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Dr Mehmet Yildiz
How Technology Leaders Meet Stakeholder Expectations in Digital Ventures
2021-04-25
Key traits of exceptional leaders in digital ventures
Photo by Christina@unsplash.com
Technical leaders are expected to lead with excellence rather than perfection. Excellence refers to demonstrating outstanding quality for the leaders by making a noticeable impact on the followers and stakeholders.
Since leaders lead the way, followers expect their leaders to be tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity. Taking risk is one of the necessities in digital ventures. Leaders taking calculated and timely risks contribute to the growth of ventures.
Dealing with people and leading others require vigorous emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence makes the leaders more self-aware with their fluctuating moods, changing emotions, and drives. They also understand the emotions of their followers. Emotionally intelligent and mindful leaders can cope with substantial stress caused by work issues, unpredictable business situations, and rapidly changing technologies effectively.
Taking personal responsibility and being accountable for the situations, these leaders can leave better impressions on their followers. This cheerful and positive disposition creates trust for our integrity.
Exceptional leaders act quickly, focusing on priorities. They don’t like delaying and procrastinating. Followers become happy when their leader addresses their issues in a timely manner.
Priority management is focusing on essential tasks. It makes a real difference in reaching desired outcomes. Focusing on things that matter, avoiding distractions, removing roadblocks, and creating enablers are fundamental characteristics of leaders to set the prioritization for the venture goals.
While actions are critical, followers also expect their leader to be visionary. Leadership vision must display the values, beliefs, and culture of the ventures. Leadership vision brings team members together and motivates them to work for the same goals.
Interacting with people and feeling comfortable with many personalities depicts the social intelligence of leaders. Socially intelligent leaders can be outgoing, courteous, tactful, and diplomatic in their approach.
Paying attention to people’s current moods, body language, tone of voice, and other clues from their conversations, excellent leaders can steer conversations in healthier and productive ways.
Their social intelligence makes them resourceful. Resourceful leaders can understand the current situations, have a clear vision for the future state, articulate the needs to followers and other stakeholders. They also develop a clear pathway to effectively reach the target state using the talented team members who follow them.
These followers expect their leaders to be effective communicators. Good communication requires unbiased listening, understanding followers’ point of views and conveying the message to the point in the proper context.
Clarity is the critical enabler of effective communication. Using the right words in the right context, refraining from jargons and ambiguous terms are essential to effective communication.
Leaders solve problems and make decisions by reaching consensus. They employ various techniques to reach an agreement. They can clarify rules of engagement for all parties, operating models in the organization and departments, and underlying processes and procedures of the digital ventures.
Making quick decisions require knowledge and skills. Exceptional leaders earn new situations quickly in the right context. They adjust themselves to situations based on their capability to learn quickly, respond intelligently, and follow up efficiently.
They build skills quickly and are known as quiet achievers. They don’t highlight their achievement and success blatantly. They leave it to others to recognize and appreciate them rather than self-promoting their achievements. When they are challenged for their credibility, they stand up with confidence easily.
Their credibility and trust convey influence on followers.
Influence requires many leadership characteristics and capabilities. One of the primary characteristics is building trust with people. Trust built with integrity is believed to open all communication channels in the workplace.
Influential leaders act with principles. Followers accept principles as determining truth for conversations, actions and interactions. Followers believe that it would be useless to argue against principles because they are based on truth.
Excellent leaders build trust based on integrity. Trust and integrity apply to venture activities and their private lives.
Trust and integrity allow the leader to act self-confident. Self-confident leaders take more calculated risks to create better opportunities. Self-aware and self-confident leaders connect with their followers more easily. Their communication styles are noticeably bright and articulate. They depict optimism by focusing on good things to happen for themselves and their followers.
Their optimistic energy is noticeable. Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy is essential for leaders to shine. They know how to energize themselves at the correct dose and right times. Their palpable energy also inspires their followers to gain power and achieve their goals.
While they are energetic, they show modesty and humility in their actions. They admit their mistakes with humility without degrading themselves. They embrace new ideas without insisting on their views as being superior to others. They refrain from dominating the conversations and discussion sessions.
With these traits, followers find them charismatic. Since they are effective communicators, followers like listening to them and follow them with passion. Followers hardly question the credibility of charismatic leaders as people are mesmerized by their gentle attitudes, engaging conversations, and friendly demeanour.
Followers like transparent leaders who are open about their thoughts, views, ideas, vision, goals, and objectives. They even encourage opposing views shared with respect.
They don’t get distracted by opposing views and negative criticism. They recognize the distractions, hidden agendas, but they don’t waste their energy fighting with them. Focusing on their priorities naturally lowers the impact of distractions.
More importantly, exceptional leaders depict a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. Followers know that leaders with a growth mindset can be more resilient, more motivated, deal with situations more effectively, develop better relationships, communicate more clearly, and achieve better results.
Leaders with a growth mindset can create a meaningful sense of urgency to change followers and situations to better ventures. They create a collaborative culture for all stakeholders enabling creativity, innovation, and productivity repeatedly.
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