Written by: Emi Olausson Fourounjieva, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Leadership today and beyond pushes many Leaders to review their values, skill set, and leadership style. The old solutions are not always applicable anymore. The world is developing at a tremendous pace, which presents real challenges and requires contingency planning. However, this intense environment creates amazing opportunities for those leaders who want to adapt, grow, and succeed.
In this article, I will share my top tips to the high-level Leaders and Executives - to help them see themselves as powerful, high-impact leaders and act accordingly - today and in the future. There are many important qualities especially needed in this changing post-Corona environment to thrive - professionalism, resilience, drive, ability to embrace change, integrity, empathy, open-mindedness, and many others - but here and now, I’d like to share with you what I see as really helpful and sometimes, unfortunately, missing.
1. Be engaging, be engaged.
To be present and have a clear vision is really important. It allows you as a Leader to spread your energy across the area of your responsibility and be really impactful. It becomes increasingly important for a Leader to be a Coach, a Mentor, to offer help, support, and share wisdom with those who need it. It is really about time for many bosses to leap into becoming genuine leaders. Self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and communication skills are really important at this stage.
2. Be authentic, be true to yourself.
To step out of the comfort zone to show more of your personality and to share the best of your true self with your team and your community are other changes coming up to the surface and growing fast. Soft skills are needed today and tomorrow as never before - to be the best of yourself toward yourself and others. Step out of your comfort zone - become the change and drive the change. Obviously, it’s always important to keep it well balanced with the reality - some businesses are more ready for change and growth than others, but the overall trend is there, and it’s for everybody’s best. The future generously offers you that space to become a stronger Leader already today, to share your wisdom and lead by example.
3. Stop doing, start doing.
The changing world's opportunities are great, but it’s also about changing the approach, transforming the mindset, adjusting the way of leading, and reviewing the list of priorities. It’s all about a clear strategy - what is fitting into your new paradigm and what is not serving you anymore. Get rid of everything that doesn’t belong to your vision, everything that will not enable you in the future, stop doing things that didn’t show enough results. Define new initiatives and add them up to your pipeline - there is no way to get different results while doing exactly the same thing time after time. There is no growth without innovation.
The trends and solutions I shared in this article are applicable for many Leaders today, but, surprisingly, not all of them understand in a clear way how many of their pain points and challenges are connected to the leadership topic. In fact, what they see as the root of their problem is sometimes just a consequence of Leadership issues in a specific area. That’s why, in my opinion, it is so important to enable today’s Leaders to find their unique winning concepts fitting into the new reality and support them on their way to success. After all, today’s leaders are shaping the leaders of tomorrow!
Emi Olausson Fourounjieva, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Emi Olausson Fourounjieva is a Transformational Coach, Digital Transformation Leader with extensive experience in Digital Analytics and Marketing, Visionaire, Educator and Global Speaker, Advisor in the Advisory Board of two global professional networks. Her strength is to create synergy effects using resources and technologies to get optimal business results in a data-driven, customer-centric way.
Emi's initiative "Digital Transformation for Humans" reflects her passion to the intersection of Technology, Business and Human Factors. Her professional experience has led her to the conclusion that Digital Transformation must be boosted not only by the power of data, research, algorithms and technologies, but also by human intuition, creativity and adaptability, in order to obtain harmonious and sustainable development.
Through her coaching, Emi empowers Leaders to combine their Intelligence and Competence with Soft Skills, helping them become more confident and self-aware, feeling positive, having more impact, and achieving goals with ease and joy.
Emi sees Mindset as a critical part of any successful Leader's toolbox, which is why she has developed her signature coaching program, "The Winning Mindset for Leaders in Digital".
