Good leadership does not happen overnight
What have you learned about yourself as a leader through the Leadership Health journey?
That there’s a long way to go! Good leadership does not happen overnight and is in constant motion. It’s not a 30-day crash course where you receive a certificate and call it a job well done. It requires continuous effort, trial and error, learning, and lifelong dedication. I still haven’t been able to fully up my game on being an active listener and find myself becoming impatient mid-conversation – through the Leadership Health missions, I was surprised to find it so challenging and have learnt that it definitely requires practice, continuous effort and dedication.
How will you maintain your leadership health?
I will try to ensure I do a little learning every day – not only through bite-sized learning such as reading up on short articles, watching videos, and attending online seminars, but also through my peers, people leaders, and junior colleagues around me. I think it is important to first be self-aware and then be open and receptive to new ideas, ways of working, and feedback to ensure I maintain a good and well-balanced leadership health.
The daily Leadership Health missions provided me with the opportunity to think about various leadership traits and practice them in my everyday work life. Recently, I attended an online seminar that talked about ‘How to become a leader who everyone wants to work with.’ The answer? Be an active listener. Together with the tips that were provided through the Leadership Health missions, I’ve started to focus on my communication more – am I a listener or a speaker, do I try to fully listen and understand before speaking, do I question with curiosity? I’ve learnt so many new aspects about myself as a listener through this exercise, together with the realisation that actively listening is no easy feat!
What does healthy leadership mean to you?
To me, ‘healthy leadership’ means building trust among each other. When we have trust, communication becomes so much easier as we are able to open up to share ideas, values, and problems. We are not afraid that we will be judged by our differing views, and in this way it is possible to build on each other’s ideas and be innovative. Healthy leadership requires collective thinking, trying new ideas, being able to persevere through failures (because we understand they are intelligent failures), knowing that at the end of the day we all come out of the journey together as winners, feeling a little more accomplished.
