Become aware of your thought processes and through this awareness you finally learn to change the conditions of your life.

Leadership is widely recognized as including a broad set of skills critical for individual and organizational success. It’s so critical a skillset that articles about it are ubiquitous:  we are ever-diligent in reading, writing and discussing definitions of leadership, leadership attributes, who are the best leaders and what great leaders do and don’t do.

But, what is Leadership? Kevin Kruse provided the best definition of leadership I’ve seen, in his article on Forbes, “What is Leadership?” where he shares the wisdom of Drucker, Bennis, Gates and Maxwell and then provides his own excellent definition:  “Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.”  

There are 3 dimensions of Leadership that significantly impact organizational performance:

Credibility – that fosters trust and confidence throughout the organization

People-skills – that move employees through change and enable people to find meaning and purpose at work, operating from both personal and organizational perspectives

Influence – that drives a powerfully persistent focus on the business strategy, among individual, teams and organization-wide

Credibility

Experience shows that leadership credibility is powerful in drawing investors because it is a reliable indicator of strong financial performance. Leadership credibility helps to build and sustain the trust and confidence of the workforce. Leadership credibility is so powerful it can build excitement among employees to achieve higher performance. People want credible leaders and respond to that leadership with commitment.  How do leaders develop and maintain such credibility?  Is it about saying what you mean?  Walking the talk?  Dedicating time to being present in each department, getting to know people and to understand what they do?  Is it having strong, ever-current knowledge of the business, the industry? I recommend the landmark book by James Kouzes and Barry Posner, “Credibility”.  I’d also like your comments.

People-Skills

Communication and interaction require people-skills.  How can one lead without doing both in ways that connect with people’s hearts and minds?  An organization’s capacity to change is essential for its sustainability. Strategic direction and objectives must flex and adjust based on changing market needs. Internally, change is needed in order to align the organization’s activities, structure, processes, decision making, and operational and leadership practices with its competitive strategy or value proposition. And, change is an integral partner of innovation, learning, and improvement, all of which are fundamental to any organization. What, in your own experience, has differentiated leaders, enabled one leader to rise above the rest?

Influence

The third dimension of leadership that impacts business performance is influence.  An article in Harvard Business Review in June, 2013, “When CEOs Talk Strategy Is Anyone Listening?” cites a surveyin which only 29% of employees in companies with clearly articulated strategies had taken in the information. Leaders must embed communication about the strategy and strategic performance results into the work environment, the cultural DNA. This means leaders develop interesting, informative and creative ways to make the strategy come alive with meaning for all employees. Communication on the strategy needs to be systematic – as a routine part of meetings, newsletters, visuals, the décor, the culture. This can only be accomplished through a well-planned effort and the involvement of leaders at all levels, especially the CEO, whose personal influence, communication and interactions cannot be sacrificed in the process; practices such as cascading information down strategic information often-times dilute both the message and the positive power and influence of the senior executive.  While cascading supports communication, there is no substitute for the personal touch and visibility of the President/CEO.

Leadership is the 2nd of 5 Keys to effective strategy execution. They are:

Strategic UnderstandingLeadershipActivities and StructureBalanced Metrics aka Strategy MapHuman Capital

Together with Market Discipline, these comprise the recipe for successful strategic performance.  Our next article will focus on Activities and Structure.

You Create Your Reality

You are the creator of your life and your reality.

Your thoughts become your actions and your actions create the circumstances in your life. You are responsible for everything that happens to you in your life.

This is the simple law of as you sow so you reap. It can also be called the law of motion and emotion. Every thought that we send out into the universe comes back to us with accumulated energy of its own kind.

When negative thoughts go out of our minds, they will come back to us with redoubled negative energy and give us lot of pain and unhappiness.

Positive thoughts on the other hand bring in positive energy and energize us, establishing in the process peace and harmony in our consciousness.

Our actions too yield the same results.

Our positive actions bring in positive rewards and our negative actions bring negative rewards. The energy that we unleash, either in the form of a thought or action, always comes back to us with increased force.

Thus through our actions and thoughts we are constantly creating our own realities.

Whatever we give comes back to us. We should therefore be very careful about our thoughts and actions as they have a lasting influence on the pattern of our lives.

People blame others for what happens to them. Little do they know that if any one is to be blamed it is the person himself who made it happen to himself! 

Wisdom is when something happens to you. Instead of looking around for excuses and placing the blame on others, look into yourself and ask yourself why you made it happen? Why you invited those conditions and circumstances into your life? 

Perhaps it was because you wanted to learn something out of that experience. Perhaps you wanted to strengthen some aspect of your personality or resolve some long troubling relationship.

When you start accepting responsibility for the events of your life, you begin to learn more about yourself, your inner thoughts, your fears and aspirations. Out of this awareness you also start expanding your consciousness. 

Become aware of your thought processes and through this awareness you finally learn to change the conditions of your life.