/upright/images/upright-primary-logo-t4bcd.png){kind=logo}
Login
/upright/Screenshot_2023-09-20_at_10.18.36-sac2f.png)
In our Real Skills Series, we explore what we traditionally call "soft skills".
Ranging from communication to leadership to problem solving to creativity and governing how we interact with teams, we don't really learn them at school or university.
And yet, no matter how savvy we are technically, these skills can make or break our success as a human working with other humans in any organization. Even though they are harder to measure and quantify, we definitely know when they are not there and it is usually not a very pleasant experience. I would like to refer to them as "Real Skills".
In today’s blog post, we will try to explore the very evanescent and mysterious skill of leadership. What is being a great leader about? How can we develop and cultivate this?
Can we work on leadership? Some seem to have it naturally: that presence when entering the room, that aura that makes people follow them, and, most importantly, want to be around them. Bathing in their energy makes one feel safe, strong and positively challenged to show their best self. Their energy is usually enough to move mountains together as a team. What is this about? How did they become who they are?
Social Entrepreneur Fields Wicker-Miurin works to improve the quality and impact of leadership worldwide by discovering leaders in unique, local settings and connecting them with one another, from the Amazonian forest or Bangalore, all the way to the towers of Manhattan.
She summarizes what characterizes all the great leaders she has met in a Ted Talk:
“They didn't read a manual, "How to Be a Good Leader in 10 Easy Steps." But they have qualities we'd all recognize. They have drive, passion, commitment. They've gone away from what they did before, and they've gone to something they didn't know. They've tried to connect worlds they didn't know existed before. They've built bridges, and they've walked across them. They have a sense of the great arc of time and their tiny place in it. They know people have come before them and will follow them. And they know that they're part of a whole, that they depend on other people. It's not about them, they know that, but it has to start with them. And they have humility. It just happens.” (TED Talk - Fields Wicker-Miurin - Learning from leadership's missing manual).
A quick note just to be clear: many people are in power positions and sustain it by triggering fear or discomfort in their audience. Some actually write that there is a higher percentage of psychopaths in leadership positions than in the rest of the population (Victor Lipman - The Disturbing Link Between Psychopathy And Leadership). This is anti-leadership. It works, actually quite well, to ascertain power and create obedience, but then as soon as you are no longer in power, you lose the people as you have failed to nurture any loyalty. This is the opposite of what we are looking to create: virtuous synergies, enabling everyone to work harmoniously and shine their best because they feel safe and supported.
Roselinde Torres conducted a study on leadership across 4,000 companies: she found out that 58% of the companies felt that they were facing a big talent gap for critical leadership roles, in spite of all the coaching, off-sites, training programs and so on.
“More than half the companies had failed to grow enough great leaders”. “Why are the leadership gaps widening when there's so much more investment in leadership development? And what are the great leaders doing distinctly different to thrive and grow?”(TED Talk - Roselinde Torres - What it takes to be a great leader)
According to Roselinde Torres, companies fail because they use old school models and training that do not enable potential leaders to thrive in today’s world and face the challenges of tomorrow. According to her work, “leadership in the 21st century is defined and evidenced by three questions:
Let’s explore each of these points in detail:
This is about where we spend our time, our energy: who are we meeting, where are we traveling, what are we reading? This is about standing with our heads up and letting the world feed us, listening to our intuition and to others. This is about sharing perspectives so that we are growing our understanding of trends around us. When we feed ourselves from our environment, we cultivate a growing field for intuition and insights.
This is about curiosity, discovering new worlds and learning about them so that our own world becomes bigger. Relentless learning, listening and finding perspectives. As Fields Wicker-Miurin puts it, it is about leaving something you know to enter something you do not know (Ted Talk - Fields Wicker-Miurin - Learning from leadership's missing manual).
Great leadership is anticipative, not reactive. If we spend too much time head down doing work and preparing deliverables, it’s likely that we may be missing to keep a critical eye on what’s around us and the soft trends that are developing in silence while our head is down. Let’s pause, lift our heads up, make space and listen to what is around. Let our brain quietly process all the inputs and give you back deep insights.
Don’t forget to include key numbers and indicators as part of your brain food to make sense of the environment you are looking at. Most importantly, trust your brain to do this background work of processing all the data and soft signals for you and provide you with the consolidated insights and knowledge. But beware, if you are always busy and never silencing everything to listen inwards, you may miss them (Ted Talk, Jitske Kramer, Silence, the Forgotten Human Skill).
We’ve explored this in past articles: diversity is key to nurture innovation and promote trust and ethical behavior in organizations (Pauline Blondet - The Power of Diversity: Building and Sustaining Diverse Teams to Nurture a Strong Ethical Culture).
Now let's have a look at our networks and ask ourselves the question: are we actually working on developing relationships with people who are different from us? That's the way to go!
“Great leaders understand that having a more diverse network is a source of pattern identification at greater levels and also of solutions, because you have people that are thinking differently than you are.” (Roselinde Torres - What it takes to be a great leader).
I find that this is the hardest point. It is about leaving our familiar and comfortable bubble! About taking that leap towards the new, the unknown. Regularly challenging what we do and how we do it. Taking that risk.
“And one of the leaders shared with me the fact that the most impactful development comes when you are able to build the emotional stamina to withstand people telling you that your new idea is naïve or reckless or just plain stupid” (Roselinde Torres - What it takes to be a great leader).
Do not lose faith in your ideas, and let the brilliant researcher Idriss Aberkane remind you that:
“all revolution (and innovation) in the story of humanity goes through three stages, first it is considered ridiculous, then dangerous, and at last, it is considered evident” (Audition of Idriss Aberkane on bio-mimetism by the French Conseil Economique, Social et environmental - in French - I recommend you watch this one if you speak French, it is SO inspiring!).
Maybe we are not preparing a revolution, but the same principle applies to our ideas on a smaller scale! This is a calling to dare embracing our ideas, our intuitions and to let ourselves be guided to address the challenges of today and tomorrow! Stand up, stand out, have no fear and keep your grounds, for great leaders are:
“women and men who are preparing themselves not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow.” (TED Talk - Roselinde Torres - What it takes to be a great leader).
To summarize: we know the questions we need to ask ourselves, we know that we need to quiet and listen in to make space for intuition, trends and welcome the new. We also need to be daring, brave and full of grit facing the world. That's what it takes to expand as a leader.
That being said, leadership does not live in a vacuum: we need to work together to lead and inspire other humans, and be lead and inspired by them in return. I thus would like to focus next on what we need to cultivate to embrace virtuous leadership.
/upright/Screenshot_2023-09-20_at_10.28.08-ade13.png)
To be an effective, enlightened and empowered leader, we need to work with other humans. And to do so well, it starts with making sure we work on ourselves. A cultivated self will enable us to achieve great outcomes along other humans!
There are a few key things that we need to work on (in my opinion), so as to be able to truly lead and be lead by others effectively:
“All that I know is that I know nothing” (attributed to Socrates).
It is quite some work to work on ourselves and be really aligned with ourselves, but the result and reward is well worth the effort!
“Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is.” (TED Talk - Simon Sinek - Why good leaders make you feel safe).
I hope these few ideas inspired you to reflect on leadership and provided you with ideas and references to feed on along your journey!
Follow Upright Solutions on Linkedin for more content.
/upright/Screenshot_2023-09-20_at_10.23.00-fbb91.png)