- by Tim O'Connell
I’m not sure if
leadership is a science or an art these days. So much literature, so many
millions invested in training and producing “leaders”, and yet any random
survey of the employees of your average global organization will produce a
great big “Need To Improve” mark against the leadership. It can’t be that they
don’t know what makes a great leader today, can it? I mean, open any business
magazine or browse the internet and you can find reams of “how-to” guides to be
a great leader, or develop one. So it must be something else going on. And I
wonder if that something else has as much to do with the pressures of being
asked to lead as anything else.
It can’t be fair, can
it? If you run a multi-million (billion?) piece of an organization (or even the
whole thing), you’ve got to keep it all together for everyone else, but who’s
got your back? Who’s there to encourage you, motivate you, and generally
check-in on your well-being on a daily basis?
The answer is no-one.
And there’s the clue. You’re going to have to do that for yourself. Even when
you feel like s**t.
This is what’s generally
called “self-leadership” these days. Or even the grander title “self-mastery”.
To be the great leader you (and your company) want you to be requires you to
take just as much care of (and put as much focus on) developing and using your own
emotional skills as it does your technical or strategic leadership skills.
In an article published
all the way back in 2000, Dee Hock (former CEO of Visa) went as far as to say
that self-management as a leader should take up 50%
of available time. He also wrote that:
“The first and param
Source:http://global-executive-coaching.blogspot.ch
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