Leadership investment requires resources, time, energy, methodology and practices, to continually strive for what influences the most people in the most positive way.
It’s an interesting personalized world emerging ahead of us. All of us learn, grow, and do things with unique personal style. Personalization needs to be the theme for leading a people-centric world.
Contemporary business leaders are expected to play multiple personas to deepen influence: Today’s business workforce is multigenerational, multicultural, multidivicing, etc. The diversity of thoughts, characters, skills, styles account for the majority of our differences. Personalized leadership is in demand to broaden perspective and bridge gaps by building compelling teams in which people are encouraged to learn, criticize, and collaborate with each other to co-solve complex problems smoothly.
Great leaders must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to catalyze business growth. Contemporary leaders need to wear multiple personas and practice multiple leadership roles fluently. They can lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to get critical issues done timely; they are great coaches to advise, and change agents to walk the talk.
The leadership differentiation provided by versatile talent, unique capabilities is usually more influential, with personal touch: With the increasing level of uncertainty and complexity, leaders that truly understand change and know how to lead people through complex transitions are critical to long term success! Leadership is both art and science. The high-profile leaders are multidimensional thinkers and versatile business executives, have the right blend of leadership skills, business acumen, technical expertise, and digital fluency to amplify leadership impact.
In today’s hyper-connected and fast changing environment, command and control style leadership is gradually out of steam. The expectation is for leaders to listen, have empathy and involve the team to make decisions and ensure the personal development of all. Personalized leadership based on empathetic understanding, fresh knowledge, logical reasoning, persuasive communication via different channels, professional maturity, can make personal touch for diverse followers, deepen leadership influence all the time.
Leadership with personalized style will build trust and become more influential: Leadership is situational; there is the time you need to lead ahead, facilitate answers, set examples; there’s the time you need to lead from behind, ask insightful questions, and attract fresh viewpoints. There is time you should be strategic with the big picture perspective; there’s time you need to be hands-on by paying more attention to significant details. But avoid ineffective “hands-on” such as interfering, meddling, tinkering or overbearing, undermining people and stifling execution of the required deliverables.
Abundant information can be refined into business intelligence combined with digital pulse, so the organization has more visibility of people’s sentiments and can work to make a motivating environment to increase people-centricity. Organizational leaders equipped with customized analytics tools can make formerly invisible patterns of social interaction more visible; apply such information to boost people engagement, build mutual trust, and increase leadership influence.
Our planet has a diverse population and multiple generations! Leadership is not about exercising power over others, but inspiring them to become leaders and to reach self-efficacy. The substances of leadership are about vision, influence, and progression. Leadership investment requires resources, time, energy, methodology and practices, to continually strive for what influence the most people in the most positive way.
