Leadership of the XXI century
A leader hasn’t changed a lot in the last 100 years. A leader is a person with integrity, that persuades others to follow (because they want to, not because they have to), creates a culture of openness, has discipline, communicates clearly, and forges relationships built on mutual confidence (both sides: the leader and the follower).
The key aspects of leadership have remained largely unchanged over the past 100 years. Harvard Business School’s first dean described leadership as courage, judgment, character, and an ability to get things done. One way to do so is with soft power (just because the follower wants to follow you, no rewards or penalties used) and establishing long term relationships with your followers.
Leadership lessons are often learned from very difficult situations. An example is when the company is in the bankruptcy, and then one person decides to become leader. This person has to lift all the company “by himself”, and by building trust with his followers.
The experience of these leaders tells them that crises amplify the basics of leadership and of business. Such basics are: creating an open environment, prioritizing, having discipline, communicating what and why, and acting with integrity.
Due to the leadership needs, the Harvard Business School (HBS) decided to modify some stuff in their programs in order to fit in the actual times, to prepare the students for an important leadership role.
As for HBS, it has slightly different ideals for a good leader, like articulate visionary, effective motivator, strong people skills, ability to see the big picture, willingness to delegate, a global view, and an awareness of social responsibility.
Obama is the first leader to demonstrate the range of qualities needed to deal with our complex age and conditions. He embodies most of the qualities described by these great writers on leadership.
Although he remains untested in high office, Obama has nevertheless displayed a remarkable breadth of qualities.
As a man, he remains true to the values of his humble background. Raised by a single mother in Hawaii and Indonesia, he was no doubt tested by his circumstances. Yet he has matured into a thoughtful, considerate, inclusive, relaxed and level-headed man. He has shown humility and connectedness with ordinary people, remaining gracious under attack and undistracted by innuendo and smears.
As a charismatic leader, he has revealed a soaring eloquence, fierce intellect, gravitas, passion, conviction and a rare ability to mobilize and inspire diverse groups of people in the US and around the world.
As a transactional leader, he is a consummate professional, intellectual, dynamic, with tenacity, focus, grasp of detail, breadth of knowledge and intellect. His campaign demonstrated superb organizational ability, skilled use of technology, tenacity, focus, grasp of detail and breadth of knowledge.
Most important of all, he has emerged as a beacon of hope, showing unwavering faith in his country and its people, and his willingness to step up to the plate, despite threats to his life and deep-rooted problems at home and abroad.
As he said in his victory speech, his aim is to restore the US's enduring ideals of democracy, hope, opportunity and liberty, rather than the recent attractions of wealth and arms. On a more practical level, his challenge is to unite Republicans with Democrats in the new administration, something he appears to be tackling.
There are many reasons why people should find their authentic leadership. Those reasons are:
No one can be authentic by trying to imitate someone else. You can learn from others’ experiences, but there is no way you can be successful when you are trying to be like them.
People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not a replica of someone else.
Leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else.
And some stuff that is good for you was discovered, and is:
You do not have to be born with specific characteristics or traits of a leader.
You do not have to wait for a tap on the shoulder.
You do not have to be at the top of your organization. Instead, you can discover your potential right now.
But, discovering your authentic leadership requires a commitment to developing yourself. Like musicians and athletes, you must devote yourself to a lifetime of realizing your potential.
Task 2, April 6th 2010. First of all, the hardest person to control is you. I’ll begin from that assumption, because to control our own body needs requires much more than pure intelligence, due to the organic functions of the human being. Then, to achieve personal growth, you need to control your ways in order to carry your objectives, which means you must have discipline in yourself. If you do so, then the rest is easier, because of the moral that is required to do so. An example is when you have an urge, you may feel that you can’t stop doing something in order to satisfy it, but when you have discipline, you eventually learn to stop the urge from the roots, and get it away from your body. The process of discipline may later be applied to rule a certain section of other humans, or, in other words, to be a good leader. Hence, if you turn into a disciplined being, then you already built yourself a character! This is all a chain reaction, series of moves in order to get the best out of you and from others as well, by learning how to control your essence, being, your whole self.
