Is leadership an inherent trait or can people be taught to be good leaders?

 

They are the men and women who inspire you. Who transform potential into reality. Who manage, motivate, energize and influence people. Who create an iconic vision of the future. Who bring success and prosperity. The leaders. The visionaries who make a corner of the world a little better with their passion and innovation.

 

As with various other endeavours, leadership is important at every level in every organization. It is the leaders in an organization that provide the direction, encouragement and impetus to the employees towards conquering goals. Great leaders create great employees and together they create success for a business or an organization.

So, are good leaders born or made? Is leadership a natural talent or is it a characteristic that can be nurtured?  The question is sure to throw up many contrasting views, but behavioural theories point out that leadership is definitely more than just genetics.

Inborn traits can be associated more with leadership emergence than with leadership effectiveness. Within a group, an extrovert, a more intelligent or a confident person might assume leadership of the lot. However, this charisma does not necessarily mean that the same person will perform well if placed in a formal position of leadership.

People can become leaders through the process of training, learning, experience and observation. Inherent characteristics like being bold, assertive, smart, or risk-taking can be advantageous for leaders. If you don’t possess these characteristics, fret not. You can still be a phenomenal leader if you learn and develop the tactics, the strategies and the implementation.

Some of the most common attributes of a leader are -

·  Decision making skills

·  Flexibility

·  Fairness

·  Empathy

·  Confidence

·  Conviction

·  Communication skills

·  Conflict resolution

·  Critical thinking

·  Discipline

·  Business acumen

While individuals are born with varying degrees of these traits, only through practicing from the adolesent stage, these characteristics daily and across varying situations, can they become deep-rooted and an integral part of your character. Observe, listen, ask questions and pay attention to people around you. Take it upon yourself to evaluate your leadership abilities and acquire new skills. Do not wait to start learning something new, rather seek it out.

Leaders who have these qualities should not be complacent either but work hard to gain valuable expertise, perspective and insight to augment their skills. That is how effective leaders maximize their success. They make use of leadership training programs, knowledge from books, management courses, mentoring and learn from their experience to boost their skills and cement their position as a great leader.

Thus, if you are an owner of a business or part of the top management, you need to recognize that strong leadership development training at all levels in your organisation is crucial. Leadership is not about merely communicating guidelines to your employees and expecting them to achieve them. What an organization should do is prioritize leadership development and invest the required resources to make it happen and more importantly, make it effective.

For this you need to -

·  Communicate with your employees and get them to understand what leadership role is expected of them. Once you give them an overview of leadership requirements, you can provide them an opportunity to analyze where they stand and what skills gap they need to address to reach their goal.

·  Once you analyze your employees’ leadership strengths and weaknesses, you can decide on the kind of training they need. Training should be given in the core leadership skills that is lacking. Provide them with online resources, conduct workshops and bring in industry leaders to share expert views on leadership and leadership practices.

·  Networking is essential to individual growth of any leader as well as for business development. Networking will teach them how to form   connections, enter into discussions/conversations and act with the confidence of a leader.

·  Set up an objective mechanism to evaluate the performance of employees in leadership roles. You should reward employees who have shown outstanding leadership skills. 

·  Train your managers on new leadership styles, approaches, and methodologies with a view to expose them to various ideas and situations.

·  Mentoring is a great first stepping for developing leadership attributes. By using an effective mentoring program, you can help develop today’s talent into tomorrow’s leaders.

·  Believe in your employees and give them the authority to make certain decisions. When you give your employees responsibilities, they will  rise to the occasion and emerge as leaders.

·  People learn to be leaders by being around leaders. Leaders at the top should be role models for employees. They should aim to continuously remain a successful and a positive model in the workplace.

Organizations, today, need not spend time scouting for potential leaders outside their offices. Similarly, if you are an employee, lack of inherent leadership qualities need not deter you from becoming a great leader. There are several skills that are at the core of leadership, the embodiment of which makes an effective leader. Enhanced with education, training, coaching and experience, a person can undoubtedly cultivate all these qualities and more, needed to be champions for the forward progress of themselves and their

Social Networking - The New-Age Enabler of Entrepreneurial Success Stories

If ideas, knowledge, and capital are the key components of an entrepreneurship, it is social networking that catalyzes the symbiotic consolidation of these elements to transform an entrepreneurial venture into a successful enterprise.

