Why we are all leaders - every day
When thinking about leadership, we often think about CEOs of large corporations that sit in glass towers and all they care about is their individual profit and salary. What we don’t see is that modern leadership starts with the small things. The colleague that encourages us to stand up for the team, the manager that signed us up for this training that really helped us enhance our career, all of them are leaders in their personal micro – cosmos.
At its core, leadership is about the art of developing others, based on their individual strengths, to achieve the best possible outcome, not only for the short term gain of the business, but in the wider belief that human development is a core part in moving a business towards long term excellent performance.
I my post today, after defining what leadership is, I would like to introduce the servant leadership model, which describes ten key components that are essential for modern leaders.
1. Foresight
2. Vision
3. Transformation
4. Awareness
5. Empathy
6. Persuasion
7. Listening
8. Team development
9. Stewardship
10. Building community
The last three, team development, stewardship and building a community – reflect the outward approach of a leader towards his employees or peers. The focus here is to build the community. Additionally, stewardship highlights the understanding that the CEO simply holds the company in trust for future generations.
The four traits of awareness, empathy, persuasion and listening are the key components of effective interpersonal behaviour. It is through empathy to understand the world of others and through active listening to get insights about a person’s personality. The last one, the skill to persuade which is also fundamental for leaders.
The final set, foresight, vision, and transformation is about long-term relationships. Leaders must analyse the environment and make sense of often complex information, to put this into a vision, to drive others. They then need to be able to bring about transformation and make others share their vision.
To go back to the start of who we see as leaders, most people who have some or all those characteristics are seen by us as inspiring personalities that are interested in developing others. These are very often not the people in fancy glass towers but the people we interact with on a daily basis that encourage us to be our best every day and persuade us to implement our vision of a future of success.
Here at PROGRESS we work a lot with junior and senior leaders to excel in all those traits. And remember we are all small leaders and inspirers in our daily bubbles 😊
