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ELEGANT LEADERSHIP
A
fter more than a decade dedicated to leadership development in 13 countries, helping hundreds of Executives from different multinational organizations and their teams to develop new mental models and practices, I experienced my most difficult conversation when my four-year-old son asked me, "Daddy, What is that thing you call Leadership that you do in your work? ”. I said: “Leadership is the quality some people have that through what they do, they help others to be better and achieve their goals,” he replied, “And can I be a leader, dad? Yes, please, please, what do I have to do? That moment led me to revisit everything I knew about leadership, through studies, readings, and conversations with thousands of leaders I´ve had, in order to respond to my son. Today I want to share the main learnings from that exercise. The first thing I will tell you is that the day I wrote this article I found 1,010,000,000 page results on Google
32 MAY-JUNE 2020
FERNANDO DADA Once we embody our Purpose and Vision then the second skill that plays a fundamental role in your effectiveness is to develop a Systemic Perspective. for “leadership skills”. That tells me that we know a lot about it, but we understand very little. Something I have learned is that we can dive into each of the topics related to leadership, but there are some characteristics and skills that have been statistically shown to be the basis of driving leadership effectiveness and that over 90% of leaders today recognize that they could develop. I will start with the most powerful element of leadership based on my experience. PURPOSE AND VISION. An Elegant Leader must have the ability to incorporate his purpose and vision in ways that inspire others. All their actions and decisions are aligned 100%
of the time with the care of this purpose. The leadership of any person is born from the search for something greater than any economic and selfish reason, a reason for being that combines vocation, profession, mission and passion. Perhaps the best task you can take away from reading this is just reflecting on the purpose of your organization and the purpose of your leadership. Once we embody our Purpose and Vision then the second skill that plays a fundamental role in your effectiveness is to develop a Systemic Perspective. A system is a set of interrelated things that have a common purpose or function. The Systemic Perspective in Leadership then is the ability to understand everything that is connected in a specific context - the stakeholders -, the characteristics of those connections, and the differences that exist between those parts. As a leader develops his or her Systemic Perspective, then he or she is able to make decisions with greater awareness of the impact that these will have and
