By Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa
There has been a contentious debate which management scholars may say it’s now sorted about whether people are born a leader or not. Whether leadership is a thing people are born with and therefore can be traced in their DNA. This all raises another important question which is whether leadership is a science or not. Can people truly change and be taught to be skillful leaders? A very bid question which some in not finding a convincing answer may say, has answers beyond this world.
In position of leadership, one is exposed to an abundance of various types of information. What matters is how you deal with the information availed to you as a leader. Information is the necessary ingredient for better decision making, here we are talking about good quality information not any other.
In categorising information, you would find that some of it is given to present opportunities that are there to be taken advantage of. In the same line, you may have information that gives alerts for threats which if not known may pose bigger challenges. Thus therefore, you may have some information to curb competition for instance if you are in business.
Wisdom and skills means those with information will know which to share, how, when and to whom. Though there may be times when it may be necessary to discard all or part of the information without the need to share it. This informs that there may be some information which may need to be guarded whether through storage, dissemination, kept as a secret or being careful in its destruction. The human kind has all the freedom.
The quotes this week are a final extraction from a book which if read in full so powerfully share the good tenets of successful leadership. I am sure the few selected quotations from this book listed below, will enlighten you to one or two life lessons. Read and enjoy:
NEUROSCIENCE FOR LEADERSHIP by Tara Swart, Kitty Chisholm and Paul Brown
“Not only is culture a huge brand differentiator, it has the capacity to organize why and how people act both inside and outside the organization. So it is a critical part of the leader’s capability to understand and manage the culture very well indeed. Like personality it gets the neurochemistry of the organization flowing and, done well, flowing in the direction that the organization wants.”
“A growing body of research links economic performance to diversity. There is now considerable evidence from the US and Europe that having a gender-diverse board is strongly correlated with bottom line success. A research report by Credit Suisse, after testing the performance of 2,360 companies globally, concluded that ‘it would on average have been better to have invested in corporates with women on their management boards than in those without.”
“You will have seen that leadership is about who you are as a person, and what you do: how you manage your brain and its energy, how you relate to other people, and how you inspire and motivate them to use their brains and energy to innovate and achieve common organizational goals.”
“Over the last two centuries the science behind medicine has made more possible a common understanding of what is happening within the whole system of the body. This is now becoming possible organizationally. Comparisons may now be made between and within organizations based upon linkages between the elements of the whole model that define how human energy is (or is not) flowing around the organization.”
