Today, I would like to invite you to reflect upon 5 key skills to exercise effective leadership
Skill 1: Strategic Thinking
What comes to your mind when you think about Strategy? Do you think about a plan or design? If by strategy we understand a plan or a design, the chances are that the work consists mostly of executing that plan or design, without much room for the emergent. On the other hand, if we imagine strategy as a being that walks on two legs: the plan or design and the emergent, then we will have space to contemplate the emergent in our daily work.
Now, what do you do with the strategy? Do you plan a strategy? Do you design a strategy? Do you develop a strategy? Three different types of actions. Planning implies the achievement of a goal through a linear reasoning.
Designing a strategy refers to starting from scratch, not buying anything made. This requires an empathetic attitude and challenges you to be close to the practice. Developing a strategy includes both: thinking and doing. It involves getting in motion.
The emergent is what is discovered as it is done, it is not what gets into our work. This impacts on the idea we have about what work means: to work now is to build on the emergent. This vision is what will drive you to generate adaptive responses without losing the original design.
Skill 2: Sympathy and Understanding
Working online -or remote working- helped unmask an old belief that leadership exercised as control no longer has a place.
If we hold on to the old belief of leadership as power, then we will have to accept that leaders are appointed. However, if by leadership we understand the exercise of sympathy, and not power, we will be better equipped to truly understand what so far had been done almost intuitively. It will also be of some help to review some automatisms, which will consequently help us modify behaviour. Being sympathetic rather than powerful will help us see leadership as a natural social skill. Almost all of us may remember a situation when we acted as leaders, be this at school, at home, in the street, just to mention some. This means that we are all leaders at something but cannot be leaders all the time in everything.
In other words, leaders emerge but it is necessary to be close to the working practice to see them. In that sense, the leaders of this age will see in their daily practice the need to be sympathetic and empathetic. A recent article in The Economist points to «transparency» as one of the basic skills, both for the leader and for the led.
Skill 3: Growth Mindset
Learning in organizations is key to their growth. This involves working with people who want to learn. However, we are used to thinking of learning as an individual phenomenon and this individualism inevitably leads us to competition with others. On the contrary, if we take learning as a social or collective phenomenon, then we can easily observe that the quality of learning has the quality of our social ties. To think that knowledge is an individual phenomenon is to fall into the trap. If we work with others, then we are learning all the time.
It is important, therefore, to recognize what we have learned and when we learned it, in order to make the implicit explicit. When knowledge is implicit, we live with the feeling that we do not know what we are looking for but we do know once we find it. Going from the implicit to the explicit helps to some extent to create a greater degree of certainty. When knowledge is explicit we can get organized, anticipate to events or even describe them.
Ultimately, an organization shows that it learns when: (a) it succeeds in doing things that it did not do before, (b) it gives room to conceptual change, (c) it identifies opportunities and develops ways to take advantage of them and (d) it detects problems and is willing to find the solution.
Skill 4: TADS –Thinking and Doing skills
It is a serious mistake to think of the capacity for innovation and execution as being mutually exclusive (Gore, 2021). That idea of »those above think and those below execute or do» no longer has a place. However, this separation of the doing and the thinking is what used to give meaning to the organization in the past and what allowed solutions to be found. Today, the solutions lie more in models of adaptive and unforeseen responses.
In simpler terms, it refers to the ability to do different things at different times or simultaneously.
Organizations seem to be moving towards new modalities: while some 20 years ago the focus was on efficiency, today it seems to be more on the side of continuous learning, which should also be just-in-time and just-in-context.
Skill 5: Management skills
Management skills are the basis of all work. When management is understood as a form of control, work becomes obedience. When management is exercised as a mode of exploration, the work itself gives rise to the creation of meaning and significance. From the perspective of work, and understanding work as action, it is important to ask what it means to work. Looking at work as a means to add value gives us a greater degree of autonomy to know where we have to be and what we have to do. This idea becomes a very useful criterion to resolve priorities and time overlaps and to know what to delegate to whom.
Asesoría
En VG & Asociados acompañamos a las empresas y sus líderes en el desarrollo de sus habilidades de liderazgo y habilidades blandas en general desde el enfoque del Aprendizaje Organizacional. Nuestra propuesta busca potenciar las capacidades subyacentes de las personas en proceso de capacitación, invitándoles a ser parte activa del proceso.