Homework, April 8th, 2010. Proactive is the composite of all of the skills a person applies that influence and inspires others to think, say and do the right things to achieve the worthwhile vision, governing operating values, mission and vital goals of the organization. In order to do all that, the proactive leader needs to be in lower positions to understand the nature of what he does as a leader, hence it can be inferred that the proactive leader must be a follower as well. These followers have 10 hallmarks:
1. They manage themselves well.
2. They are committed and loyal to the organization that employs them.
3. They respect the legitimate authority of others.
4. They seek specific directions.
5. They accept significant assignments.
6. They develop their competencies and are credible.
7. They focus their efforts for maximum impact.
8. They value honest appraisals and feedback.
9. They exhibit exemplary integrity and honesty.
10. They are courageous and confront wrong behavior.
A study showed that leaders who participated in a development program, received 360-degree feedback, selected important areas for improvement, discussed these with co-workers, and followed-up with them on a consistent basis (to check on progress) were rated as becoming dramatically better leaders—not in a self-assessment, but in appraisals from co-workers—6 to 18 months after the initial program, in other words, they became effective leaders. In a more formal way to express it, what you need to become an effective leader is:
1. Get 360-degree feedback on your present level of effectiveness, as judged by co-workers you respect.
2. Pick the most important behaviors for change—those you believe will enhance your effectiveness as a leader—e.g., "become a more effective listener" or "make decisions in a timelier manner").
3. Periodically ask co-workers for suggestions on how you can do an even better job in your selected behaviors for change.
4. Listen to their ideas—don't promise to change everything—and make the changes that you believe will further increase your effectiveness.
5. Follow-up and measure change in your effectiveness over time.
First of all, emotional intelligence (EI) is defined as the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth. Now, the four branch model of emotional intelligence describes four areas of capacities or skills that collectively describe many of areas of emotional intelligence. More specifically, this model defines emotional intelligence as involving the abilities to:
1. PERCEIVING EMOTION. The initial, most basic, area has to do with the nonverbal reception and expression of emotion. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have pointed out that emotional expression evolved in animal species as a form of crucial social communication. Facial expressions such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, were universally recognizable in human beings. Emotions researchers, evolutionary biologists, specialists in nonverbal behavior, and others, have made tremendous inroads into understanding how human beings recognize and express emotions. The capacity to accurately perceive emotions in the face or voice of others provides a crucial starting point for more advanced understanding of emotions.
2. USING EMOTIONS TO FACILITATE THOUGHT. The second area appeared every bit as basic as the first. This was the capacity of the emotions to enter into and guide the cognitive system and promote thinking. For example, cognitive scientists pointed out that emotions prioritize thinking. In other words: something we respond to emotionally, is something that grabs our attention. Having a good system of emotional input, therefore, should help direct thinking toward matters that are truly important. As a second example, a number of researchers have suggested that emotions are important for certain kinds of creativity to emerge. For example, both mood swings, and positive moods, have been implicated in the capacity to carry out creative thought.
3. UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS. Emotions convey information: Happiness usually indicates a desire to join with other people; anger indicates a desire to attack or harm others; fear indicates a desire to escape, and so forth. Each emotion conveys its own pattern of possible messages, and actions associated with those messages. A message of anger, for example, may mean that the individual feels treated unfairly. The anger, in turn, might be associated with specific sets of possible actions: peacemaking, attacking, retribution and revenge-seeking, or withdrawal to seek calmness. Understanding emotional messages and the actions associated with them is one important aspect of this area of skill.
Once a person can identify such messages and potential actions, the capacity to reason with and about those emotional messages and actions becomes of importance as well. Fully understanding emotions, in other words, involves the comprehension of the meaning of emotions, coupled with the capacity to reason about those meanings. It is central to this group of emotionally intelligent skills.
4. MANAGING EMOTIONS. Finally, emotions often can be managed. A person needs to understand emotions convey information. To the extent that it is under voluntary control, a person may want to remain open to emotional signals so long as they are not too painful, and block out those that are overwhelming. In between, within the person's emotional comfort zone, it becomes possible to regulate and manage one's own and others' emotions so as to promote one's own and others' personal and social goals. The means and methods for emotional self-regulation has become a topic of increasing research in this decade.
