Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Begin the Leadership Journey

In this Leadership assessment guide I have tried to compile such qualities along with their basic elaboration so as to give you the bird eye view of each trait. The intention is to ease out the process of self-audit and eventually improve and/or acquire the skills which you do not have or which you lack in.
Leadership Trait
Elaboration


Aggression
Aggression is to set the attitude to achieve the target as soon as it is brought into your notice or assigned to you. You must be consistently aggressive in doing that. This means to fuel the teams to produce extremely swift results. This means to set tough goals (BHAGs), stress on their importance and insist your teams in endeavoring to achieve them.

Adaptive
You must adapt yourself according to the situation by analyzing it fairly & Logically. Though you need to be tough when it comes to achieving goals, though flexible enough to tweak the strategies according to the market demands, circumstances, budget constraints etc.

Analytical
You must consider positive, negative, emotional, financial, social, private and empathical angles while making decisions. Analyzing a situation also means to break big project into small tasks. Use the tools such as WBS, Fishbone, SWAT, Cause-Effect diagram and Excel Pivots for empowering your analytical skills.

Brave
You should be brave enough to face the circumstances once you have made a decision based on logic and fair assessments of the situation. Brave enough to protect the mistakes of your team members; brave enough to avoid emotional break-down to avoid any further damage to yourself, the team members and the project.

Creative
You must think out of box. New ideas of making things happen more swiftly will give you the edge on your competitors. Innovation is the key to success now a days. Considering millions of businesses already established and successful, you must have a unique product or service which makes you stand tall in the market

Consistency
Unpredictable and unstable people don't fit in the class of true Leaders. You must be consistent in your habits and actions. Frequent Mood Swings are an indicative of your unstable personality which cuts your marks in your Leadership exams.

 Commitment
Once you decide something,  you have to make sure you complete it by all positive and logical and fair means. Committed people makes thing happen. A weak approach to any project means you are already half lost.

Competence
I am competent enough understand the role of each of my subordinates. Its your ability to complete the job with a set of behaviors which are positive, fair, logical and efficient.  Keep learning new things, keep observing other people, keep evaluating the market to become more and more competent.

Communication
Nearly all skills are closely linked with your communication skills. You can only make a convincing impact if you are a great communicator.  No matter how genius you are, you will only be successful if you communicate in effective way. Learn the art by watching relevant videos, reading forums and improving your vocabulary. Consider Barlos Model of Effective Communication

Deep Thinker
Deep thinking means considering the back-ground, stake holders impact, facts and figures and market study. Deep thinking will improve your analytical skills too.  Consider using Mind Mapping tools to enhance this ability

Emotionally Intelligenct
Winning people is highly important because they are your real wealth. Right skills without mental happiness of your team members will not generate fruitful results because of low efficiency although high availability of staff. You need to consistently judge the emotions of team mates to create an environment which promotes friendliness and high ethics and eventually ensures high potency success.

Focus
Focus means looking in the 'eyes of the target'. Running continuously in a direction without knowing the actual target will take you nowhere.

Honest
Shortcuts are short term gain but seriously long term pain. An honest approach will enhance your chances for long term success. If you are honest, I don't have to remember what you have said. Because you are transparent in what you say and what you speak.

Initiative
Taking initiatives indicate your confident personality. Being confident is the major trait of your leadership character. If you are a deep thinker and and innovator, you tend to take initiatives with more confidence and trust in your abilities.

Knowledge
Knowledge gives wisdom, improves the thoughts process, enhances your horizon and gives you vision. I must learn the knowledge about different aspects of my work to make better decisions. I must learn something on daily basis

Listening
If you are not a good listener, you are on the risk of losing great advices from your well wishers. Empathic listening is the key to understand someone's perspective. Develop this habit.

Organization
Being organized avoids any mishaps, speed breakers. I must be organized from personal level to office level to company level.

Proactiveness
Proactiveness gives you the luxury to plan things ahead of time. You must keep your eyes, ears and brain open so that you sense things well in advance in order to make appropriate decisions so as to avoid eleventh hour emergencies.

Passion
Passion is your deep desire to get something. Are you passionate about success? Do you strive for making things happen? Does your brain thinks about your target all the times?

Positive attitude
Thinking positive keeps you away from politics, helps you stay focused, avoids negativity hence encourages you to work on things which matter the most.

Problem Solving
Problem solving requires deep analytical skills. You must consider the associated stats of given situation, back ground, economical and humanity factors and WBS techniques to break down big problems into small problems and then address one by one.

Risk Taking
Successful leaders are risk takers. When I doubt, you can take next small step to determine if you are wrong or right. You can always undo if wrong else move ahead with your next task towards your destination.

Patience
While you are aggressive in nature being a great leader, you must have the patience to absorb, judge and fix any situation.  Being an explosive personality sometimes result in irreparable losses.

Responsibility
Responsibility means to understand your role and take it seriously. Your carefree attitude will generate a ripple effect of carelessness in your organization which will cause deficiency in the work and failure of the projects

Rewarding
Rewarding my team mates is like fueling them to go extra mile. I must have a fair approach to reward those who put their efforts in my cause. Employees are like batteries; Learn the techniques to charge and recharge them for maximum efficiency and throughput

Self Disciplined
Others will follow your legacy if you are self disciplined. Being organized and punctual are great traits of a true leader.

Teachibility
The quality of a good leader is to produce more leaders instead of more followers. This can be done with consistent teachability and spreading wisdom around yourself. You must be a knowledgeable person to develop this trait. For this you must learn a lot on daily basis. Dedicate some of your daily time to learn something.

