Even if it sounds elitist, leadership is a key quality to be acquired by employees.
Try to gain leadership from an employee point of view could be perceived as difficult whereas Top-manager are supposed to be granted of it. However, it’s not by thinking on a conservative way that employees will have a chance to get to discover leadership. It should be a commun employees belief that leadership can be acquired by each of us who wants to make a change of perspectives, despite high level of hierarchy in its organisation.
The positive impact will completely transform your way of perceiving things and actions. The mindset shift will transform you. This will be possible only if your raise your viewpoint from little details to a broader picture, not only on your work but on a larger scale as your department, your business unit, your division or even your whole company. This way of changing perspectives, will give you a chance of catching what are at stakes, for each entity and how these confrontations or similarities will affect your own decisions or understanding.
You will become able to rise as said by Hiroshi Mikitani from « the minutiae and take a big-picture view of your work and the work of others. You start thinking long term and build strategies for achieving goals. You see things differently, just as you do when you climb tothe top of Mt. Fuji. You’re able to see far into the distance not because you have superior vision, but because you enacted a plan and climbed to the summit. »
But why it can has a use for your company. The main advantage will be that you can see the profits and losses, the pros and the cons and how your position can benefit from this whole new understanding. It is like a little transformation for you and your close colleagues with who you interact on a daily basis, if of course you would like to share your new comprehension of the whole process. Interconnections will be rediscovered and strategies can be reinvented in order to gain in leadership.
How this can be a mutual benefit from your employer? It would be mean that if you have understood the system as whole, that you can assess your situation and reassess your actions priorities in order to perform more efficiently in a short term as well as in a longer term, as part of bigger system.
On a day to day work, great leaders act accordingly by identifying stakes, options and solutions which may be chosen by assessing advantages and drawbacks.
By having a new vision which will be based a broader picture of your new understanding, you should be able to bring new ideas as a leader not only based on your own position but as a whole organisation. This will makes the difference and will be clearly appreciated and identified by your managers.
Have you ever experienced being a leader? What are for your the other aspects of leadership which are key to suceed?
Samuel Roux, Fondateur et coach professionnel @ Start with your Coach