“If we focus only on being seen to be the strongest, most powerful person in the room, then I think we lose what we’re meant to be here for.” - Jacinda Ardern

I was recently being asked to host a virtual webinar and share a few thoughts on leadership with a group of young professionals. There is a sea of literature and studies on the topic out there. After giving it some good thoughts, I decided to share with the group several aspects of leadership less commonly discussed.

Leadership is a BIG word. It means a lot of things and often very different things to different people. Any business professional can name with ease at least a dozen of qualities that make a good leader, such as vision, ability to inspire, self-confidence, decision making, resilience, good communicator, accountability, empowerment, and so on.

They are all useful leadership traits which we all should work and improve on. They would certainly allow us to perform our leadership role more effectively and make us a better person. But does it mean that who ticks the most boxes on that list is therefore a better leader?

The reality is that most leaders excel in some, but not all, of those skills and they can still be effective.

I am not a born leader. Leadership is something I have been learning continuously. And l learnt a lot from mistakes. I remember in my early career as the CEO for Asia 15 years ago, I had a very high performing sales manager reporting to me. She had lots of drive and energy, which I valued a lot and worked very closely with her in various deals. I shared with her my opinions on how to go for each of the deals and what to do in each stage of the process. After nine months, she resigned. I was totally shocked because I thought we had developed good rapport and we were successful working together. Her feedback was that I was overwhelming and she lost her confidence.

Leadership is more about listening than telling. By connecting people, a leader can influence them to achieve the organisation’s goals and mission more effectively.

A lot have been said that a leader must provide a vision to hold an organisation together. But we cannot air-drop a vision into the organisation from above as a new leader. Unless it is a start-up of our own, I have found it more effective to develop a sense of purpose by drawing on the common values already present in the organisation, and elevate them to form a vision through discussions and reach consensus. This will ensure much stronger buy-in.

Influence is mutual. As leader, we need to have the confidence to lead and inspire people to join us on the journey. But at the same time, we also need to have the humility to realise that we are a member of the team. This perspective shift will enable us to exercise empathy to better understand the team’s feelings and dynamics and check on the soundness of our decisions, resulting in stronger mutual trust and greater effectiveness of the organisation.

Jacinda Ardern, the current prime minister of New Zealand, said in her recent book: “We’ve placed over time so much emphasis on notions of assertiveness and strength – that we probably have assumed that it means you can’t have those other qualities of kindness and empathy. And yet, when you think about all the big challenges that we face in the world, that’s probably the quality we need the most. We need our leaders to be able to empathise with the circumstances of others; to empathise with the next generation that we’re making decisions on behalf of. And if we focus only on being seen to be the strongest, most powerful person in the room, then I think we lose what we’re meant to be here for. So I’m proudly focused on empathy, because you can be both empathetic and strong.”*

Similarly, leaders need self-recognition. Leadership is a dynamic process that evolves all the time, depending on the environment, the organisation’s stage of development, the people, and the specific situations. Winston Churchill’s directive style of leadership led Britain to win WWII, but he was voted out during peace time for his same style of leadership. We can be an excellent leader during a certain phase, but not necessarily for the rest, of the journey. As a leader, we need to have the self-recognition at what point we have accomplished our mission and would pass it on to our successor and move on to a new assignment. That will go a long way in the long-term success of our career.

I was lucky to have been inspired by role models at different stages of my career, who pushed my limits and gave me opportunities to develop leadership skills through different experiences. But more often, I learnt many of these skills from everyday life - from colleagues at work, to people who report to me, or the communities I work with. There are plenty of things to observe from people from different background in our daily life and learn how they handle challenges.

Like many other skills for life, we would never learn enough about leadership.

*"Jacinda Ardern: Political leaders can be both empathetic and strong", The Guardian, May 20, 2020.