, and are vital components of the leadership formula, they miss out essential components of the formula. Without these missing components, the change needed to develop our leaders for the future may well be slow and fraught with difficulties.
Expectations of our leaders are increasing Ethical and value centred leadership seems to be the emerging priority across the globe. The world needs leaders who can pull it from the current state of chaos. Certainly enhanced cognitive, emotional and behavioural skills and competences will help to make that change.
According to Mike Myatt In the USA alone, it is estimated that some $170 billion has been spent on leadership development. The danger is though, we approach the problem and waste many more billions in misguided leadership programmes which miss important components of the leadership formula.
The missing parts in the leadership formula are the filters which our thinking, emotions and behaviours are sieved through. These are our beliefs, and our ability to envision a future.
Cognitive, emotional and behavioural excellence is to no avail and the leadership formula is incomplete when the belief system those skills are filtered through is somewhat blinkered, limiting or biased. Without vision, then no-one is going anywhere, and we remain at Groundhog Day, repeating the same mistakes, making the same future from yesterday and remain in our respective comfort zones.
What I have seen from people who have inspired and influenced the world, such as Ghandi, Luther King JR and Mandela for example have been some basic beliefs and a clear vision which have freeing and unifying beliefs. These are similar to:
- We are all equally as valuable
- There is only love or fear of love
- We can create our reality
Such leaders and truly successful business leaders, also have a capacity to envision a future and enable great loyalty and enthusiasm from teams and the public when their vision includes the precepts of:
- Anything is possible
- Our vision is for the greater good of all
- What we can imagine we can create
If you add these two elements to cognitive, emotional and behavioural skills, then you have the ingredients for all possibilities, and a chance to shape the world; the organisation or the team anyway you want. They are the 5 components of a successful leadership formula, which, if done well could change the world for the better.
This great article is from the our 6 months themed series based on the Centre for Creative Leaderships Report of 2013, in which they identified the 6 top challenges for leaders across the globe: Don't Miss Out! Sign up here to be notified of subsequent issues and posts
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