I think proactive leadership is intimately related to the servant leadership, because it involves the leader’s job of becoming a follower himself, in order to understand what is good for his own followers. As I’ve said before, servant leadership is the ideal, because it’s really hard to produce corrupted minds with it, due to some jobs that require lot of effort and willpower to be done properly (or just done). The person will automatically value the effort of the low paid job, and eventually will treat the ones who do it permanently with lots of respect, which is one of the aspects of the proactive leadership. Therefore, this one would help me to value more what I have, and to not complain too much of some trifling things.
Then, the effectiveness involves more the correction of actual mistakes you may have. For example, if the leader doesn’t receive feedback, he may become a bad leader in the sense that he won’t know how to solve simple company problems, not even his own. It specifically helps me to realize that no one is perfect, and that we all need corrections in certain ways to get adapted to the real needs of a group, in the leadership case, our followers. If you correct all your mistakes, then you’ll become a very respected and effective leader, you’ll know how to solve all kinds of problems, and you’ll be appreciated by your followers as well.
At last, but not least, the emotional intelligence, would help me in a very peculiar way: to understand better what people try to tell me with their emotions. I consider myself as having a low degree of emotional intelligence, and I just find it plain difficult to try to understand when people don’t make any comment about an issue they have when they want or need help. For example, let’s say someone is really angry, and that someone may even be red of anger, and if that someone then comes to me, and stares plainly and vaguely, I wouldn’t be able to tell exactly what that person has, while a person with a high emotional intelligence would immediately tell that person the problem, and make a proper solution to make the person feel way better than before. I think the reason why I can’t tell is because I have very few emotions myself, which is something I can’t change. But what may help me are my plain cognitive abilities, in order to make the people speak out what they have, so that I can do something about it, like trying to suppress the problem the person may have (which is what I do with some friends). Another conclusion I have (related to the one stated before) is that a person with a very high emotional intelligence has lots of emotions that he feels, learns to control, and then applies what he did in other people’s emotional problems to solve them.
Homework, April 9th, 2010. The personality types are:
ISTJ
Serious and quiet, interested in security and peaceful living. Extremely thorough, responsible, and dependable. Well-developed powers of concentration. Usually interested in supporting and promoting traditions and establishments. Well-organized and hard working, they work steadily towards identified goals. They can usually accomplish any task once they have set their mind to it.
ISTP
Quiet and reserved, interested in how and why things work. Excellent skills with mechanical things. Risk-takers who they live for the moment. Usually interested in and talented at extreme sports. Uncomplicated in their desires. Loyal to their peers and to their internal value systems, but not overly concerned with respecting laws and rules if they get in the way of getting something done. Detached and analytical, they excel at finding solutions to practical problems.
ISFJ
Quiet, kind, and conscientious. Can be depended on to follow through. Usually puts the needs of others above their own needs. Stable and practical, they value security and traditions. Well-developed sense of space and function. Rich inner world of observations about people. Extremely perceptive of other's feelings. Interested in serving others.
ISFP
Quiet, serious, sensitive and kind. Do not like conflict, and not likely to do things which may generate conflict. Loyal and faithful. Extremely well-developed senses, and aesthetic appreciation for beauty. Not interested in leading or controlling others. Flexible and open-minded. Likely to be original and creative. Enjoy the present moment.
INFJ
Quietly forceful, original, and sensitive. Tend to stick to things until they are done. Extremely intuitive about people, and concerned for their feelings. Well-developed value systems which they strictly adhere to. Well-respected for their perseverance in doing the right thing. Likely to be individualistic, rather than leading or following.
INFP
Quiet, reflective, and idealistic. Interested in serving humanity. Well-developed value system, which they strive to live in accordance with. Extremely loyal. Adaptable and laid-back unless a strongly-held value is threatened. Usually talented writers. Mentally quick, and able to see possibilities. Interested in understanding and helping people.
