02. Going beyond attributes: Laying the foundation

Key Points

Everyone should live by a few set of guiding principles and for a leader, these are the 4 main principles:

1. Perspectives

2. Reflection

3. Perception

4. Context

Perspective: How a leader sees things

Reflection: How the leader could do it better and not blame the circumstances

Perception: What is your brand? What do you stand for?

Context: What's different in this situation?

Thoughts

Analogy: An aeroplane makes use of the principle of 'thrust and lift' to fly. However, in the absence of the principle of 'Gravity', it will continue in its path into outer space .... sound like one of Einstein's theory doesn't it. Science and management does gel doesn't it. To be a good leader, you can't work on one principle, you need a few principles to counter balance your views and to see it in a more holistic view. This is why I advocate having these 4 principles as a minimum.

Perspective: It's important how leaders see things, remember the question:"Is the cup half full or half empty?" Remember, if we see it only from our perspective, we are always 'right'. A true leader takes a step back and thinks :"Where is that person coming from, what was he/she thinking about?"

Reflection: It's always easy to blame others and justify your own actions. Napoleon Bonaparte said: "...there are no bad soldiers just bad officers." His officers were complaining about the poor quality of soldiers they had, trying to justify their lack of performance. A good story: A professor was trying to explain to his PhD student a new theory that he had just discovered but the student was not able to grasp it. Question: Who is the stupid one? The student who was not able to understand or the professor who was not able to explain the theory in simpler terms?

The morale here is to always ask yourself: "Did I make myself clear? How could I handle the situation better if it happens again?

01. The Reason for this Blog

Leadership has always been a complex topic and if you are not careful, you may get caught up in the latest fad. Someone is always trying to come up with a new concept to differentiate themselves and most of the time, just after finishing the whole book, you ask yourself: "Alright, that was interesting, now where do I start?" Before you know it, you stumble on a other book. I've not come across a book which captures the real practical step on 'how to do it' and most of them are very conceptual.

Perhaps this works in the 'West' but generally, in Asia, this is quite difficult to grasp. Probably this is because our our culture, history and education background. Interestingly, I stumbled on one of Edward de Bono's video. He mentioned that the Chinese were one of the most advanced civilisations with numerous inventions under their belt. However, their creativity stopped when they started categorising their vast knowledge and stopped hypothesising. Interesting and I see this in out education system in the East. If you go back in history, to be a court official in China and India, one had to go through rigorous Imperial examinations. They basically tested your ability to rote learn. Interestingly in Singapore, this very value is still being perpetuated, only the top in the education system are selected to enter into the Civil Service. Having said that, the system is now evolving as they realise that to thrive in the future, there's more than just good academic grades. It was a good start to level the playing field but there is more to it. This is something I'm not going to explore in this blog.

Now, back to why I'm writing this blog:
1. To capture my concepts
2. Share the concept to anyone who stumbles on this blog
3. Welcome other perspectives (this is one of the ways we broaden our outlook)
4. To leave a guidebook to my lovely 3 kids and hopefully leave a legacy for them

I tend to be a little long winded but for this blog, I'll try to summarise the key points at the beginning to allow for easy reading. The context and the thinking behind it will follow. This is the important part though but it's for those who like to go more in depth into the topic and engage in a good healthy exchange.

More to come!  :))