#SundayThoughts on #Leadership

One of the leadership traits that is often praised is the ability to lead from the front.

How relevant is this,especially in the context of empowering your colleagues, coaching your team, developing big leaders and to allow faster decision making

Why are leaders scared of letting their staff fail? The same is true for parenting as well. The constant fear of failure prevents leaders and most parents to “let go’, which unfortunately,may provide a temporary relief from a disaster but sets up employees & children for failure.

The challenge for leaders, especially as one moves from an individual contributor (operational) to a team leader (strategic) role is to be able to step back and let the second rung of leaders take over.

The temptation to intervene and get the job done …provides no learning and development opportunity for the team. A leader must be able to role up the sleeves, pay attention to the fine print, ask the hard questions...but must avoid the urge to do the job themselves.

Some lessons that I have learn and could be worth considering for coaching your team are:

1) Set expectation clearly and hold the your team accountable for their actions. Act on over and under-performance immediately.

Some lessons that I have learnt and could be worth considering for coaching your team are:

1 Set expectation clearly and hold the your team accountable for their actions. Act on over and under-performance immediately.

2 While we share learning from best practices and customer wins, we often neglect the lessons to be learnt from worst practices and deal losses. There is probably more to learn from a loss than a win.

3 Delegate authority with responsibility. For e.g…….If a leader is responsible for orders and margins, he or she must be empowered to make decisions on the spot with complete access to costs and margins to be able to deliver on their goals.

4 A Leader must have the ability to work in the trenches, roll-up their sleeves if required to go & get the job done, but must do so only as a last resort.

5 Use such opportunities to identify development goals. Spend time to understand the reasons that needed your intervention.

Is it skills, lack of clarity of goals or a deeper organizational malice.

6 Use accompaniment calls to observe and give insights to your team on skill gaps and ways of bridging the same. Be a fly on the wall to observe skills.

The role of senior leadership goes beyond just setting the vision, mission and strategy for the organization.

It is not about bringing the numbers .. quarter after quarter, which is an important and necessary condition to stay on the job.

The more important dimensions that are often neglected is to be able to plan for the future, be an evangelist to sell the vision to a range of stake-holders, be able to think at 30,000 ft and also drill down to specifics, be a talent advocate; be a long range planner,

a multiplier, an enhancer and a protector of share-holder value and also be a brand ambassador of being a good corporate citizen of the enterprise.

Leadership can be as effective from the back, as it is from the front.

As a matter of fact, at times, the impact and value to an organization of leadership from the back could be far more important than from the front .

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