When it comes to leadership, perhaps many people think it is something managers and executives need to pay attention to. I sorted out why learning is the core of leadership. Please refer to it.
Why is learning the core of leadership
The first aspect is business management
The purpose of business management is to achieve work results beautifully. In addition to their own efforts, the executor of any work results in any position should understand professional management strategies. This strategy must have "performance management ability", "analytical thinking ability" and "problem-solving ability". "Performance management ability" is to achieve performance results, "analytical thinking ability" and "problem solving ability" are to promote performance improvement and promotion. In this way, first, we should understand performance planning to obtain the consensus of the collaborators and themselves on what goals and results to achieve; Second, understand the process control, so as to obtain the effective support of the collaborators for the process links when completing the work results, so as not to be accountable after problems occur; Third, we should know how to analyze to promote performance improvement, especially get the collaborators to diagnose your pulse together, so as to find, analyze and solve problems more objectively, which is conducive to achieving the purpose of performance improvement and performance improvement.
The second aspect is managing others
It doesn't mean that we can succeed with our own efforts and professional management strategies. To have the final performance results, we also need team support, which requires everyone to have and develop "team synergy" and know how to achieve the synergy of others and how to cooperate with others to succeed under the goal drive.
The third aspect is to manage yourself
Only when you are good can you be qualified to lead and manage others. Therefore, to develop leadership, we must first learn to manage ourselves.
First Learn to manage your time well, which is "time management power". Only in this way can we overcome the bad habits caused by poor time management, such as procrastination, picking sesame and losing watermelon.
Second We should learn to effectively improve ourselves, which is "efficient learning ability". In the digital age, digital technology promotes the iterative speed of knowledge and skill renewal. No learning means fleeting backwardness.
Third To maintain a positive and enterprising spirit, this is "achievement motivation". Only the desire to succeed can give yourself the power of continuous and unremitting action. Only action can ultimately ensure that each of us "achieve what we want".
Fourth To cultivate good personality, we should at least have "integrity". It's hard to believe that a person who doesn't have integrity can have positive contacts in the workplace, and how can he get the cooperation and support of others.
Eight core practices of leadership
01
Close contact with the masses burns quoted a paragraph from Mao Zedong on the title page of his famous Book Leadership: "to contact the masses, we should follow the needs of the masses and initiate voluntarily... Here are two principles: one is the actual needs of the masses, not the needs imagined in our minds; the other is the voluntary needs of the masses, which should be determined by the masses themselves, not by us instead of the masses." Burns's great contribution to leadership is to take the relationship between leaders and followers as the main line of leadership research. Western leadership masters after burns also noticed the importance of close contact with the masses. First, leaders should realize that leadership is a relationship.
"Leadership is a relationship. If people feel more positively about leaders, they are more likely to perform at a higher level of performance," kuzez said Therefore, leaders should try to make people like themselves: leaders often have to make decisions that others disagree and dislike, but this does not mean that we have to make such decisions or take actions in an "unpleasant way". We can pay attention to the way of "doing" so that in the end, they still like us as leaders on the scale of "dislike" to "like". We do it in a way that makes them like us. Secondly, close ties with the masses also require leaders to be able to hear the truth from the masses. Manfred Frith, a professor at the European School of business administration, and Xu zhuoyun, a Chinese historian, both suggested that leaders should have the role of "clown" in Shakespeare's play King Lear. "Of course, this is an idealized statement, which is not very realistic; because the clown's part often doesn't last until the end of the play. But it would be nice to have a core circle, or a network, as an echo wall to test reality and tell executives what things are like," Frith said Frith suggests that executives can hire leadership coaches to take on this role.
Instead of waiting for others to tell the truth, leaders should take the initiative to seek the truth. Therefore, for leaders, asking questions is more important than listening. Jim Collins found that the "fifth level leaders" who led their organizations to achieve the leap from mediocrity to excellence, their real skill is to "ask the right questions". Because when you ask many questions, you also get a lot of insights. We noticed that the fifth level leaders asked many questions. They were very Socratic. An important achievement of close contact with the masses is to establish a "shared vision". Kuzes pointed out: "leadership is about" shared ideals ", not just about the vision and values of leaders, but collective. Leaders represent a group of people or a career with a set of principles, not just themselves."
