Serve
Some of the attributes needed by a leader who serves are:
• Empathy – leaders are always striving to understand other people and to have the ability to see things from their perspective
• Listening – leaders now need more than the ability to just communicate, they must also have a deep commitment to listening to others and astriving to understand what they hear
• Awareness – both in terms of what is going on around them, and a heightened self-awareness of what happens within themselves
• Persuasiveness – how to influence and persuade rather than order and use positions of power and authority
• Teaching and Developing – the 2015 leader must be able to teach others what they know and help to develop them
• Community Development – working towards building communities of people within organisations, not just having staff – or even just teams
The cultivation and development of such attributes requires leaders to start to focus themselves both outwards and within, to be mindful of everything around and inside us. One of the most useful methodologies for starting to develop these attributes is that of mindfulness, a way of helping us to view the perspectives of others yet not get overwhelmed when encountering negative emotions.
Collaborate
2015’s leaders need to go further than working with people and stakeholders; they need to actively promote collaboration – to work with others as equal partners in the achievement of tasks and goals. This means having an excellent grasp of stakeholder interests and organisational goals as well as the ability to bring together the best suited people that can work together as partners in achieving those goals.
This may mean turning on their head traditional models of working with suppliers or even customers, not to mention other departments and leaders.
True collaboration means the establishment of trust and the removal of the ego from the partnership; gone has to be the master-servant relationship, leaders need to be able to share knowledge and power, being prepared to work together with people who might previously have been seen as “the opposition” to share best practice and work towards a common goal.
Reflect
One of the greatest qualities necessary for leaders is that of awareness; of both self and of what is going on around you. The way to become more aware is to learn how to stop, think and reflect on what is happening.
Doing this often requires a complete paradigm shift in the expected culture of leadership within many companies; all too often leaders are rewarded, or at least expected, to be always on the go, energetic and energising. Whilst this does work for a while, it means that often such leaders are at their best in a crisis, they are good at reacting but not at planning, strategizing and envisioning. To do these requires the ability to put on the “handbrake”, stop and think for a while, and to be thinking with the prime objective of trying to make sense of what is going on and then plan for the future.
Learn
The previous quality, reflection, is an integral part of the ability to learn; it is part of the “Experiential Learning Cycle” and the ability to make sense of things and not just plan but to actually learn has been vital for leaders throughout history. Indeed the most successful leaders have been the ones who can learn from what happens around and to them and thus make sure that errors are never repeated.
This, however, does not mean that mistakes must be eradicated. Any attempt to do just that leads to inertia and never getting anywhere; integral to the art of learning is the art of being prepared to take risks (calculated ones), make mistakes and ensure that they are not repeated.
Effective leaders within 2015 will be those who are experts at learning at far deeper levels and across three distinct areas.
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