Tag: Social Awareness

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership: Improving our Social Awareness

In my first post (which you can read here), in a series of posts about “First Principles Based Leadership”, I shared the importance of developing five types of awareness (self, social, cultural, contextual and systems) in order to build that foundation for becoming a First Principles based leader. Today, in this third post, we will talk about how we can improve our social awareness. When I talk about social awareness, I mean the ability to know what is going on with the people we lead and work with, as individuals and the interactions between them. It is our ability to […]

Leadership

Foundation For First Principles Based Leadership

Premise: One of the foundations for First Principles Based Leadership is for leaders to be aware. Leaders need to work on their awareness on five different levels. 1. Self Awareness: First and foremost is for us, as leaders, we need to work on improving our self awareness. When I talk about self awareness, I am referring to knowing what we want to achieve and why we want to achieve it. Is it for our own sake (ego driven) or is it for the sake of the team that we are leading (service driven). When I talk about self awareness, I […]

Leadership

Being a Good Leader is Hard Because

Effective leadership demands mastery in various areas: making tough decisions with limited information, fostering self-awareness, ensuring the welfare of others, practicing active listening, cultivating high performance, upholding organizational culture, remaining humble yet driven, building trust, managing conflict, aligning team and individual goals, hiring sagely, bringing appropriate energy, learning from successes and failures, treating everyone equally, inviting feedback, seeing potential, setting high standards, expanding influence, clearing team obstacles, taking accountability for failures, and adeptly switching between numerous roles as required.

Leadership

Imposter Syndrome

Premise: One of the things that I have experienced myself and heard from many other leaders is the feeling of being an imposter. Everyone of us at some point in time, have felt the feeling of being an imposter. Sometimes it could be because, we don’t see what someone else sees in us, as capability and/or potential. Other times, it could be that we are not sure if we deserve the leadership position that we currently occupy, specially when we see some really good people on the team. This is self-doubt. In my opinion, any good leader, worth their salt, […]

Leadership

Leaders are Not Great, Leadership Could Be

I stumbled onto an interview with Simon Sinek where he shared his thoughts on what does it take to become a great leader. You can watch the video here. One of his core insight is that leadership requires courage, courage to do the right thing under pressure, courage to stand up to what we think is the right thing to do, courage to make the tough decisions with limited information, courage to set a direction and march forward (believing that it is the right direction), courage to give credit when things go well and take the heat when things don’t […]