Leadership and Entrepreneurship
How to Be Professionally Distinct and Eminent
Seven leadership traits that can make us distinctive and eminent in our profession
Introduction
There are many leadership skills, traits, and capabilities, as I mentioned in a previous article. However, in this article, I focus on only seven critical points that can differentiate factors in gaining eminence in any profession.
I see every successful professional as a leader in their career. I firmly believe that with these distinguishing factors, any professional can demonstrate leadership in their field.
It is important to note that leaders can take followers into uncharted territories with their vision and strategy. However, besides expertise and leadership skills, professionals need some additional capabilities and traits, as I outline in this article.
Employees with these skills and traits don’t have to sell themselves overtly for promotion. Instead, employers and customers can find them by reflecting on their work ethics. Remarkably, word of mouth is powerful in social and professional communities. So, of course, we need to create visibility by sharing our work meaningfully, as touched on in item #2.
I introduce these seven points briefly, only touching on the key points without going into details. Most of them are common sense points; however, we sometimes underestimate the power of these traits, so I see value in highlighting them based on my professional experience, leadership research, and feedback from my mentors and proteges.
1 — Pioneering with an Innovative and Inventive Mindset
Employees and leaders need a growth mindset to grow. In addition, a growth mindset contributes to creating innovations and inventions.
Originality is crucial to distinguish in any professional field. Linking disparate systems, tools, and processes can create innovation. Inventive thinking helps us find novel ideas. Making them useful to solve real-life problems can add an enormous business, economic, and societal value.
By finding nonidentical and dissimilar components and linking them logically and uniquely, we can invent new concepts and create patents for our ideas in any field. Originality is vital for invention but not for innovation.
2 — Meaningful Engagement and Diverse Collaboration
Integrity is the most crucial aspect of engaging with others. We can only create meaningful engagements by building credibility and trust with others. Therefore, our words and behavior need to align with our integrity principles.
Openness and transparency are other critical factors for creating meaningful engagements and improving our collaboration. People only deal with other people if they feel safe with other people.
Thriving relationships are formed with mutual respect and common courtesy. In addition, our ability to regulate our emotions, thus emotionally mature behavior, plays an essential role in sustaining relationships with others.
Collaboration, instead of competition, can improve our productivity. By sharing our ideas and content generously, we can create valuable relationships. In addition, the visibility of our profile and content significantly increases. Finally, collaboration can help us market and sell our skills effortlessly.
In addition to face-to-face meetings, we can also use technology and social networks to increase our collaboration on a global scale.
3 — Articulation and Simplicity
Effective communication, both verbal and written, is essential in all job types. However, to be able to communicate effectively, we need to be excellent listeners.
Articulation is simplifying ideas and opinions for others to understand them easily. Therefore, we need to speak and write with clarity, brevity, and impact. For example, imagine a medical professional using technical words to explain a condition to a patient. If the patient is not familiar with those terms, how would she feel?
We know that technical people use a lot of jargon among them. This is because different fields have different technical terms. They may work when communicating with other specialized employees; however, when dealing with managers, business people, and customers, we need to use common words by removing ambiguity and boredom in our communication.
We should also re-frame ideas and use analogies and metaphors to simply our message. In addition, confirming understanding and follow-up conversations are essential communication skills that we need to develop.
4 — Responsibility and Accountability
Taking personal responsibility for our thoughts, behavior, and actions makes us reliable and trustworthy people. Likewise, taking accountability in business depicts the quality of our leadership.
When employers and clients see responsible and accountable employees, their trust significantly increases. Credibility and trust help us influence others to accept our ideas and positively impact our character and work.
Many problems occur in the workplace due to a lack of responsibility and accountability. Blaming others, systems, and processes for failure is expected and familiar. It is an easy choice for some employees; however, it does not produce positive outcomes.
When we take personal responsibility and accountability in our lives and businesses, we can resolve issues faster and amicably.
5 — Priority Management with Agility
Effective management of our priorities determines our success or failure in any venture. It is impossible to manage time as it never stops. However, by focusing on our priorities, we can use our time productively.
Agility in business ventures contributes to our creativity and productivity. We discover uncharted territories by using constant trials and errors with incremental progress. Agility with a design thinking approach is also a crucial entrepreneurship skill.
We should be able to set, switch, and shuffle between priorities. Then, we can quickly fail, turn the failure into a learning experience, and grow incrementally by using an agile approach. Acting on our priorities with agility, we can become more creative and productive in our business.
6 — Tolerance to Uncertainty and Ambiguity
As the future is unknown to us, we need to tolerate uncertainty to deal with unexpected situations and create new opportunities. Unfortunately, there are more “unknowns” than “knowns” in life. Only with acceptance and tolerance to uncertainty and ambiguity can we turn “unknowns” into “knowns”.
Uncertainty and ambiguity bring us fear and anxiety. However, our growth and greatness are proportionate to our risk-taking profile. Without taking risks, we cannot grow. By tolerating uncertainty, we can take more calculated risks to create better outcomes.
Our tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguous situations can bring us more options in creating opportunities and taking new initiatives. In addition, tolerance to uncertainty can bring us serendipitous encounters.
7 — Passion for Learning and Discovery
As life is so dynamic, learning never stops. So, we need to invest time in education and measure our learning and discovery. If our progress helps us change our behavior in the right direction, it means that our knowledge contributes to our growth.
Accelerated learning and quick discovery are essential to compete in the market. But, unfortunately, what we learn at school becomes obsolete very quickly. Therefore, informal learning plays a critical role in the development of technical professionals.
Learning everything from books and other publications is not possible. We need to experiment. Experimental learning helps us discover new ways of doing tasks and give us new perspectives to accomplish our job more effectively. Using multiple senses, such as touch, vision, smell, and sound, can expedite our learning and discovery.
Asking questions with genuine curiosity and requesting help from others can also speed up our learning and discovery. Therefore, meaningful engagement and collaboration are critical for our growth.
Takeaway Actions for Professional Eminence
1 — Develop an innovative and inventive mindset.
2 — Engage with others meaningfully and diversify collaboration.
3 — Simplify and articulate ideas.
4 — Take personal responsibility and accountability.
5 — Manage priorities with agility.
6 — Tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity.
7 — Keep learning and discovering.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I hope you find these simple points and actions valuable.
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About the Author
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