Casablanca, Morocco
I care about leadership because it is essential in every act of growth I seek in life. I had the chance to discover it closely through my participation in the “International Visitor Leadership Program, IVLP.” That experience was my first formal one with leadership. Moreover, I now know that I was introduced to some other experiences before IVLP, but I was not equipped with the right tools to decode the aspects of leadership then. It is a matter of awareness which I technically describe as “a process of effective decoding.”
Later after other experiences in trainings and camps, I started caring more about soft skills as a bigger framework that contains leadership as a key element. That process has appeared more when I started teaching in “Improve Your English Skills Program, IYES” at FST Mohamadia, Morocco, where I have been seeing the importance of empowering students with leadership skills. I even had seen some key tools of helping high school students before that. Project Work is one of those key tools I discovered when I was doing my research to graduate teaching center back in 2016.
With those experiences I mentioned, I am trying to open a discussion with you dear reader to reflect upon the best tools that can make leadership effective in its basic level. To start with, I need to highlight a very important element of discussion which is perspective. My perspective is based on what to do rather than the opposite. I am naming this “3 Tips to Avoid Fragile Leadership.”
Tip 1: Have a clear vision.
The second habit Stephen Covey covers in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin With the End in Mind.” This habit is the core of leadership, and it is the crucial element of turning a fragile leadership to an effective one. A leader has to have a clear idea about where they want to go by all the measures and actions they take. In addition, that clear understanding should be encoded to the team members as well.
Tip 2: Master your communication.
From the very beginning of their work, leaders have to be aware of all aspects of communication in their work. Leaders should understand that teams go through many stages of getting along (forming, storming, norming and performing). In each stage “ego” and “encoding/decoding” challenges can stop communication from running effective. Aristotle’s triangle of persuasion (logos, ethos, and pathos) is a good recipe to deal with most of the challenges I mentioned before, and it can also be used to communicate with both thinkers and feeler in the team.
Tip 3: Keep your C’s alive!
Communication, Commitment, and Collaboration are, according to agilebusiness.org, the three main C’s of Agile Leadership. Each C has some guiding principles. For example, Communication has Developing, Reflecting, and Learning as its guiding principles to make the “C” framework more applicable in real-life situations. In addition, you can check (1) in my reference section to know more about these C’s and how they can be used effectively.
As a conclusion, Leadership is a very dynamic field and skill that has to be always under the process of growth and reflection. This article itself is a living proof of me leading my leadership philosophy to go under the process of feedback and enhancement.
