What Does Leadership Mean? Brainz Expert Panel Answers
Updated: Jun 18, 2024
Expert Panelists are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within the areas of Business, Mindset, Leadership, Lifestyle, and Sustainability. Members of The Brainz Magazine community of experts will share their best tips, advice, ideas, and hacks on different topics.
Expert Panelists
1. An ability to motivate, engage, and lead others
Leadership is the ability, simply speaking, to lead others and oneself. We all have a preconceived image of what leadership represents, and this is, to a great extent, promulgated by the prevailing media, culture, and society. Leadership should appropriately be viewed as the ability to motivate, engage, and lead others to achieve a tangible goal or realize a vision, to guide others, and play a role in their becoming the best versions of themselves.
Ketan Kulkarni, Savvy Physician
2. Resisting the urge to jump in
Leadership is about being a gardener, not a firefighter. Instead of solving the problem for your team and putting out the fire, be a gardener and create the right conditions to allow your plants to grow and thrive. By empowering your team, soliciting their input, and letting them run with projects and solutions, you are heightening their engagement, developing their skills, and creating an environment where team members can do their best work. However, it's really easy to be a "firefighter leader" – suiting up at the first smell of smoke, ready to put out the fire and solve the problem. This approach does little to encourage employee engagement and development. On the flip, strong leaders empower their team to solve problems, contribute ideas and take risks. They are like gardeners, creating the optimal conditions for team members to grow and thrive. Coaching, recognizing, encouraging, and mentoring are all part of the "gardener leader's toolkit.
3. Making choices you can stand behind
Leadership is the decision to step up and take responsibility for the choices you make in life, and this on a personal all well as a professional level. Being aware that the choices you make will not only impact you and your life but also have a ripple effect on the people around you. That is called Accountable Living; That is the philosophy I live by and which I teach my clients, so they can become leaders who are happy with the choices and decisions they make and consequently contribute to The Greater Good – for Me, for You, for Us!
4. Being of service to the people
Leadership is about empowering and inspiring others to achieve a goal or helping them become their best selves. Leadership requires integrity, interpersonal skills, empathy, self-awareness, communication, trust, and vision. The core of leadership is people and being of service to the people. Effective leadership impacts and transforms the lives of people and inspires them to empower and inspire someone else to their greatness.
5. Following your heart
Leadership is about having the courage to tap into & follow your present moment intuitive universal wisdom and inviting others to be guided by their own heartful wisdom in response, thereby replacing fear-based interactions of defensiveness and judgement with limitless creative potential.
6. Listening and learning in order to accomplish the vision
The more senior you are in an organization, the more your job is to set the vision for its success. Your work involves inspiring others to do world-class work in service to the organization and its desires. To differentiate between inspiration and motivation, motivation is lighting a fire underneath someone. Inspiration is lighting a fire within someone. From a task standpoint, leadership also involves listening and learning about the roadblocks that exist to accomplishing the vision. and removing the institutional friction that impedes talented people from staying inspired and doing world-class work in service to the vision.