Yes, social media today is not just a mere technology or tool facilitating the discovery of any business venture, but an intrinsic constituent of every entrepreneurial space. Social media is indeed fast turning out to be every aspiring entrepreneur’s best friend as new opportunities and innovative approaches of social networking are being untapped every day.

From serving as a knowledge base to facilitating marketing through digital channels, social media has become an indispensable tool enabling entrepreneurs achieve success in innumerable ways, including providing support in:

·  Identifying funding options from investors

·  Sourcing talent for your entrepreneurial journey

·  Introducing your brand to your audience

·  Unearthing expertise that you can partner with

·  Providing platforms to test effectiveness of ideas

·  Bolstering customer interaction to create dedicated communities

·  Mobilizing marketing from persona definition to targeted, personalized interaction with your target audience

Social media thus plays a crucial role in today's entrepreneurial world, increasing visibility and credibility of organizations. However, despite the innumerable benefits of incorporating the new-age social media innovations into entrepreneurial initiatives, the road is not always smooth.

A clear lack of awareness is a primary reason for entrepreneurs not taking advantage of all the potential advantages that social media can offer. Half-hearted approaches lose patience as it takes time and effort to generate a solid following and to cement your place in the social world.

The key to earning a social capital is not just in the number of contacts made but in turning these contacts into long-lasting relationships.  Commitment and patience, as well as proper planning and strategy, strengthen social media networks and their contribution to every organization. As you adopt effective and profitable approaches to fulfill your organizational goals, here are a few suggestions to optimize your social media strategy in achieving them:

·  Find the right platform – All social media platforms are not the same. You need to choose the right ones for your products or services. Each business has a varied target audience and finding the best channel to reach your audience is crucial. You must carry out two essential steps before you choose your platform - identify your target audience by defining clear-cut personas and map these personas and their online behaviors to specific channels. Your business will then benefit from concentrating on these specific networks that are aligned to your solution or product, even if they generate relatively less traffic.

·  Create a social media strategy - Blind pursuit of latest social media trends often leads to disappointing results since these approaches are not backed by solid strategy that maps the organization's brand with the target audience and the desired consequence. The who, what, when, and how of the entire approach must be clearly defined in the road map. Most important, crystal clear means of measuring performance through trusted analytics must also be available.

·  Schedule and delegate – Create a social media schedule that drills down to the minutest of details. You might also need to hire a dedicated social media manager to manage your accounts, update your profiles, stay on top of trends, post great content, interact promptly with your audience, and monitor performance. 

·  Make use of the tools – As social networking gains importance in business world, a number of tools are available in the market to aid you in managing it. There are sites and tools that help you by sending updates to multiple social networking sites, with one click, that help you reach out to specific audiences, and that deliver critical data analytics on what works and what doesn't.  

·  Build a content plan – Every successful social media strategy depends on content that targets the right people with the right messages at the right time.  You need to have a continuous, relevant presence on social media, which can only happen through meaningful content that is channel appropriate and in tune with your marketing and business strategy. Consistency and fresh content matter thus help increase the popularity of your business. 

·  Follow-up – Purposeful, personalized conversations with your target audience are crucial for maintaining relations.  Social networking is about engaging with your audience - the first step in expanding this network is to build trust. Following up on complaints, constant monitoring of social media channels, prompt interaction with your audience, and immediate initiatives to resolve any issues are key to a successful social media strategy.

·  Keep updating – Like any other marketing strategy, your social media strategy needs to be constantly updated. You need to monitor the responses and look through your analytics every week to understand your performance. You need to refine your networking ideas to meet your goals.

Connecting with the rest of the world through networking and social media tools is a priceless approach that the entrepreneurial space should leverage. Riding this wave will boost all chances of your success. No matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, social media has grown to such colossal dimensions that its influence on your business cannot be overlooked. With far-reaching benefits that this road holds, entrepreneurs should harness every single advantage they can gain from embarking on the social media journey.

Start networking!

Knowledge creation to speed the conversion of ideas into market ready enterprises.

Businesses of yesteryears used to be located near availability of raw materials or capital. Not any more. In today’s world they are flowing to the epicentres of knowledge. A company’s potential is assessed on their  knowledge creating capability. Capital is going to the areas where knowledge is available to create new business products and new services.

