Dr George John

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader” – John Quincy Adams (6th American president)
Whether you are a multinational CEO, an entrepreneur or even the abbot of a monastery who has leadership responsibilities, it won’t work well for you as a leader until actionable strategies for the good of the company and the community are in place, your vision is clearly articulated and you become a team player with excellent communication skills.
It is the ability to work with those who are different from us and the capacity to monitor our own personal and professional development needs whilst having the requisite self-confidence that makes leaders stand out. Leadership is not just doing the right things; it is also knowing how to do things right.
To translate their vision into reality, most leaders become role models encouraging the growth and development of others in the group. Even when you want to do something yourself, letting others do it because they wanted to, is a sure sign of good leadership.
The key aspect of leadership is influence, not authority. It is best cultivated by example, which inspires others. Scriptural wisdom demands that a good leader first become a good servant because the way up points down. The glamour of the position doesn’t matter as much as the energy, passion and empathy that the position demands.
Great leaders have clear goals and know how to accomplish it. Nothing matters more in leadership than, Integrity and at its core lies truthfulness. Where there is Integrity, there is nothing to fear because there is nothing to hide and doing what is right bears no guilt. It is never wrong to do the right thing. The Latin dictum “Fiat Justitia; ruat coelum” (Let justice be done, even if the heavens fall) stands true in every age – in other words, ‘Do the right thing, even if the heavens fall’, is not nearly as naïve a maxim as it sounds. In the real world too, it often turns out that doing what is morally right is also the right thing to do in practice. Although the expression ‘Even if the world perishes, let justice (nee: the right thing) must be done’ is often credited to the 16th-century German emperor Ferdinand, it was also a personal favourite of Emmanuel Kant. People with integrity do what they say they are going to do and the first law of leadership is that foundations are laid through the integrity of character and the building of trust.
Essential Humility in a leader is the self-confidence to recognise the value of others without feeling threatened by them. It is also undeniably the willingness to admit when one is wrong and knowing that you don’t have all the answers. The more egos are controlled, the more we become realistic enough to learn how to listen. True humility is intelligent self-respect. That is the one thing that can remind us how much we have come short of what we can truly be. Even to this day, good business schools teach the Andrew Carnegie dictum that “no man will make a great leader, who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it”. The man who leads the orchestra always turns his back to the crowd. There is more than a subtle difference between thinking less of yourself and thinking yourself less. Humility, in its various interpretations, doesn’t mean that modesty can be equated to low self-esteem. The results of humility speak for themselves. Humble people are unafraid to ask for help and praise others and that is when people gravitate towards them.
Courage is the most identifiable personality trait of leadership which is taking risks without absolute assurance of success. “Courage is rightly considered the foremost of virtues for upon it all others depends,” said Winston Churchill. There is no certainty in life or in business for that matter because every commitment made and every action taken entails risks of some kind. So, if courage is such an integral part of leadership, why then do those with the potential for good leadership sometimes fail? One likely answer is fear. When some underhand and not widely known unsavoury things that should not have happened do nevertheless happen, under the right circumstances, the fear of shame and the fear of being discovered is way more powerful than even the fear of death. When people yearn for what they don’t have and dread losing what they do, rudeness and disconnection with ideals become the expression of their fear. That is precisely when owning up to mistakes is required and all good leaders apologise for their mistakes. How one deal with adversity is what marks out a true leader and that requires courage.
“Courage is the mother of all virtues because it is the one quality that guarantees every other virtue” – said Aristotle. One of the subtlest and not-often-seen aspects of true leadership is the ability to get people to work for you because they want to. The quickest way of gaining the co-operation of others is by getting along with everyone. “If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self-interest, you can have practically anything you go after,” said Napoleon Hill, the American self-help author who is credited to having influenced more people into personal success than anyone else.
Leaders focus on results knowing what must be achieved by them and by others. The ability to focus and make others remain focussed on valuable use of time is crucial for performance. Great leaders focus on people’s strengths more than their weaknesses. Successful people stay positively focused on past successes more than past failures. Knowing the next steps to take to get closer to the fulfilment of goals will greatly help in leadership endeavours. Leaders who excel are, without doubt, outstanding strategic planners, looking ahead and anticipating trends well ahead of competitors.
Leaders are different from followers. The leader-follower interaction determines which qualities followers develop as a result. Leaders who are task-oriented focus on detail. Personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness and self-monitoring, characterise a leader with a strong self-image. The dawn of the 21st Century saw the development of integrated theories of ‘person-organisation-fit’, in which the structure of the organisation is compared to the personality of its leader.
Successful organisations tend to employ those with a range of soft leadership criteria that fits the organisations internal environment. Regular feed-back on performance of leaders and timely corrections are essential for sustainable leadership. Cognitive ability, personality type, simulation, role play and multi-rater assessments are thought to be the best predictors of effective leadership.
Superior intelligence with high IQ is vital but Emotional intelligence (EQ) trumps regular IQ by a wide margin when it comes to leadership. Basically, what is meant by Emotional Intelligence is, understanding the emotions of others and responding to it accordingly, the ability in overcoming the stress of the moment and being aware of how words and actions affect others. It is widely known that Emotional intelligence (EQ) is a key component in all good leaderships. What is perhaps not so widely known is that aspiring leaders can benefit from training to improve their EQ.
Leaders lacking emotional intelligence become unable to gauge the needs and expectations of those they lead and a leader who reacts emotionally without any filters creates mistrust. Leaders are not born; they are made and good leaderships should grow more leaders like them.