02
Storytelling "storytelling" plays a more and more important role in leadership. Howard Gardner, a famous psychologist, believes that storytelling is the main tool of leaders.
Leaders have two main challenges in storytelling: first, create stories that can attract people's attention. If the story is too familiar, it will only disappear into the story that people already have. Second, the story told by the leader should be reflected in his way of life and behavior. A key to storytelling is to make the audience identify and resonate, If Bill Gardner has something in his room that people don't know immediately, it's the best way for him to resonate with the audience. If Bill Gardner has something in his story that he can't hear immediately, it's the best way to make everyone feel comfortable with it Inspired by Gardner, teach summarized three important leadership story models: 1 The story of "who am I", a man like Gandhi, has a narrative about his life. 2. The story of "who we are" is about how we come together, if it's part of something bigger. 3. The story of "where are we going" is like "we're going to cross that river" or "we're going to cross that mountain".
03
Be a good teacher
George, who has long served as CEO of Medtronic, a fortune 500 company, retired from business and became a professor at Harvard Business School. He said that leaders and coaches are closely linked. CEOs always have to teach people around them and help them become better leaders... Not to be leaders themselves, but to train others to be leaders. Teach pushed "the role of coaching" to a higher level: leaders should build a coaching organization in which not only everyone is learning, but also everyone is teaching.
At the invitation of Jack Welch, he once served as the head of Ge training center. He believes that Welch's success is to build Ge into a coaching organization, and Welch's successor Jeff Immelt is doing the same. Moreover, Immelt is not "one-way teaching", that is, leaders are both teachers and students. This not only means that leaders learn first and then teach, but also that leaders learn by teaching. At Stanford University, March is called "Professor of Professor". As a famous teacher, he has good suggestions on how leaders can be teachers: teachers should try their best to create an environment for students to learn, and managers should create an environment for employees and other managers to learn. Managers should also have the belief (though difficult for managers) that success comes from the success of their students, not from themselves.
An important job of being a teacher is also asking questions. "Always ask questions that you don't even know the answer to, and use them to make conjectures that you don't necessarily believe in. I see my job this way: not to tell people what the right answer is, but to remind them that they don't have all the answers at the moment," March said
04
Leaders must be good at learning from failure. They regard failure as a melting pot for forging their leadership.
Inspired by Bennis, Bill George emphasized the melting pot of failure. "Many people go through a melting pot. It's a difficult time in their lives. It's a critical moment. I asked students at Harvard Business School to write down their melting pot. Almost without exception, they all have meaningful melting pots that shape their lives and leadership," George said Historian Xu zhuoyun further emphasized, Leaders also learn from the failures of others: allow me to say this: "Success is the sum of many rational and irrational factors. You may only have one chance to succeed, but you have a thousand chances of failure. Success is very rare and different, and failure is more common and more regular. Therefore, if we want to learn about leadership in history, we'd better study failure. They can teach us more and better lessons than studying success.
05
Reflection is also an important leadership practice. Only reflection can produce epiphany.
Kuzess emphasizes taking time every day for reflection: you can reschedule your time, maybe 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there, and you use it in a learner's way.
In other words, you step out and reflect: "I want this result. I did it this way. How am I doing? Have I achieved the result I want? What are the good results? What are the bad results? How can I do differently? Let me try again". Joseph badarak Jr., a professor at Harvard Business School, believes that there are two kinds of reflection:  one is the reflection of "looking back" as kuzez calls it; There is also a "forward-looking" reflection. There is also a reflection in a certain situation. Look forward to the decisions you need to make and the things you need to do. Such reflection is more about what you care about, what your values are, and maybe to some extent what kind of person you want to be. This is different from simply understanding yourself from the back. Looking forward, I hope to shape myself, behave in a specific way, live according to specific values and make specific commitments.
06
The theme of Hafez's main works is "leadership without easy answers". For leaders, in the face of problems, there is no easy answer, and leaders need to think again and again.
