Awaken your innate leadership skills

Listen to Joe Sherren’s refreshing straightforward thoughts on leadership

Awaken your innate leadership skills

Most of us were promoted by doing a job extremely well, but the skills we used then may be substantially different than the skills we need to succeed in the future.

We succeed by doing. Now, to continue growing we need to win by getting others to think brilliantly, analyze diligently and execute flawlessly at blinding speed using the full team’s strengths and abilities.

As you grow, your job becomes more about building a constructive, collaborative productive workplace where people are open and sharing, and pool their knowledge and resources in order to see, innovate and execute better.

Joe Sherren, author of iLead - Five Insights for Building Sustainable Organizations and a Schulich Executive Education Centre expert on leadership, believes we were all born to lead. But for many people, the innate ability to lead was driven out of them before they got to a position requiring those skills. The only solution is to learn them again, or for the first time.

Joe’s five insights are:

1. A great leader anticipates crisis because he knows it will arrive. He is just not sure when, or what clothes it will be wearing. So he prepares his team the way a pilot prepares. He simulates potential disasters over and over looking for a way to avoid them or handle them better. He makes sure the company is prepared to see the long term opportunity and get through short term turbulence.
2. A great leader creates the right culture and environment to attract the right employees and allows them to be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated.
3. A great leader promotes the “right” people, people that will give advice and counsel asking powerful questions and then will continue to teach his key leaders how to ask these questions in a demanding yet supportive manner tailored to the individual.
4. A great leader teaches the 12 styles of communication so his people can communicate with each other, with suppliers, and with customers, allies and collaborators more effectively.
5. Great leaders teach and leverage collaboration where the leader focuses on making someone else look better every day, week and month. To harness the teams individual and collective potential,teachers, bullies, and bad bosses.

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