Nothing more fulfilling than reading about how universities, organizations and community leaders are seeking out key qualities that resonate with those of us who learned as toddlers, that we MUST share. It’s no longer just about the test scores, but rather a candidate or talent’s ability to demonstrate:
Passion Creativity Accountability Flexibility Focus Resilience Gratitude
In fact, as the first born of two university professors, these were mandatory skills that I had to demonstrate consistently throughout my youth. Our family structure valued rigor in an approach to education, peppered with the freedom to fail. All the while, emphasis on re-invention and repetition.
Now several decades later, I’ve found that this foundation was the basis for my career success in that I learned to value active listening, collaborating, risk taking, and persistence. In fact, I’ve found that through sharing, I personally have more to gain than loose. Which is what brings me to the following question? Why are we still talking about embracing business models which encourage enterprise mentoring, collaboration and connections to talent and learning development programs?
Leadership, it boils down to this simple word. Whether you talk about leadership on the scale of a billion dollar company, or via deep and lasting impacts a home maker / leader has on their brood or a tribal leader. We in leadership every single day are putting into motion these ‘systems’ through our actions and words. Which is why we often see much ado about: Amazon, Zappos, Mary McNevin healthcare as the industry sweethearts who are daring to lead, making laudable investments in people, or is charging forward with drastic strategy pivots?
At a cursory level, you can read about handfuls of leaders who have a burning imperative for being performance enablers. These individuals have clarity of vision and ensure their teams collaborate and have what they need to deliver results.
So don’t be the ‘tractor in the swamp’. Be bold and take on the wide-ranging malaise surrounding organizational design structures and performance management systems through your born leadership legacy.
