Why your ability to handle your problems define your leadership?

How big are your problems? Are you overwhelmed by your problems? Or your problems remain insignificant in the vastness of your mind? Your ability to solve challenges define your leadership traits. The quality and quantity of the problems you solve decide your current & future leadership positions. Gone are the days of leadership where leaders take a year’s worth of data to plan for the next five years in their leisure time. That old style of leadership won’t work anymore in this digital transformation age. Slow thinking and execution are the things of the past. Leaders today have so many problems to address daily. They need to act fast and solve it with the right solution to sustain their role or progress to the next level.

When I started my career, I always wondered how some people able to handle so many tasks in parallel so casually with so little energy spent when others suffer continuously. How do they train themself or what made them see beyond locusts of problems?

Over the years, I observed many leaders, and I got an opportunity to see their early careers. These leaders have a different orientation towards problems. I still vividly remember how one of my managers acted 20 years before. I was working in an IT services giant on those days, and the region I was working on was on complete fire in terms of customer complaints, mainly due to a lack of field engineers. Due to intense market competition, the firm lost several excellent staff to its competition. That sudden change left the operations with a massive backlog of customer complaints. Corporation identified and moved this new Regional manager from another region. From day one he took charge, he only got to see furious customers and their complaints on one side and field engineers who want to quit to join the competition on the other. But he was calm and composed yet curious to know the depth of their problem. His every call was bursting with positivity and enthusiasm. I watched him talking to customers, employees, and partners with one message that he will solve their problem. With 10–12hrs of such stressful conditions, he leaves office with full of energy and concise mind to settle his family in that new city. His strategies and persistence eventually made that region one of the top revenue-generating region. That gentleman, @Jaipal Singh is now a group CEO of CCL.

Running away from your problems is a race you’ll never win. Tony Robbins says, “Problems are the gifts that make us dig out and figure out who we are, what we’re made for, and what we’re responsible to give back to life.”

I have seen four substantial characteristics of the leaders I worked with, which can help you in your journey.

1) Perspective

In the book “The Obstacle Is the Way” Ryan Holiday says, Perspective has two definitions. Context: a sense of the larger picture of the world, not just what is immediately in front of us. Framing: an individual’s unique way of looking at the world, a way that interprets its events. Your Perspective of any situation depends on your conditioning over the years based on your experiences in life. You can’t change this overnight, but accepting it will allow you to see the situation, people, and problems in a different light. The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. Always believe there is more solution to every problem. If you are not sure whether the solution is right for the challenge, move forward anyway. It is better to fail fast and learn than wait infinitely for the right idea. Today’s leadership challenges are like heuristic-you have to come up with something new every time because there are no set instructions to follow. Changing just Perspective often changes so many things in your life; it will allow seeing the problems differently.

2) Growth Mindset

A fixed mindset puts you inside the box, whereas a growth mindset allows you to open up to explore all possible areas. Carol Dweck, the author of the best-selling book Mindset, proves with so many real-life examples of how seeing failures as learning puts people in a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset thrive on challenges. The fixed mindset: “I can’t do it.” The growth mindset: “I can’t do it yet.” Growth mindset develops a deep-seated desire to direct your own lives, to extend and expand your abilities, and to live a life of purpose.

3) Embrace Problems

Leaders who are established and succeeded are known for their desire to embrace problems. They know what stands in the way becomes the way. Focus on the things you can control; let go of everything else. Turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to become better, stronger, and tougher. Whatever you face, you have a choice: Will you be blocked by obstacles, or will you advance through and over them?. Steve Maraboli says, “Sometimes problems don’t require a solution to solve them; instead, they require maturity to outgrow them.”

4) Delegation

Leaders accomplish so many more things than their followers, not just because they are more productive and focused, but they mastered the art of delegation. They build their teams to help them in their vision. They make sure to choose people with the right attitude, experience, knowledge, and skills. They always observe and identify every member’s strengths and weaknesses and use them in the right task. Instructing them with clear expectations, and the timeline is their key success factor. Identify what you can delegate in your work or home today. Reinvest that time to look for a more interesting problem to solve.

To conclude

Charles De Montesquieu says, “Happiness is not the absence of problems, but the ability to deal with them.” When we see a problem is an opportunity and start loving the problems and create a passion to crack it, it will melt.

These 4 traits of leaders are interdependent, interconnected, and fluidly contingent disciplines. Incorporating them in your life will put you on track to your dream leadership journey.

Share your thoughts on how you handle your problems and how you keep them insignificant?

#leadership #personaldevelopment #branding #personalbranding #feedback #transformation #careerdevelopment #perspective

Published By

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.