Do you remember the day when you gathered people at 5 am on the cricket ground to play a cricket match? Do you remember the evening when you organized a birthday party and made everybody dance to your tune? The reason you could align people and complete some tasks was because of your leadership skills. There’s nothing called as born leader. We all have done something where we made other people do things as we had planned. Leadership is a skill that can be learned, honed and mastered with practice like any other skill.
So, what is leadership? Leadership is an acquirable practical skill which enables an individual or a group of people to lead or influence other people, an organization, a nation or a group of countries into working towards a certain goal. It is also how you lead your life acquiring skills along the way. Leadership starts from leading your mind to where you want to take it rather than you keep jumping from one place to another with your monkey mind.
There can be different styles of leadership: Servant Leadership, leading from the front, leading from behind or leading while remaining a part of the group but the job remains the same, that is guiding people to achieve a vision. Following are the 5E’s of Leadership which can enable a person to become a great leader in life.
- Envision: Great leaders are visionaries and their imagination stands on solid foundation of present and not on false hopes. They know themselves and their people’s strengths and weaknesses. They are connoisseur of recognizing people for the right job and assign responsibilities accordingly. They are resourceful and understand that it’s the people which is their ultimate resource. The commitment to their vision makes them honest with themselves and their people.
- Exhibit: They exhibit great strength, confidence, courage, determination towards guiding people to achieve a goal. They are direct in approach when needed to take a decision and are not afraid to even show their vulnerabilities at times which further result in empathy while dealing with people and act thinking of long-term impact on the individual as well as the organization.
- Excite: They communicate effectively to excite their teams from top to ground level as much as people on the ground also feel connected with them even though they do not have any direct contact. They make people feel heard, are transparent and thus build a culture of trust. They celebrate wins even small so as to keep the momentum going and spirits high.
- Empower: They empower their people to take control of their life and business resulting in creation of more individuals as leaders. They don’t shy away to give credit where it lies. They enable people to become the best version of themselves by providing opportunities and platform to perform at their highest potential. They give freedom to people to find their ways to complete a task but also instill ethics while doing so.
- Emotional Intelligence: This is one trait that keep their people aligned with them and the goal for which they all are working. People feel that its not just any organizational goal but their own. They give constructive feedback thinking of the long-term effects and the big picture. They are able to express neutrally without mincing any words when needed. They listen and understand from where somebody is speaking and then respond.
You will be able to level up your leadership skills once you start observing the above characteristics and their presence or absence in your actions. You don’t have to have a team to become leader and still can influence people in a certain way. While working for about two decades in different industries and most of it in pharmaceuticals, I could impact hundreds of people from my colleagues to superiors, relatives, family and friends to lead a healthy lifestyle as I believed one requires a healthy mind and body to be successful in achieving any goal in life as an individual or as an organization.
Director North- CHD Group | Life and Leadership Coach- ECIPH
