Innovative Leadership is my research interest. I studied prominent traits that attract us to exceptional leaders. I have been researching leadership in various settings for several decades. In one of the leadership and business articles on News Break, I introduced "Remarkable Leadership Traits for Technology Executives". My research revealed the difference between ordinary and distinguished leaders.
In this post, I want to share 11 essential roles and responsibilities of exceptional business leaders.
Learning these roles can provide useful insights to aspiring business leaders and entrepreneurs.
1 - Outstanding Communicators
Exceptional communication skills are essential for business leaders. Their communication skills are well respected and sought after by their followers, peers, superiors, and all other stakeholders. Excellent business leaders can communicate at all levels with confidence and ease.
They also encourage other people to communicate clearly and effectively to share their knowledge in their team or outside of the immediate teams. These leaders are recognized as communication mentors and coaches. They observe their team members and provide constructive feedback for their growth.
Excellent business leaders can articulate complex and complicated issues to the team members in necessary details and succinctly to the business executives using the right terms and references for clarity.
2 - Blind Spot Recognizers
Inevitably, everyone can have blind spots. It is a natural and well-recognized situation. Blind spots can be hazardous in certain circumstances. The owner of the blind spot cannot see his or her blind spot unless using specific tools or assistance from someone else.
Excellent business leaders are astute and professional observers. They look for big pictures from multiple angles and can deep dive when needed hence can quickly identify blind spots and weaknesses.
These leaders also articulate situations with constructive feedback and help people to see their blind spots and understand their weaknesses and turn them to strengths and opportunities.
3 - Meticulous Measurers
Taking necessary measures are essential success factors for business outcomes. Excellent business leaders focus on both qualitative and quantitative measures for team success.
These leaders manage across complex matrix structures in their organizations. They use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the initiatives. They use creative team dashboard to see the trends. They can qualify and quantify progress in visual formats for the team members and the business stakeholders.
These leaders also encourage other team members to create their dashboard and shared dashboard for the team. They turn the company to a data-driven organization to measure the progress methodically and innovatively.
Two of the key measures are customer orientation and support mechanisms. These leaders ensure a customer-centric outlook is provided at all times, focusing on continually improving client experience with measurable results.
4 - Innovators and Inventors
Excellent business leaders are passionate about innovation. They are original thinkers. These leaders continuously combine and contrast things to create new meanings, new understandings, new use cases, and new values.
To some extent, these leaders are also inventors. They look at the things from a novelty perspective. These leaders create new values for old concepts, terms or ideas. They look at things from different angles.
These leaders understand the value of innovation, they can become a catalyst for innovation, and they keep innovating relentlessly. Excellent business leaders create an innovation culture and embed it to the organizations’ ecosystem.
5 - Mentors and Coaches
Exceptional business leaders mentor their immediate team members, extended team members, people from partnering organizations, students from universities, and even external people in other organizations.
These leaders are also good at coaching their peers, subordinates, and cross-team members by being a soundboard to them. They are great listeners and even contribute to well being of their team members providing coaching sessions resulting in therapeutic outcomes.
They also provide mentorship to news business executives who are not familiar with the culture of the business organization. Their mentoring and coaching capabilities help their team members stretch towards bigger and better roles. They can coach team members as one on one basis or in groups.
6 - Change Catalysts
Change is critical for business. Everything changes continuously and rapidly. Effective change management is a vital function. Dealing with this rapid change is not an easy task, and indeed require delicate skills, experience, and insights from business leaders.
These excellent leaders are catalysts for change in business organisations. With their catalytical contributions, they refresh the culture to a more agile, collaborative, and innovative landscape.
These leaders create new sets of practices in the ecosystem. Their attributes, such as being responsive, sharing and learning mutually, and having fun with joy in a pleasant team environment, can have a tremendous impact on improving the culture for transformation.
7 - Fast Learners
Learning is a never-ending process in business environments. Due to changing technology stacks, process and tools, excellent business leaders and their followers need to learn rapidly and efficiently.
These leaders can have a wide variety of learning styles. Based on situations and conditions, they can learn formally and informally. They turn every possible interaction to a potential learning opportunity.
These leaders can create learning opportunities for themselves and their team members. They can also teach other people actively and on-demand. By teaching their team members, they even learn more and better.
8 - Talent Keepers
Talent is essential capability proposition in business organizations. No talent, no business: it is this simple. Therefore, excellent business leaders understand the value proposition and the importance of talent for their business.
These leaders are very cautious to keep talent in their business organizations. They make every creative effort not to lose any talent from their teams. Talent is one of the critical enablers of core products and services of transforming business organizations. Without talent, an organization cannot thrive and be competitive in their business offerings such as digital transformation.
As a new trend, excellent business leaders also perform talent management and facilitation roles. They encourage the employees to perform optimally and turn them into talented team players. These leaders can also identify poor performance in the team and help remove poorly performing employees and replace them with talented team members.
9 - High-Performance Team Builders
Modern business environments require team members who can perform at the highest possible level. We can call this phenomenon as optimally performing teams in the industry. These are selected employees due to their utmost contributions to the end goals. Their skills and capabilities are tested and validated to suit the type of work they are performing.
Building high-performance teams are critical for business leadership. Excellent business leaders create collaborative, well functioning, and high performing teams to run successful business initiatives.
These leaders create proactive and engaged local teams and community of practices. These high-quality teams and community of practices generate innovative, high-quality solutions in agility. They are ideal contributors to business and digital transformation using fusion principles.
10 - Thought Leaders
Thought leadership is a critical requirement and demand in business environments, changing cultures, and transforming ecosystems.
These leaders can think both physically and digitally bridging the business services for transformation. They are known as digital thought leaders in the industry. As most of them are technical savvy, we now use the term of digital thinkers and digital thought leaders. Some also call them digital opinion leaders.
Excellent business leaders are drivers of ubiquitous digital transformations at a personal and organizational level. As almost every business has some digital transformation project to some extent nowadays, leaders leading these businesses must think digitally. They are thought leaders and at the forefront of digital transformations.
11 - Tangible Outcome Creators
Tangible outcomes are essential for the success of business organizations. Business requires tangible outcomes iteratively rather than monolithic basis.
Excellent business leaders pay special attention to providing tangible outcomes with the support of their team members. The transformation environment presents a constant and rapid change and any change leading to a tangible outcome matters in the transforming ecosystem.
These small and rapid changes lead to more significant tangible outcomes at later stages of the transformation lifecycle; for example, the business systems may need to be fully automated, loosely coupled, service-oriented, software-defined, self-learning, self-managing, and self-healing are a few to mention for their outcome focus.
Conclusion
These 11 roles and responsibilities have established recognizable patterns in many large business organizations when I worked in digital transformation initiatives.
Understanding these roles and responsibilities of business leaders can be very useful for aspiring entrepreneurs who plan to establish startup companies.
Lack of one of these characteristics may have an adverse effect on the performance of business leaders.
Thank you for reading my perspectives.
Follow me to see more articles like this. I am a business leader with technology focus. I enjoy sharing my experience with my readers.
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