Good leadership, some experts say, is creative rather than reactive leadership.
In other words, good leadership anticipates future demands & trends and makes new products or tailors the ones already available to suit the future. For many reasons, things are changing very rapidly these days.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to be able to understand how those changes will affect your business leadership… and establish ways to take full advantage of those changes.
Leadership in business is everything – it determines the majority of outcomes in your business ranging from the productivity and happiness of your employees to maximising profits and successfully networking at business events. This is why creative reactive leadership is a necessity to truly succeed in business.
Embrace the challenge and develop your leadership skills! While there is a good chance you may possess some reactive leadership traits, this is your opportunity to work on them and unlock the best leader in you.
Do you adopt a reactive or reactive Leadership style? Test Yourself:
If you want to advance quickly in the business you work for or accelerate the progress of the business you own, you’ve got to become much better at starting things, and at making things new… or making new things.
In an article in Fast Company magazine (“The Secret Life of the CEO”), Jim Collins (author of “Good to Great”) wrote that the best leadership didn’t focus as much on beating the competition rather making their own products and services better than they were before. (Here! Hear?)
Creative business leaders are always asking themselves the following questions:
- What do potential customers really need, now?
- What worries them?
- What causes them pain?
- What would they be eager to buy?
- How can I make our current customers happier?
- How can we make the products we sell them better?
- More useful?
- More valuable?
Do you ask yourself these questions?
Regularly?
And if you do…do you come up with not just good, rather great answers? Answers that can advance your business?
Test your creative skills against the following checklist printed in a recent issue of Executive Leadership.
Ask yourself…are you:
- Internally driven
- Focused on the work, not politics
- Goal-oriented around, rather than crisis-centred
- Good relationship builder
Ask yourself…do you:
- Make full use of your strongest talents?
- Set aggressive long-term goals.If you want to achieve your business and personal dreams, the best way to do so is through setting long-term goals where you have smaller objectives to help you get there. A detailed business plan is the first step to having that clarity on what you want to achieve.
The above are all characteristics of creative leaders.
Here are the traits of reactive leadership.
- In general:
- Is motivated by external factors like money and power
- Is focused on corporate politics, not the work
- Allow productivity to dictated by what’s in their inbox
- Sometimes ignore the strongest talents in favor of “good management”
- Plan in one- to five-year increments
- Believe nothing is sacred and relationships are expendable
How many of those reactive leadership characteristics apply to you and the leadership you have experienced? Do you currently move towards creative or reactive leadership?
How would you grade yourself? The best leaders are indeed long-term oriented, people-friendly, loyal, eager to provide better products & services, and unconcerned about where they stand in just about any pecking order…either in their industry or within their business.
Now there’s a challenging insight.
If you’d like to discuss how Executive coaching will shift the leadership in your organisation book a call.
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