What is Leadership?
Posted on July 20, 2020 by Kumar Dattatreyan, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
An experience report from a Leadership Boot-camp
While conducting a leadership boot-camp (a part of a leadership cohort) at Denovo Solutions a few months ago, one of the participants made an observation that went something like this, “Kumar”, he said, “I don’t mean this in a negative way at all, but what we’ve been discussing over the past couple of days, well, isn’t that what a leader is supposed to do?”
What we were discussing is the role of an “agile” leader, a leader in today’s VUCA world, a world where change is the norm, and a leaders role is to help arm themselves, and the people who look to them for guidance, with the knowledge and the ability to make decisions that benefit the company as a whole.
What a great question! Isn’t this what a leader is supposed to do? Ponder that for a minute and think about what you do as a leader and the effect it has on the people you lead. Do you do what you’re supposed to as a leader?
As part of the boot-camp, we had the leaders conduct a “values” exercise, where they selected the 10 most important values to them (we had them cull them down to their top 3). We plotted them using a word cloud and the wordcloud that emerged was something both expected and unexpected! While the image speaks for itself, these values are meaningless unless they are something people live by everyday.
Why did this company decide that they needed help to assess where they are on their leadership journey? Change in today’s VUCA world is the slowest it will ever be, and is progressing faster than it’s ever been in the past.
This is why the leadership at this company, and every company should assess themselves and chart a course for enabling and empowering their people. Growth can only be sustained by companies that invest in their people, and those that invest in leadership.
Our relationship continues today, with coaching of their senior leaders, and their middle management, and they’ve credited leadership coaching with their ability to pivot and persevere during the pandemic.
