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Living in a time of significant changes: A glance at Leadership Traits
Leadership traits are the personal qualities that help a person to shape himself or herself into an effective leader. These traits help one to address specific challenges and work efficiently in different fields. For example, leaders in IT must deal with the constant industrial change, as well as issues with cybersecurity threats, legacy systems, and legal compliance, etc. Leaders should also model some of the leadership qualities to motivate employees to achieve high performance and meet business goals.
Key Leadership Traits
Throughout my career, I have been working with quite a few leaders, many of them are competent but only a few are extraordinary and influential. What makes the difference? Some people suggest that great leaders should be resilient, responsible, respected, and should have a solid base in domain knowledge. Some people say that outstanding leaders should be kind to their subordinates and demonstrate ethical conduct. Others reckon that a charismatic style of the leaders is more desirable and will draw people to them.
I have summarized the following qualities which I have observed working with leaders, and I believe all leaders should consider embodying them to be effective.
Empathy
When a leader treats all with respects, shows genuine concern for others, listens carefully to understand, it helps the leader to create awareness, earn trust and foster relationship. Leaders who create strong rapport, develop deep bonds between themselves and their employees, help to improve team collaboration and warrant the long-term success of organizations.
Emotional Intelligence
A leaders’ emotional intelligence is as important as professional ability, if not more. It is not only about recognising and managing one’s own emotion, but also understanding the people around you, how they feel and how your emotions affect them. Have you witnessed any emotional outburst in the workplace, and how did that impact the working relationship? Leaders need to master their emotions and navigate through stressful situations to succeed.
Foster ‘No Blame’ Culture
When the team make mistakes or encounter issues, instead of looking for a scapegoat and blaming individuals, leaders should focus on the problem, looking for constructive solutions and moving forward. By fostering a ‘no blame’ culture within an organisation, leaders encourage employees to participate actively, learn and improve constantly, and help the organisation to more transparent and continue to grow.
Humility
Humility is the recognition of people being human and have both strengths and weaknesses. Leaders who show humility, don’t think less of themselves, instead, they think more of the others. They prioritise the success of the organisation over their own. Humble leaders present themselves like everyone else, they attract and inspire followers and bring people together to contribute to their business’ success.
Responsibility
Leaders should take full responsibility for themselves, as well as the success of the project, team, and organization. Responsible leaders stand by their success and take ownership of their mistakes. They take the initiative to do what needs to be done and they will hold others accountable. They are willing to cross the boundaries and help out where needed.
Self-Confidence
Leaders’ confidence is influential. Employees are drawn to leaders who are confident, seeking their opinions and advice. Leaders should also recognize the value of building self-confidence within the others and are not threatened by doing so. This will help to promote new ideas and maximise participation from everyone. Also, self-confidence enables one to be more flexible in adapting others’ suggestions, taking responsibility, and keeping on improving, which is key to today’s businesses.
Courage
Courageous leaders are assertive and willing to take calculated risks. They are willing to try new things, test new ideas, and facilitate constructive disagreements for the best interest of the organisation. These individuals often champion new ideas and breakthroughs and enable the team to achieve creative solutions.
Focus
Extraordinary leaders don’t wait to start, they plan, and are extremely organized. They encourage collaboration and inclusive leadership. Also, they think through multiple scenarios with viable alternatives and plan toward success. They devise strategies, formulate plans, define processes and monitor progress to warrant high performance. They take calculated risks and prepare contingency plans in the event of unexpected changes.
Leadership focus on how leaders use their authority in the decisions they make, actions they engage in, and ways they influence others. Effective leaders exercise a high level of integrity, leading with confidence, communicating clearly and concisely, addressing problems without finger-pointing, demonstrating courage and real accountability, and keeping focused on delivering the business’ objectives. They are people-oriented, aware of how their decisions impact others and use their power to serve the greater good and motivate teams to achieve high-performance.
Also, don’t miss to check our Leadership course curriculum. Contact us at [email protected].
If you want to become a great leader, make sure you embody and demonstrate the qualities discussed above. It isn’t easy, but the rewards can be truly phenomenal. If you want to become a transformational leader and need help to improve your leadership skills, Contact usto find out how we can help.