Trust Worthy
Being trust worthy helps wining people. Winning people is more important than winning targets because people will ensure success in your next tournamnets not only the current one. Trust is developed by consistent honest, friendly, encouraging behaviors demonstration.

Team Player
At the end of the day, its not your success its 'ours' success. You have to make sure that each employee contribute to the cuase. You must have the ability to perform as a team member however when required, you should be able to work alone and still demonstrate excellence.

Unbiased
Judgment should be fair and not biased. Fair Judgment requires honest approach along with analytical skills covering all aspects of the situation. A lot of feedback, stats and background is required to be considered while making conclusions about projects or people.

Visionary
If you are a fast running horse, you must ensure that you are heading in the right direction since several other horses are following you. Your success is their success and your failure is theirs. Being visionary also means that you can see and sense the future and strategize things to gain maximum benefits and reduce the tragedies to the minimum.

While I have made this guide, I truly understand that leadership is a huge sea full of knowledge, wisdom and experience; I being a young professional of 34 years of age cannot cover all aspects of leadership in true sense. Being a novice I have tried to make the foundation for learning the wisdom of leadership and improve the associated paradigms to become a great leader. I would highly appreciate your kind feedback on this guide so that I can improve myself and eventually the rest of the readers of my blog.
If you would like to receive the Microsoft Excel version of this guide which gives you the opportunity to evaluate yourself against all these traits and finally calculate the percentage of your Leadership index then drop me an email at mjunaidtahir – at – gmail – dot – com

I am an Ideal Person

Quite often you have thought that:
There is nothing wrong in what I do to others;
My thoughts about myself and others are perfectly logical;
The way I communicate is very sound and reasonable;
So overall I am close to an ideal human being !!!
Right? Wrong. You can be wrong some times. Everyone can be wrong sometimes and if you don't mind, let me say, you can be wrong quite often; several times a day even. It's my polite way of telling you that there is nothing wrong in being wrong as long as you understand your fault and strive to eradicate it. Actually, the sooner you confess this fact, the sooner you will open the doors of self-improvement and pave the way to reach your destination to achieve your life-time goals.
Remember this reality that successful people are those who consistently audit themselves on what they think, what and when they speak and how they act. Such people keep improving their mental horizons and their personality traits and consequently become the 'men of honor' in the eyes of the world. On the contrary, unsuccessful people are those who keep finding faults in others and keep considering themselves as a concrete ideal personality and leave no cushion for improvement.
So in conclusion it's a matter of choice on whether you would like to be a victorious person or a complete disaster. A wise man said that I have learnt the wisdom from fools because I don't do what they do. So the advice here is to keep your mind open all the times; observe others not to find their faults but to improve yourself. One day you will become what you consistently think and what you repeatedly do.
For Muslims there is a Hadith of Prophet Muhammad PBUH which says that you are in loss if your today is not better than yesterday. So take the dosage of wisdom every day by learning something new to keep polishing yourself in order to fulfill your dreams.

7 Tips to Attain Peace of Mind

When you were child you had a pure mind; the mind which was free from worries and anxieties. As the time passed, you were influenced by several social, personal, familial and official crises such as financial complications, broken relationship, lack of trust, joblessness, failure in business, loss of respect and so on. When the mind is stressful, the associated germs of negativity, jealousy and pessimism add fuel to fire and hence your pure mind becomes impure. These impurities if taken out can bring back the mental purity hence real spirit of joy of childhood can be attained up to an adequate level.  Off course you cannot fix all of your problem at once but you can train your mind to develop the skills which can help either bypass or overcome the depressed  and tragic situations so as to give you a big time relaxation while you focus on the solution to your problems. Below are some techniques which can be used to combat the peace stealing triggers:
  1. Mind your own business. Yes, please mind your own business. When you start being concerned about things which are not related to you, you lose your grip on your thought process which often results in negativity disturbing the mental peace. Basically, your mind starts wandering here and there. As you know that a non-focused mind is evil's workshop hence the germs of negativity and jealousy gain more strength. So next time an unnecessary thought comes to your mind, think whether this is really something you should be worrying for? If not, shun it right away and focus on something positive, practical and fruitful.  Article by Junaid.Tahir
  2. Surround yourself in positive people. Ignore negative comments and stay away from negative souls. When someone is negative, he spreads negativity and you get affected. Permanently staying with such people will have long term impact on your character so think about your company.
  3. Don't think about others too much. Remember the great quote: small minds discuss people; Average minds discuss events; Higher minds discuss ideas and Great minds act in silence. Don't allow your brain to compare yourself to others as this is an insult to yourself. Don't be Jealous; it's a heart killing disease, get rid of it as soon as possible. When you are jealous you focus on finding faults in others even if they don't have. This poisons your soul and steals the mental peace.  Article by Junaid.Tahir
  4. You can't keep everyone happy. Don't be over sensitive. Be natural and genuine in what you do. Be positive, constructive and ethical in your deeds and then don't really care too much about others. Be aware, don't apply this formula to too closed relations. Develop trust to establish powerful relationships.
  5. Control your mood swings as it is an indication of unstable personality. Do it by not being over sensitive to others. Stop being reactive and implosive. Stay calm.
  6. Ignore your thoughts about being unlucky. Bad luck happens to everyone. It's not your fault at all. Time whether good or bad, passes quickly. Develop the power of not looking back into your past. Believe in the power of Now.  Believe in your skills. Work hard and have faith in God; you will get what you have been entitled for. Be patient and see what God has planned for you. Patience and consistency in your deeds is the key to success.
  7. Simplicity in your character and living style can overcome the stress and improve your happiness index. Don't be socially sensitive and start following every single trend your social circle is following. 

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