INTJ
Independent, original, analytical, and determined. Have an exceptional ability to turn theories into solid plans of action. Highly value knowledge, competence, and structure. Driven to derive meaning from their visions. Long-range thinkers. Have very high standards for their performance, and the performance of others. Natural leaders, but will follow if they trust existing leaders.
INTP (It’s my personality)
Logical, original, creative thinkers. Can become very excited about theories and ideas. Exceptionally capable and driven to turn theories into clear understandings. Highly value knowledge, competence and logic. Quiet and reserved, hard to get to know well. Individualistic, having no interest in leading or following others.
ESTP
Friendly, adaptable, action-oriented. "Doers" who are focused on immediate results. Living in the here-and-now, they're risk-takers who live fast-paced lifestyles. Impatient with long explanations. Extremely loyal to their peers, but not usually respectful of laws and rules if they get in the way of getting things done. Great people skills.
ESTJ
Practical, traditional, and organized. Likely to be athletic. Not interested in theory or abstraction unless they see the practical application. Have clear visions of the way things should be. Loyal and hard-working. Like to be in charge. Exceptionally capable in organizing and running activities. "Good citizens" who value security and peaceful living.
ESFP
People-oriented and fun-loving, they make things more fun for others by their enjoyment. Living for the moment, they love new experiences. They dislike theory and impersonal analysis. Interested in serving others. Likely to be the center of attention in social situations. Well-developed common sense and practical ability.
ESFJ
Warm-hearted, popular, and conscientious. Tend to put the needs of others over their own needs. Feel strong sense of responsibility and duty. Value traditions and security. Interested in serving others. Need positive reinforcement to feel good about themselves. Well-developed sense of space and function.
ENFP
Enthusiastic, idealistic, and creative. Able to do almost anything that interests them. Great people skills. Need to live life in accordance with their inner values. Excited by new ideas, but bored with details. Open-minded and flexible, with a broad range of interests and abilities.
ENFJ
Popular and sensitive, with outstanding people skills. Externally focused, with real concern for how others think and feel. Usually dislike being alone. They see everything from the human angle, and dislike impersonal analysis. Very effective at managing people issues, and leading group discussions. Interested in serving others, and probably place the needs of others over their own needs.
ENTP
Creative, resourceful, and intellectually quick. Good at a broad range of things. Enjoy debating issues, and may be into "one-up-manship". They get very excited about new ideas and projects, but may neglect the more routine aspects of life. Generally outspoken and assertive. They enjoy people and are stimulating company. Excellent ability to understand concepts and apply logic to find solutions.
ENTJ
Assertive and outspoken - they are driven to lead. Excellent ability to understand difficult organizational problems and create solid solutions. Intelligent and well-informed, they usually excel at public speaking. They value knowledge and competence, and usually have little patience with inefficiency or disorganization.
The possible career paths for the INTP are:
- Artist
- Actor
- Architect
- Archaeologist
- Agent
- Consultant
- Computer Specialist
- Computer Animator
- Computer Programmer
- Engineer
- Economist
- Forestry/Park Ranger
- Financial Planner
- Historian
- Human Resources Manager
- Investigator
- Investment Banker
- Inventor
- Interpreter/Translator
|  | - Judge
- Legal Mediator
- Logician
- Lawyer/Attorney
- Mathematician
- Musician
- Marketer
- Network Specialist
- Psychologist
- Psychiatrist
- Philosopher
- Project Manager
- Photographer
- Researcher
- Systems Analyst
- Scientist
- Strategic Planner
- Technical Writer
- Teacher/Professor
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For 10 years from now, I see myself working for an organization like NASA doing research, or going with a teacher as an assistant just to earn some cash for living and the extremely useful experience in the curriculum of working to help a teacher doing research one on one. In order to get there, I will need my studies and really good grades, and a good attitude towards the work. As for the way I will live, I see myself all alone, with few friends that I will trust with certain things, but still alone. The other option would be to work as a pilot for some other company, like Continental Airlines, or something like that. But my main option of my research is the physics area, or applied mathematics, just sitting in a room with a pencil and a sheet of paper all day long coming up with new ideas.
