Leadership is about future and change. More specifically, leadership is about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present, utilizes the best talents, capabilities, and resources of their people and organization to drive changes and produce meaningful and valuable results. People lead in the different levels. Senior leadership of the organization or the society are like the steering wheel to ensure their ships are moving toward the right direction. Senior leadership is neither equal to seniority nor the big title, it implies the high level of intellectual and emotional maturity, strategic foresight, profound insight, decision wisdom, and high-level leadership influence.
Sound judgment: Generally speaking, compared to other junior level management position, the senior leadership role needs to spend significant time on making both strategic and tactical decisions on the daily basis. Hence, the sound judgment skill is important to enhance leadership effectiveness and improve decision-making capability. Due to the complexity and ever-changing business dynamic, sound judgment is a hardcore leadership competency and the prerequisite quality for being a senior leader. In the senior position, stay on strategic focus rather than the tactical details. That means the senior leaders are foresightful, can leverage strategic thinking (think longer term), systems thinking (contextual understanding the interconnectivity between the parts and the whole), creative thinking (think the alternative and better way to do things), independent thinking (junior leaders follow the senior leaders, but senior leaders should follow both their own mind and heart) Senior leadership is neither the status quo, not a ceremonial role, ideally, it means the leaders are reaching the high level of maturity to drive changes and make influence significantly. Biases and stereotyping are how humans cope with larger numbers of other humans than they could ever know. Therefore, senior leadership should set the tone for advancing and inclusiveness. There’s knowing unknown, there’s unknowing unknown, everyone perhaps has some blind spots blocking the way. But as a senior business leader (or any kind of leader), the blind spots will cloud your vision, trigger your negative emotion, cause your decision ineffectiveness, and compromise your leadership competency. Hence, even you are in the senior level position, being learning agile, learn from all necessary resource, learn from others, learn from the past, etc, but ultimately, you should shape your own viewpoint and practice your own leadership influence.
Abstraction: Compared to junior/middle or functional managers, senior leaders should focus on the holistic big picture, without getting distracted by trivial details. Senior leaders play the critical role in setting principle and policies, hence, abstract thinking helps them differentiate substance from style, grasp the quintessential from outdated information. Abstract your thoughts and words by omission, composition, generalization or idealization, to reach a point of agreement or develop the foundation of the timeless principles, in order to move the business forward. You must convey a clear message and communicate relentlessly and understand that not all of the stakeholders will move through the change curve at the same speed. Just because you have arrived at the other side does not mean everyone else has. Either making communication, negotiation or presentation, senior leaders should enforce communication to tailor audience via different styles. From abstraction to elaboration. Open your mind – listen (read) carefully, expecting to find some new insight. As a C-level position,, at a higher level, as many times abstraction enables agreement.
Profundity: If in the industrial age, the louder you could speak, the more senior it sounds like; and then digital era changes the rules. The senior leadership should reflect on how profound they can think and how persuasive they can communicate. Leadership in itself is a constant learning process that requires the leader to build experience and to share insight. The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches and role gaming is needed to reach for in-depth understanding. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario. The difference between knowledge and insight is thinking, and especially lateral, nonlinear or multi-dimensional thinking, a holistic view. Ideally, when the rule is fair and the digital principle is clear, the deeper you can think, the more senior position you could reach. Furthermore, insight is being able to identify the root cause of a problem or the core issues. Senior leaders should have ability to frame the right problems, before delegating others to solve them. We all know often solving the wrong problem is even worse than doing nothing about it. The difference between senior and junior (middle) leadership is not about how many answers you have, but about how well you can ask the open questions to attract best answers, and leverage all sorts of informations to see the big picture into which the knowledge fit, to improve decision effectiveness and enforce leadership maturity.Senior leadership makes influence from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes and societal advancements. Leadership is ripened when the power of leadership is based on acute observation, insightful understanding, sound judgment, courageous questioning, unconventional connection, careful discernment, and deep penetration. And the senior leadership is less about hierarchy, more about leadership maturity.
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May 08, 2017 at 10:59AM
from Pearl Zhu
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