Projects fail to gain momentum because the leaders in the journey covered the distance travelling backwards. Consider you are driving a car, constantly looking into the rear-view mirror. How do you think your journey would be? How safe would you be? How fast would you be going? Would you be moving towards your destination at all?
Leadership is all about moving forward. Living into the future. A future that does not really exist and so that needs to be created. To understand how to create this future, we need to understand the context a leader must know about the impact of his/her Past, Present and Future.
The Past
The past is where it should belong, the past. However, leaders carry their past not only into the present but also into the future. Fear of failing is a typical example most leaders experience. Let’s talk about Hari. Hari failed repeatedly in his studies while at school. It happened in the past, yet he lives the failures each day. Worse, he refuses to take up new assignments or risks for the future, because of the failure he faced in his studies, in his past.
The Present
The Present is just what it literally means. A ‘Present’ given by life to each of us moment by moment. A moment to create, perform and live. But, guess what, leaders ignore the opportunity and replace the present with events of the past or expectations of the future. Hari fails to see his present as an opportunity to shed the discomforting events of his past. Rather, he prefers to allow uncomfortable thoughts of an uncertain future to replace his present. Hari, as a leader, has no present. His life, every moment, is either being lived with failures of his past or the uncertainties of his future. This adversely impacts his leadership abilities significantly.
The Future
The future is the most precious of the three. It is up for grabs. A leader has the freedom to do whatever he or she wants from it. It is a blank canvas. But what does Hari do instead? He clutters all possibilities of a future by pushing past events into it. He kills all the possibilities of his future by blocking it with experiences of his past. Hari refuses to adapt himself to a better future because his concept of a future is nothing but the events of his past being revisited.
Leaders such as Hari are unaware of the fact that they are leading moving backwards. He senses he is moving, but he is unaware of the direction. When a leader is walking with his back to the future, he is moving ahead, but not visualising ahead. Leaders who fail to visualise into the future generally display the following outcome behaviours:
They are risk-averse. Since they fail to envision ahead.
The tempo, velocity and direction they resort to are all unpredictable.
They do not have the faculties of forecasting, prediction and response
They fail to overcome obstacles easily and spiral into anxiety to perform
They live in constant fear of failing and do not allow others to fail
Leaders need to look ahead and walk ahead. They need to fix empowering future contexts that are not anchored by past failures. Past failures and challenges are mere beacons. Beacons which should influence a person to take workable actions and not stop him, or her, altogether. Leadership requires a clear understanding of creating powerful future contexts that are not influenced by past failures. It means walking a journey knowing fully well of the chaos, challenges and pitfalls that lay ahead, and yet being unfettered and resolute in purpose and intention.
An effective leader thrives in an environment:
Where leaders are adaptive to create a future from their present and not from the past
Where leaders place the events of their past to where it rightfully belongs; the past
Where leaders do not allow failures to impact the present or the future
Where leaders understand, that in reality, the past does not exist nor does the future.
Where leaders comprehend that it’s up to them to either enforce the present with the pain of the past or gains of a future
Leadership is all about setting a powerful context, a vision and driving oneself towards a definitive purpose using the future as an agenda. It is about operating from the present to create a future of own choosing. Most importantly, it is creating an eco-system where other human beings too are empowered operating from a present that is driven by a powerful future than an arduous past.
Transformations are led by Leaders with teams that are forward-looking and pacing with a clear understanding of the impact of the Past, Present and Future. It is about driving the car looking ahead and using the rear-view mirror intermittently to maintain safety and direction.
A forest once experienced a flood. The swollen river had breached its banks and water inundated the forest floor. It was not a good time for the animals, more specifically those that lived off the land. Fortunately, in the middle of the forest was a rocky outcrop, an elevated table that rose from the ground. It was here that all the animals were safe.
The situation was precarious. Hunter and hunted were now together. Resources were limited. The time now hinged on when the water level receded in the river. It looked like it would take a couple of months. Then something strange happened. The animals started to exist in harmony. They did not pounce on one another, they did not push the other away to make space, instead, they started to look for innovative ways of nourishment. Living with what was present for them, by existing and innovating within given conditions. That was now the new normal!