First of all, we need to distinguish the difference between management and leadership, that is, the difference between "technical problems" and "adaptability problems" mentioned by Hafez, and the difference between "dredging channels" and "writing poetry" mentioned by March. The answer to the question should also be the result of reflection. Therefore, the vision needs to be based on reality. For masters, there are different ways and emphases of thinking: ● for Peter Shengji, thinking is mainly the fifth practice of learning organization - systematic thinking; ● for Frith, reflection is not only to look at things from a systematic point of view, but also to go deep into the leader's inner stage and think about the irrational factors in his heart; ● for Xu zhuoyun, reflection is to have a sense of history. A sense of history will bring vision, and leaders need to have a vision for the next 10-20 years; ● for Cheng Zhongying, reflection is first to distinguish the Yin and Yang levels of the Tao; ● for badarak, a key to pondering is to understand that the choice faced by leadership is often between right and right; ● for Jerry polas, co-author of "everlasting foundation", reflection is to think about how to build an organization with everlasting foundation as an "organization architect". Drucker once said, "profit is to a company what oxygen is to people." You have to have oxygen, but that's not your goal, it's just a necessary condition. This is a question for leaders to ponder: what is the purpose of my organization?
07
Another question that needs to be considered to know my leaders is: what is my purpose in life? This is another important leadership discipline: know yourself. Knowing yourself is not only what George said about "understanding your own life story", or what Frith said about "understanding your inner stage", but also what Shengji said about "the first practice of learning organization: self transcendence".
George talked about his findings: "we interviewed 125 outstanding leaders around the world, aged from 23 to 93. We found that regardless of their age, what defines these leaders is the impact of their life stories on their lives. This also determines what kind of leaders they want to be and where they find the passion to lead and change the world". It does sound a little abstract, but what is important is that it defines the leader's perception of himself, which is more important than any trait or characteristic. Frith said of the inner stage: "the inner stage is related to these questions: what motivates you? What is important to you? What are you passionate about? How do you feel about certain things? How much do you know about how you affect others
If you want to be an effective leader, it's important to know who you are, what you're good at and what you're not good at. If you are not good at something, maybe you can take some measures to improve it. Maybe a better strategy is to find someone who is good at it to complement each other. Shengji emphasizes that knowing oneself is an endless practice: in the fifth practice, you can find that one of the cornerstones of our research is "self transcendence", one of the five practices. A key to self transcendence is personal vision. In your life, you need to keep asking yourself: what do I really care about? What is really important?
Not that you will get a final answer, but always ask the question.
08
The next step to becoming yourself and knowing yourself is to be yourself. To become yourself is to become a better self, to become what you want to be, should be and can be, and is the corresponding action after knowing yourself.
"You have to spend your life asking what's really important, and use it to adjust the direction of your life," Shengji said Therefore, become the love you pursue, not the opportunity in the eyes of others. As Collins said, "it's difficult to achieve great things. There will be a lot of hardships along the way. If you don't start with love, if the motivation doesn't come from the bottom of your heart, once you encounter difficulties and obstacles, or achieve small success, you're easy to stop. For me, love is like an internal little perpetual motion, never stop. Why should I stop? I love it too much, although it's really difficult." This is also the leadership course from Don Quixote taught by March. Don Quixote acted as "identity" rather than "result". Don Quixote doesn't care about the result. His concern is to be himself and a strict knight. In a sense, the most important sentence in this novel is "Yo s é quien soy" - I know who I am. Because he knew who he was, he took action.
09
The cultivation of leadership is also the cultivation of life. Leaders also have a consensus: the cultivation of leadership is also the cultivation of life. In his book, George wrote that cultivating leadership quality "rewards not only being a better leader, but living a full life". "The basic problems of leadership are no different from the basic problems of life," March said Debashis chatjee, a management scholar from India, tells us that when it comes to purpose, the Indian understanding basically refers to human development - that is the ultimate purpose. Therefore, the task of leaders is not only to practice their own life, but also to lead others to practice their life.
Leading people to find their selves - to find the great significance of their spiritual existence in the physical body is the first task of leaders, Chatterjee said. This is why I regard leadership as my "major". I think it's not about leadership, but about life. Therefore, the central issue of organizational leadership is:
How to create an organization to help yourself and others live a meaningful life?
I benefited a lot from these masters, who inspired me to write the ten rules of leadership. The ten rules of leadership are the eight disciplines of leadership, plus the two cores of Leadership: taking responsibility and solving problems.