Words such as compassion, warm heartedness, empathy, patience, are rarely mentioned when we speak about leadership styles. There are so many models about what a leader should be, that it is frequently thought leadership should fit those archetypes that we have developed; patterns that may suggest we still think of leadership as being exercised by means of authority, instead of through a more natural and organic influence. And, maybe we need to cross a kind of river formed by our own patterns. . .
If we think of the challenges the evolution of jobs are bringing, where capabilities such as creativity, critical thinking, service orientation, complex problem solving are being considered crucial; we may think that leadership has the critical tasks not only to cultivate talent with those kinds of skills, but also to genuinely enhance collaboration, cooperative learning among the members of the organization, as well as breed environments with sustainable harmony.
Create harmonic spaces where these sorts of capabilities can bloom, it is not something trivial or something to be taken for granted, rather it is something that should be enabled, nurtured and cherished. Framing these spaces requires openness, clarity, patience, and certainly diligence; environments where a sense of confidence in one self and the other begins to open up in a natural way.
Cultivating genuine trust, honest and constructive openness needs a leadership with a high level of self-awareness, of empathy and compassion, as well as having the systemic view that leadership is in itself an influx, and the capacity to influence is present in all of us at certain extent. A more authentic leadership that allows building connection bridges, bridges that may open countless possibilities to create, to build collaboratively.