Leadership Beliefs

I need to start by acknowledging that I had my first failure in the series of blogs. I made a commitment to myself that I’d write a blog once every 2 weeks. While I met that commitment through the first quarter of the year, I failed to deliver on it last weekend. I could state many reasons why I could not write the blog but the reality is I missed it and that’s not acceptable to me. I learnt a very valuable lesson and such a miss will not happen in the future.

This week, I take the opportunity to share my leadership beliefs. I thought it would be a simple task to just put them on a paper but as I started on it, I realized it was difficult – not because I did not know what they are, but to put them on a paper is like committing them and I had to be honest with myself whether I truly believed in them and do I practice them most of the time. So here they are (not exhaustive but few key ones that I strongly believe in):

1.       People should respect you for who you are, not for what you are – This definitely is one of the most important beliefs of mine. ‘What you are’ is primarily determined by the title, position that we carry. Any respect we get because of our position is limited for the period of time we hold that position. People should respect us for what we stand for, for our values and more importantly, for value we are able to add to them. The key part is to ensure that we are authentic in all our interactions. This ensures that we gain the respect even when we do not carry the title or position.

2.       Learning is a journey – It is important to continuously learn in our life. Learning ensures progression (not of title/compensation but of our mind). It’s a journey and as long as we are open, we can find many sources that we can learn from. These could be books, web, videos but the best sources are our colleagues, associates, managers, mentors, coaches and friends. There is an insurmountable experience around us and we just need to keep our mind open and it will get filled with many learning. Always ask – What did I learn today?

3.       Prioritization in life – This is a key takeaway from Transformational Leadership program that I attended last year at ISB and I was blown away by it. We all have to juggle multiple balls in our life and it is always difficult to manage all of them in an appropriate way (primarily due to lack of time). The best way to prioritize is to determine which of the balls that we are juggling are glass balls and which are rubber balls. A rubber ball can always bounce back and we would have a future opportunity to still put them in play; however if a glass ball drops, then we would lose it forever. Examples of glass balls in our lives are Family, Health, Friends – those interestingly are the ones that we usually ignore.

4.       Staying with the question – One of the biggest fallacies of human beings is that we like status quo. Whenever we are not in equilibrium, we feel highly uncomfortable and strive to come back to that position as quickly as possible. Hence, when we are faced with a difficult question, we tend to rationalize it by attributing a response. Similarly, when we come across two different, divergent view points, we just lean towards one and accept/acknowledge it while ignoring any data that drives us to the other view point. It is critical to understand that an intelligent mind is one that can hold two equally opposing thoughts at the same time. It is important to stay with the question. Stay in the uncomfortable zone and let new ideas/thoughts emerge. Enjoy the butterflies in the stomach. This would lead to success.

5.       Everyone is talented – Popular western management practice on people state that it is important to segment people into multiple categories to better manage them. But the reality is everyone in this world is talented. Every human being who comes into this world comes with certain strengths of their own. It is important for people to realize what their strengths are and should find opportunities that can leverage on them. Doing this would ensure success. However, we find many people trying to follow or replicate others in the pursuit of success, while ignoring their own attributes. It does lot more good to look inside for answers than outside.

6.       Definition of Success – Definition of success is relative and it is driven by what gives you happiness as against what others think of you. We all have two scorecards – Internal and External. Internal scorecard is focused on what’s important to us while external scorecard is focused on what others think of us. If we are constantly driven by external scorecard, we may put ourselves in a situation where we are living our life to meet others expectations as against our own happiness. Hence, it is important to ensure that we meet and exceed our Internal Scorecards. Go ahead and pursue your passions. Pursuing passions would enable us to score high on internal scorecard and at the end of the day, that scorecard is more important than the other one.

Well, these are not exhaustive but I thought I’ll write those that are important to me. When I started to write, I thought I would pen down Leadership beliefs. However, I now realize that these are my personal beliefs that characterize my Leadership. Penning these down has given a lot deal of clarity to me. What are your beliefs and are you practicing them? Please do share. We can all learn from each other.