technical leadership

Thought of the day: Six leadership lessons

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Below are my six leadership lessons from a recent leadership course.

Self-awareness: Leadership starts with self-awareness. Start with yourself to know what are your strengths and weaknesses. Find out about your leadership style. To know about yourself, continuously get feedback from others.

Reference: https://bmjleader.bmj.com/content/leader/5/1/3.full.pdf

Decision-making: An effective and a simple way for decision-making could be to do a what-if analysis of any situation. Like, what will happen if I do this? Generally, humans try to choose the option in which the loss is less. We try to minimize risks.

Psychological well-beings: Taking care of ourselves and avoiding burn outs is important. For that, we must take care of ourselves. Leaders must develop resilience. It’s an ability to bounce back in difficult situations or failures. For the well beings, we must build emotional agility by validating ourselves on how we are making connections with others, how we’re contributing to what matters to us, and how are we compassionate towards self and others.

Building trusting relationships: To succeed as a leader, we must build trusting relationships. As Dr. Brené Brown suggests, trust is built in small moments. It takes more time to build the trust than what it takes to hurt the trust. To build trust, a simple process could be to listen actively and make humble inquiries for any topics.

Conflict Resolution and Negotiations: To resolve a conflict, we should aim for a win/win collaborative scenario where both, the assertiveness and cooperation are high. I really liked below framework about conflicts resolution. To know more about it, read here.

Reference: https://kilmanndiagnostics.com/overview-thomas-kilmann-conflict-mode-instrument-tki/

Curiosity: Refer to the six signature traits of inclusive leadership by Deloitte here. Out of all six, curiosity is my favorite. Curiosity is such a magical attribute of leadership that opens up doors for discussions and allow us to make humble inquiries from the perspective of a learner, instead of a perspective of a knower.

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