The ability to create new knowledge is often at the core of the organization's competitive advantage. Knowledge creation according to the Nonaka's SECI model is about continuous transfer, combination, and conversion of the different types of knowledge, as users practice, interact, and learn. As defined by Ikujiro Nonaka, knowledge creating process consists of socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization.

In today’s cutthroat business world, innovation is said to be the key factor that is driving an organization’s value and competition with rivals. Organizations requires input of knowledge to create new products/services, processes, technologies, and managerial systems. Knowledge management (KM) can play a huge role in producing the source of knowledge that is integral to support innovation. It is hence important that you adopt knowledge management strategies that support radical innovation giving you the added advantage.

Knowledge creation process need not limit itself to within the organization. New knowledge acquired from outside the organization about customers, their habits, needs and preferences can enable you to improve your products as well as marketing strategies. Conference and seminars help in bringing new learning to the organization and sharing the expertise with one another. It encourages partnership and collaboration with other organizations to develop new products and services. Academicians and technocrats can join hands to share knowledge to develop or improve existing or new process.

Explicit information and data can be easily understood and shared as it can be quantified and stored. There are tools and skills that manage these type of business information. However, it is not in this type of data that the advantage of an organisation lies in. An organization's true asset is in the knowledge which is found in individuals and their communities. Using the right KM strategy, practicing the relevant leadership behaviours and cultivating organizational learning culture can help you in effectively managing this intrinsic knowledge of the people.

Without a doubt, better management of knowledge within a business will lead to improved innovation and competitive advantage. Knowledge creation is today perceived as one of the major assets of an organization. New knowledge created, on its own or in combination with previously established knowledge can provide a strong foundation for continuous improvement of a your organizations’ processes, products and services.

Skills and behaviours of successful entrepreneurs.

Some have the technical brilliance, some others the vision. Some have the experience while for some others it might be their personality. What makes an entrepreneur successful? Is it just one stand out quality or a combination of skills and behaviours that they acquire during their entrepreneurial journey? What qualities create a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet? Are they born-entrepreneurs or are there specific techniques and habits that they consciously develop to better themselves?

Studies that have researched the success factors of enterprising business owners have found that though each may have their own strength, there are certain traits in common to the successful business leaders that push them to their success. Some level of talent is innate but there are many other traits that can be developed too. There are a number of skills and behaviours that many entrepreneurs have practiced and nurtured over the years to perfection to reach the pinnacle of success.

Often, successful entrepreneurs are driven by a complete vision of the future than just the immediate task at hand. A successful entrepreneur has a set of skills and talents that sets him apart from the herd. Some of the skills he/she displays are -

Personal: Drive, energy, self-confidence, creativity, passion, determination, integrity, risk-taking, engaging with criticism, willingness to listen.

Interpersonal: Leadership, communication, networking skills, delegation, respect, charisma, motivation.

Business: Business vision, venture specific knowledge, pragmatic problem solving, financial management skills, resource management, negotiating skills, optimal use of resources.

Some of the highly effective behavioural patterns of successful business owners are:

·  Finding opportunities – This ability to see unmet needs that others don’t, and finding an entrepreneurial opportunity in that need. They are always on the look out for new ideas and innovations to improve on the existing processes.

·  Clear focus – They have a clear vision about the future and the steps needed to take to reach there. They are not deterred by constraints or competitions.

·  Quick decision makers – They are ready to observe and act quickly taking the right decisions at the right time. They are ready for unexpected challenges and are ready to face them head-on.

·  Not afraid to make mistakes – The series of small errors of today  would teach them lessons that helps in avoiding catastrophic mistakes of tomorrow. Successful entrepreneurs are open to testing ideas in low-risk environments to determine whether a product or idea will take off.

·  Collaboration – They motivate a diverse group of employees to come together for the common goal. They lean on each other’s ideas and skills to overcome the challenges as well as for future innovations.

·  Building relationships – They are adept at building positive relationships with various stakeholders and understand the value of a strong peer network.

Every entrepreneur cannot have all these skills. Working on their inherent strength will compensate for the absence of others. The most successful entrepreneurs are not comfortable even in their greatest success but instead keep striving to attain new heights. They are constantly learning and improving themselves as well as their organization. It is the never ending quest for more success that makes them the most successful.