The Future-Driven Leadership

The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making the positive influence, and providing direction, both for oneself and others. Leadership is about CHANGE. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. This ability becomes a capability if we constantly nurture our basic human instincts of HUMILITY, CURIOSITY, and CREATIVITY. Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today.

Vision differentiates transformational leaders from transactional managers:  A great leader is a visionary. Leadership is one's ability to paint a vivid picture, a vision of a future state and motivate others to achieve it. Despite our present condition and realities, we must never abandon the hope that generations to come will view things differently and breathe new life into an old and dysfunctional system. Thus, visionary leadership is crucial to zoom into the future as if it were closer because leadership is all about future and change. There are too many transactional managers who overly focus on short-term thinking due to the pressure of stakeholder, risk aversion, or ineffective strategy. Technology changes very quickly, and the speed of business changes is also increasing. Visionary leaders have better sense to capture the business trend, be genuinely curious about information, knowledge and future perspective, so they can drive changes more confidently, and lead long-term digital transformation effortlessly.
Strategic thinking involves of being visionary: A visionary mind has the ability to think the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future. Vision is a foresight with a proactive understanding of cause and effect, not reactive seeing. It is a clear choice among future scenarios that advocates future trends and promotes certain behavior. The "aha" vision is an "entrepreneurial" attribute; the ability to envision a solution to a perceived or not-yet-perceived need. Vision is a motivation act one plans to see happen in the life, businesses and the society we live in. It often takes turns positively or negatively, but it has been and always will be the genesis of uncountable success stories we all know.  Top leaders need to be a visionary - someone who can assist in "seeing" and bringing clarity to the future within the business ecosystem and beyond.
Leadership vision is to serve as an enabler to make profound influences: Leadership is all about future and change. Leadership vision is being great by making positive influence; without affecting anyone in any negative way. Being a leader takes one to have a desire to do better than others in certain domains, to practice Thought Leadership for making a profound influence. To clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance and make an influence so that the talent employees are limited only by their imagination. Being a leader means giving people confidence on where to go via a clear vision and how to get there, supporting them and also stretching them to live to their full potential, both individually and as members of a high performing team.
The future is already here, but it is unevenly distributed. Great leaders can bridge today and tomorrow via their vision. Leadership is about future, future is full of uncertainty, leadership vision helps to navigate through and lead into the future more confidently.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu