What is the best definition of a world-class leader?
“A best of breed leader seeks team and metric input followed by setting a clear vision to influence team members to understand, accept and capitalize on present and future states and structures of the organization. The leader invests, curates and matures brand and company assets to support team members towards goal achievement relevant to market opportunity, relevant to minatory competitive threats.” In essence leaders are not granted an opportunity for authority. Leaders must try to jump high, fly right early and often to earn the right for the opportunity to lead a team, to lead a team successfully.
At the core of urbane leadership are four quintessential tent poles, each designed, tuned and matured to best shepherd employees to over-achieve stated goals. Best-of-breed leadership stimulates, motivates and emulates the art of the possible through a substantial ambient role towards accelerating employee performance and productivity.
Ideate
A leader must also be able to feed the discussion, fuel the passion, deploy relevant assets, to ideate creative thinking and relevant deliverables to achieve a team goal. Creativity is the maturing catalyst that makes and takes markets. Refulgent creativity is the core differentiator between remora barriers and threats towards achieving brand infatuation versus a company’s demise, known as brand evaporation. The “brand,” in this essence, includes every touch point of your mission, including employee growth and happiness, to sales, to operations, to brand and product marketing, to a highly successful P&L. In essence, a brand is a mettle which must be shined every day in order to achieve brand infatuation, avoid brand evaporation. Always ideate to infatuate; never stand still, never wait. Ideation and its close cousin creativity are the high octane fuel of business passion, of determined business achievement.
Analyze
As a drill-down under the ribs of the leadership umbrella is a kinetic demand to analyze, to drill for knowledge. Savvy leaders are first and foremost highly relevant analyzers. The dignity of knowledge must drive a leader’s vision while fueling team members’ determination. Leaders are anointed with a multi-modal responsibility of knowledge, acting as skeptic, and moving to critical thinker and to strategic curator relevant to the mission at hand. Knowledge empowers every touch point of the organization, of the brand promise, of the stated goals at hand.
Structure
As important, leaders must formulate and mature a fastidious and dauntless team structure, company structure, to over-achieve the stated mission and congressed goals. This formidable organizational leadership structure must be embedded through training, clarity, purpose of mission, logic, through every company touch point, to ensure the organization acts and runs as won (one). When the team motivates, exercises, socializes and matures together, the structure – the company mission – will be gained.
Socialize
Finally, a leader must have the profound and protracting skills to socialize the mission, socialize the brand, stimulate team members and consumers, and target audiences through smart and highly relevant socialization relevant to the mission. Listening and socializing are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, need to be respected as one voice in congress with warranted change, with tracking the KPI (key performance indexes) results of the goal. In essence, the voice of your team members, customers and marketplace are indeed the core of your social leadership when reviewed, acknowledged and smartly acted upon. They must also assiduously socialize the art of the possible, the eye of the mission to ensure a profitable growth path.
There are a multitude of words describing the role of a leader – creator, relator, persuader, evader, crusader, motivator, negotiator, market-maker, market-taker, etc. For me, a leader must stand behind the team, never in front of the team. The leader has the warranted responsibility to analyze, socialize, ideate and build righteous, long-lasting structure to achieve the mission, exceed the goal. In simple words, to earn the right to lead means: “if you want to fly like the leader, act and try like the leader, each and every day.” Those who never try will just never fly…
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