Powerful Mindsets of Great Leaders
Throughout my career as a management consultant, I’ve had the privilege to work with dozens of C-level executives and hundreds of executives and leaders around the world. I’ve advised them on strategy, operations and leading change. These executives and leaders all had their own style and mix of leadership skills and competencies that made them effective. On many occasions, they sought my advice on how to have a greater impact and inspire their teams and individual contributors to acheive more. The truly great leaders had an energy about them that made you take notice, and they all had certain mindsets that made them exceptional.
In my latest webinar, I describe these powerful mindsets of the truly greater leaders. Mindsets that every leader can develop with self-awareness and coaching. Leaders tend to focus on developing outward skills and competencies such as; critical thinking, decision making or driving for results, but few are able to tap their inner-core of their character, values and beliefs in such a way to connect their personal mission and purpose to each of these behaviors. By mastering the right leadership mindsets, a leader can ignite their passion and empathy and build greater trust and commitment with their teams and individual contributors.
- Thinking Differently and Thinking Big: If you want to get different results in your personal life or in your business, I’ve found that you must have the courage to step outside your comfort zone and disrupt yourself. You have to be willing to Think as Big as possible about yourself and what you have to contribute to the world. Intelligent Leadership, thinking differently and thinking big require that you work at a deeper level than your outer-core behaviors and dive into your inner-core.
- The Vulnerability Decision: The willingness to open up, show your cards, take advice, admit your mistakes and make yourself vulnerable to others. The conscious choice that you, as a leader, make to humble yourself, invite feedback from others, and search for answers that you don’t have already. To be vulnerable requires HUMILITY and COURAGE. You need to muster enough humility to see and acknowledge that you’re not perfect, and there are elements of your personality, behavior, management style that need improvement.
- Duty Mindset: I have found that the best leaders, while certainly expressing a high-degree of individual empowerment, are deeply beholden to a larger whole, whether that be their family, their community, their organization, their country, the whole planet, or all the above. Leaders, true leaders, are not entitled, but instead are driven by a sense of service to a greater community – a sense of DUTY to something more significant than themselves. The greatest of leaders – the ones who have had a truly lasting impact on the people around them – exhibit a significant degree of duty to the causes and people they’ve served.
- Leveraging your Gifts and Strengths: When you embark on the process of leadership development, you’ll need to develop an intense self-awareness. We all have different strengths that we can leverage to become more effective leaders, and we all have particular weaknesses that we need to become aware of and improve upon in order to unleash our potential. YOU NEED TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU’RE TRYING TO GO. #4 is about you getting the most accurate possible picture of yourself – a 360 degree view, and then learning to use that information effectively to improve upon yourself as a leader- and as a human being.
- The Courage to Execute: The willingness to act under pressure is a key quality that separates the pretenders from the real difference makers. Truly great leaders are those who are willing to lean into executing a plan with Pride, Passion and Precision! Committing to something from start to finish and holding yourself accountable for delivering results.
- Staying Present and Being Vigiliant: Let’s face it, we live in a world of distractions. In this atmosphere of increased distraction and information overload, leaders must be able to tune out the distractions and stay focused. Staying present allows you to be awake to the multi-dimensional complexity of the situations you’re involved in. If you want to be a strong leader, it’s absolutely essential that you find a way to make time for people, no matter how busy you are. That means making the efforts to check in and connect with the key people in your life – friends, family, co-workers, team mates.
- Course Correction: Individuals and Organizations thriving in this new world are those who are able to evolve, innovate and change course. Agility isn’t just a sexy concept; it’s now a necessity. A number of top executives I’ve worked with have the ability to recognize the critical moment when course correction is necessary. I believe this is a learned skill. You cannot change your strategy every minute, but if you wait too long or are frozen with self-doubt, change become harder, and you’ll lose the trust and faith of your organization.
Developing these mindsets of an Intelligent Leader is not easy, it requires COURAGE. It requires VULNERABILITY to ask help. Most executives and leaders don’t feel comfortable asking for help. They may think it makes them look weak or inexperienced, or worse, they think they can pick-up a few quick tips on the internet and they’re good to go. I believe, we should be thinking about this differently.
If you set the bar high enough, you will need help on the journey. For any leader to ask for coaching is a demonstration of COURAGE and VULNERABILITY and that is what exemplifies GREAT Leaders!
If you’re ready for a discussion on how executive leadership coaching can help you to be a more passionate, powerful leader, schedule a call with me today to determine the right path.
WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE