What is the most critical skill that a leader must have? When I was at Harvard Business School, the professors thought the answer was Leadership.
But this is like saying: a marketer needs marketing skills, an engineer needs engineering skills, and a financial analyst needs financial skills as their most important skill.
Duh, obvious, no? It is like saying a tiger needs to act like a tiger; a wolf needs to act like a wolf. But how, precisely, must a tiger act? What makes a tiger, a tiger, and a wolf, a wolf? And a leader, a leader?
The answer lies not in the concept (leader, tiger, wolf, etc.) but in the fundamental aspects that constitute that concept. Rember that a concept is simply an idea or a mental picture of a group or class of objects formed by combining all their aspects.
So, for us to describe leadership effectively, we need to understand the fundamental aspects of leadership. While there are many aspects of leadership, for me, there are only two most important aspects:
Making hard decisions; and
Ensuring the successful implementation of these decisions.
As a result, I very much see that Leadership is about two skills, i.e.,
Strategy (i.e., making decisions); and
Storytelling (i.e., ensuring successful implementations).
I talked a lot about strategy in my other posts. So, I would like to focus on storytelling in this one.
Why Storytelling is a crucial skill that a leader must have:
If you want to build a great team, you need to tell others why they should join your team.
If you want your engineering peers to support your design proposal, you need to tell them the merits of your design.
If you want to propose a specific project, you need to tell the people in power why they should fund your project instead of someone else.
If you want your staff to follow your strategic plan, you need to tell them why it's the right course of action.
If you want to change your organization's culture, you need to tell others why change is important and urgent.
Storytelling is about conveying your ideas and getting others to support them in some way, shape, or form. Unfortunately, most people severely underestimate the importance of storytelling and how this vital skill is to a leader.
As a leader, your work becomes less about doing everything yourself and more about making decisions, getting them approved, and getting others to execute them.
Making good decisions is about strategy. Once you have decided on a strategy, the rest is about storytelling — getting your proposed strategy funded by and implemented by others.
In short, after strategy building, your main job is to tell others the merits of your strategy.
It is storytelling, pure and simple.
Continue exploring winning strategy here.
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