Personal
Last month I was fortunate to meet a real wonder woman. Not from the DC universe, but the wonder woman from our world. She has three kids, she is married and she runs a bank. Impressive, isn’t it? Her name is Gillian and she runs a bank in Toronto. Gillian took the first place in an honorable list of Top 100 Canada’s Most Powerful Women, which celebrated spectacular female leaders, who lead by example and inspire thousands of people.
From my own experience, I can say that Gillian is really an exceptional and inspiring woman. What I was impressed by the most is her leadership style. Unlike everything you would expect from the bank director, she was authentic, warm and friendly. In our conversation I asked her about her core values and especially her leadership style, which navigated her through the male industry and granted her personal and professional success.
We discussed leadership skills and also such important characteristics of leadership as the ability to set right priorities, built relationships based on trust and create a great team. But what was even more important is how a leader can develop his or her own unique leadership style.
You may ask, ‘Why is this so important, if the primary ability of the leader is to have vision and lead others towards the higher goal?’ While this is true, the lack of authenticity usually makes the leader look not trustworthy. So the question is how to be yourself, be a great leader and be a unique leader at the same time?
This three-step guide will help you to discover your authenticity and start leading from the heart:
- Identify Your Strengths. First, you have to understand what your strong points are. Once you know what they are – develop them. While working with something that you really like, you will feel engaged and happier. It’s also a great way to express your authenticity, because you will project your real desires and motives rather than pretending to be someone else.
- Alleviate A Key Weakness. Working at what you’re good at is not the only thing that leaders do. They also eliminate their weak sides. Unfortunately, this is not something that can happen in a blink of an eye. So, in order to work with your weak sides, you first need to identify them and then work on them for the course of several years. Some common traits that leaders usually need to work on are: being too impatient, too much sarcasm, always being last etc.
- Admit Your Mistakes. No matter which leadership styles you’re utilizing, you need to learn to admit your mistakes in order to become a great leader. If there were no mistakes, there would be no experience. Without experience, we wouldn’t know how to move in the right direction.
Instead of copying man’s leadership style, Gillian developed her own. Why don’t you follow her glorious example?
