The hallmark of today’s smart leader or what I have described as brain-based leadership is his ability to use unique and strong skills to inspire, guide and organize teams to satisfactorily achieve organisational goals by intelligently identifying and responding to “make or break” triggers that uncertainty, unprecedented and unexpected happenings have set in motion in the marketplace.
This ability is fundamentally different from strategic planning. It is scenario planning and management characterized by nimbleness and grit. The smart leader moves the organisation forward in spite of fast-dwindling purchasing power and ultra-high inflationary rate (plus other critical triggers). He intelligently provides answers to these questions: How do we manage unexpected factors that are suddenly impacting the business? How will these challenging triggers impact internal drivers? What are the likely outcomes? How do we then cope with consumer-needs variables? What agile and nimble strategies do we develop to cope with this scenario matrix?
Scenario planning is the way to go in the present unstable and uncertain business environment. It is the smart leader’s solution to strategically manage scenario-dictated options to move the organisation forward. With the bottom-up approach, the leader lists the scenarios (drawn from understanding of trends and events). He uses vertically arranged list to create remedial insights. The organisation can now brainstorm, categorize and consolidate these insights based on severity of impact.
The smart or brain-based leader exhibits two distinct characteristics. One, he is resilient in all ramifications. Two, he is equipped with intelligent demeanor (like the smart bomb, smart car, smart phone, smart card and so on).
His resilience is demonstrated or showcased as intentional commitment and skillful actions. He presides over an organisation that is always bouncing back, always stabilizing and making sure-progress in the face of obstacles and challenges. He demonstrably exhibits unique strength in simple and complex domains through intelligent ideas and result-delivering actions.
This leader views challenges as growth and learning opportunities. He sustains focus on his organisation’s objectives and goals. He is skilled in adaptation and flexibility. He is also adept in maintaining bi-directional relationship between employees’ attitudes and behaviours. He has exceptional clarity on organisation’s purpose and always engaged to it. He regularly mobilizes employees’ best ideas and value-adding contributions.
The brain-based leader is very effective at managing analytic and empathetic networks. He is always successfully navigating the business landscape while at the same time, engaging, motivating and supporting the team(s). He skillfully connects business goals to the agile and people-centric culture. He maximally engages employees and builds resilient and transformative teams. His style of leadership is immersive. He delivers goals through the innovative workforce by skillfully deploying collaboration, trust, agility and effective communication. His day-to-day activities strengthen empathetic networks. He balances tasks with employee’s unique needs. He relates to these needs instinctively.
Let me add for the sake of emphasis, that the strength of attitudes in the workplace is the product of regular behaviours that are held with conviction, confidence and consistency. Inconsistency leads to heightened state of concealed rebellion in the workplace.
The brain-based leader relates to associates as friends and hardworking colleagues. He commends them often for always being dutiful and exceptionally committed to organizational goals and objectives.
He is a transformational leader who corrects, renews, reinvigorates and constantly reinvents strategies to cope with the shifting needs of markets. For him, there must be equilibrium between competition and other business challenges. His organisation must always pioneer advancements, set enviable standards of excellence and break records. Relentless pursuit of wins is a constant in the workplace.
For regular renewals, he navigates through the two paradigms of training and learning. We get better at what we are doing by continuous renewal of knowledge and experience. When we think we have reached our peak, we suddenly realize that it is as if we need to start again. Organizations must train and retrain; refresh and rejig, and get significantly better. There should be no room for complacency.
The brain-based leader simultaneously focuses on growth and profitability in order to build and engender healthy momentum that sustains both. Profitability and growth are mutually supportive. An organisation that sustains both growth and profitability, achieves higher profitability and higher growth than an organisation that just sustains profitability at the expense of growth.
Organisations must earn the right to grow by being profitable first. A singular pursuit of either will make it difficult to balance the two subsequently.
It is worthy of note that if the sequential approach is used, short and long term performance will in addition, be satisfactorily taken care of. This means, the four performance goals namely; profitability, growth, short and long term successes, will be excellently achieved.
Let me conclude with “ambidexterity” of the smart, brain-based leader. His exceptional ability to match organisations’ dynamic competencies with external uncertainty and unprecedented trends.
He is the entrepreneurial leader that stands out from the rest. He is innovative as well as “imitative”. He creates things and implements decisions in ways never seen before. He modifies existing ideas and inventions. He makes them better and sometimes, even cheaper. He improves existing processes and galvanizes employees’ intrapreneurial skills and energies. He regularly swings the pendulum between the exploit and explore modes. He holds the “blue and green pens” together to create momentum and an exciting workplace environment. He shares success stories to reinforce the fact that objectives and goals are achievable. He acknowledges, respects and appreciates colleagues and thereby, create as well as engender cohesion and collegiality.
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