Agile Teams we have worked with during the lockdown, are akin to these animals. They have adapted and persevered. The Scrum values of Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage took a new meaning for all of us. Suddenly, they were just not words, they became the new normal of working in these disruptive times! They literally became the rallying points on which we built a whole new way of working. Disruptive times only means that existing patterns have been altered. It does not mean opportunities no longer exist. The same opportunities exist, just that one needs to create new patterns and achieve them in altered conditions.
So what is that we at Leadership Tribe do, to create new ways of working, such that we never lost the essence of working as Agile Teams in spite of the challenges that we faced?
We innovated five new patterns or new ways of working.
Increasing Number of Rituals:
Teams were now abruptly distributed. We had to work remotely. That meant spending more time working online. Instead of engaging in unscheduled and open-ended zoom meetings, we created two Stand Up meetings a day. This gave us the space to communicate not only what we are committing for the day, but also to freely express the impediments or blockers that each of us faced. Two Stand Up’s a day clearly communicating and addressing just blockers (personal and professional) became the most important issue for us on a daily basis. We also increased the number of times we did our Sprint Planning & Sprint Reviews in a week. All the while, ensuring the meetings were strictly time-boxed and the safety of people respected.
Modifying Retrospectives:
We modified our Retrospectives by changing the format. What we started to discuss on were; Mistakes We Made, Mistakes We Can Repeat, Mistakes We Cannot Repeat. By allowing for this psychological shift in making mistakes as something natural and a given, we quickly started to transform as a learning organization. Our team members were now ok to deal with the uncertainties of the conditions they faced and were able to deal with rapidly shifting mindsets more effectively.
Use of Online Tools:
We started to experiment with various online tools. We exploited all the free ones that existed! We used multiple online tools to create a better visualization of the work we did. If a tool became too cumbersome or complex, we simply abandoned it and simplified our processes, till we homed into just three primary tools to collaborate from. The aim was to convert most of what we used to do earlier in a near realistic fashion. Mural and Miro, for example, gave us the liberty to use the ubiquitous Post IT notes, while Trello got us back to the feel of Kanban.
Leadership Conversations:
The first Agile Value was paramount in our working philosophy; “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. While we adapted and meshed in with various new online processes and tools, we could not lose focus of the essence of the human element and human interaction, irrespective of the fact that we were all forced to be separated by distance and time. We initiated leadership conversations with all our stakeholders, sponsors, and clients. A one-hour interaction just to converse on the realities of our respective worlds and how we are dealing with the consequences of this unprecedented global occurrence. We didn’t engage in coaching, facilitation, or mentoring. We just decided to listen, to just be ’there’. These conversations were an opportunity to build and strengthen human relationships, the business was not on the agenda. This was an opportunity for us to make friends!
Redesigning OKRs:
We went and redrew all our existing OKRs. Most of the proposed outcomes had lost their significance due to the fluctuating markets and economic uncertainties. Our clients were on a rethink in engaging with us, and we had to be proactive. We conducted a webinar to educate our clients on this issue and went onto reconsider almost 80% of our existing Key Results. We made new ones. Market sentiments, reduced business valuation, and apprehensive strategic thinking demanded we look at our existing Key Results and redefine them to the new normal. Our Objectives didn’t change, they still remain valid irrespective of the given circumstances. They are very much achievable.
Forests are sensitive habitats. They are at the peril of nature’s wrath. Be it a fire, flood, or drought, the animals who co-exist in it are at her mercy. Yet, nature has a marvelous way of persevering through the odds. Animals, over years of evolutionary change, adapt, and survive. While individual entities may perish, the species doesn’t. Nature only creates a mass extinction, it isn’t selective. We humans, too are masters at adaptation. It is our ability to stay connected that has got us to the very top of the living order. Agile teams are an epitome of human efficiency and perseverance. It is built on Values and Principles that are agnostic to external circumstances and disruptions. In fact, the very existence of Agile is to effectively and efficiently navigate through a VUCA world.
