Assalamualaikum,
Dear all my sisters,
May Allah always bless you.
Verily, Allah always there to hear and love you. Great, let’s grab His love and fill it up in our hearts.
Okay, in this post, I like to share with sis about Leadership.
The meaning: “And let there be [arising] from you a nation inviting to [all that is] good, enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong, and those will be the successful.” (Surah Ali-‘Imran:104)
According to this firman Allah, in Tafsir al-Jalalayn:
“Let there be one community of you calling to good, to Islam, and enjoining decency, and forbidding indecency; those, that call, bid and forbid, are the successful, the victorious (the particle min, ‘of’, [in minkum, ‘of you’] is partitive, since what is mentioned is a collective obligation [fard kifāya], and is not incumbent upon every individual of the community, for not every person, such as the ignorant, is up to it. However, it is also said that this particle is extra, and what is meant is, ‘so that you are a community [calling to good and so on]’)”
“Leaders don't force people to follow - they invite them on a journey.”-- Charles S. Laue
Learning to think like a leader…
I came across an interesting Harvard Business Review article “How Successful Leaders Think” which really resonated with me. The author Roger Martin makes the following point concerning leadership:
“But this focus on what a leader does is misplaced. That’s because moves that work in one context often make no sense in another, even at the same company or within the same experience of a single leader….. Trying to learn from what Jack Welch did invites confusion and incoherence, because he pursued – wisely, I might add – diametrically opposed courses at different points in his career and in GE’s history… So where do we look for lessons? A more productive, though more difficult approach is to focus on how a leader thinks – that is, to examine the antecedent of doing, or the way in which leaders’ cognitive processes produce their actions.”
The point made my Roger really hit me between the eyes. Leadership starts with how we think and ends in the actions which arise from those thoughts. We need to learn the principles and attitudes from other successful leaders, rather than blindly copying their actions and behaviours.
Leader: Who do you intend to be?
“Management has a lot to do with answers. Leadership is a function of questions. And the first question for a leader always is: ‘Who do we intend to be?’ Not ‘What are we going to do?’ but ‘Who do we intend to be?’” —Max De Pree, Herman Miller
“Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.”-- Henry Mintzberg
As leaders we spend a lot of time focusing on action, on getting results. To do this, most of us track our actions with a “to do” list of some sort. However, great leadership is more than just getting results, it requires us to act from a deep sense of who we are. To have a foundation integrity and character that inspires and motivates others to trust us and in turn take action. As leaders it’s important that we manage our action, with a “to do” list, as well as our being, with a “to be” list. ThirdAge blogger Doug wrote a great post on creating a “to be” list. He describes these two domains as follows:
“Being and doing – these are the two domains of human existence. A person’s ‘being’ is their boundless, timeless natural self. Their ‘doing’ is the expression of that nature within form (activities) and time. Being is our ‘identity’. Doing is our ‘career’. When we are most healthy and vital, we connect identity with career – who we are with what we do. Conversely, those with careers completely disconnected from their natural self eventually experience ill-health and exhaustion. Clearly, being and doing are equally important for creating and maintaining a fulfilling and meaningful existence.”
Dong recommends a great way of improving our being by using a weekly “to be” list, which describes how we intend to be this week. At the end of the week we can review our list to assess how well we did.
“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”-- Lao Tzu
Are you a Leader or just a Boss?
I often find that many people onfuse leadership with positional power. We tend to believe that a person in a position of authority or someone with atitle, has their position or title due to their leadership qualities. However, in many cases there is no correlation between someone’s position and their leadership ability. Just having a title does not make you a leader, leaderships is about influence. Title only buys you time to exercise true leadership, and in this time your leadership either increases or diminishes and eventually fails. There is a huge difference between being a boss and being a leader…! Consider the following…
“The boss drives group members; the leader coaches them.
The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will.
The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm.
The boss says ‘I’; the leader says ‘we.’
The boss assigns the task, the leader sets the pace.
The boss says, ‘Get there on time’; the leader gets there ahead of time.
The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown.
The boss knows how it is done; the leader shows how.
The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes it a game.
The boss says, ‘Go’; the leader says, ‘Let’s go.’“
– Author unknown
People follow the boss because they have to if they want to keep their jobs. People follow leaders because of who they are and were they are going. Too many leaders today rely on their position to lead. How about you?
Wassalam..Cheers…
References: http://www.thepracticeofleadership.net
