4 Essential Inner Leadership Skills

4 Essential Inner Leadership Skills

By Mike W Bell

Many leaders today are finding that more being asked of them. Not just more in quantity, but more of the qualities needed to be successful.

It is becoming clear that intellect alone is insufficient to develop innovative, flexible and responsive teams and organizations that honor, develop and retain individual and collective talent and capability.

Today's leaders need to draw on more of their inner potential: to be creative, collaborative, decisive, courageous, visionary, inspiring, and caring.

Leadership is as much an expression of who we are as what we do. These four inner leadership skills will transform your leadership capabilities and make you a more effective leader of yourself and others.

1. The Wise Leader

Do you find that the expansion of information and knowledge coupled with complexity and change are making it more difficult to make sound decisions?

Paul Nutt in his book, Why Decisions Fail, reports, "For more than twenty years I have been studying how decisions are made - the key finding is startling - decisions fail half of the time".

Wise Leaders make better decisions by drawing on individual and collective knowledge, experience and genius in ways that generate deeper insights, more profound thinking and clear, purposeful action.

2. The Centred Leader

Do you stay centred and calm whatever challenge you face?

Each of us has many different facets and qualities, we all contain a cast of many characters that constitutes our 'self'. In the very centre, the essence of who we are, is the leader.

When there are many voices with a multitude of suggestions, opinions and ideas and the situation calls for leadership, it is only our still centre, our leader within, that can take command effectively and can stay calm under fire.

3. The Balanced Leader

Can you access your full potential - when you choose to?

We all have the capacity for creative expression, for adventure and change, for caring and sustaining, and for courageous and decisive action. Often, some of these qualities are more developed in us than others and we rely on and use only the stronger ones, even in situations where they are not appropriate.

Balanced leaders draw on their natural and innate talents in all of these areas, balancing creative vision with the need to sustain, exploration with the need for clear action.

4. The Conscious Leader

Is time your scarcest resource - or is it your attention that's scarce?

Do you find it difficult to concentrate for long periods and frequently lose focus as you attention is pulled away by emails, phone calls, and staff 'dropping in'? Then perhaps your attention is scarce and not your time. Time is a fixed resource, but your attention can be expanded.

Conscious leaders are able to stay present and hold an attention on many issues concurrently. They keep a clear sense of direction and don't get pulled off-track. They learn quickly and shift fluidly when they need to.

Mike W Bell has been a senior executive, leadership coach and organizational development consultant for over 30 years. For the last 15 or more of these I have been weaving an old wisdom tradition with the latest science and research to find more whole and balanced approaches to leadership and organization. My latest ebook, a modern fable entitled Leadership Intelligences in Action can be previewed at http://mutualinspiration.co.uk/leadershipintelligences/liaebook/

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