The Niche-Based Leadership

Leadership is all about future and change. Digital breaks down the overly rigid organizational hierarchy, therefore, command and control leadership style is not longer effective to drive the sustainable change and leapfrog transformation. Digital also breaks down the silo and blurs the functional border, business border, and industry border, leadership now become more open and transdisciplinary. Digital makes everything so transparent, and dynamic, it raises the leadership bar as well because leadership is no longer just about a few spotlight moments, but a continuous delivery. Every digital leader must ask: What’s your leadership niche in order to lead effortlessly?
Will Power: Leadership is complex, and although it has many facets, at its core, the foundation of leadership is based on authenticity. Ask the big “WHY” question to discover your intention to lead -the leadership authenticity. It’s also important to discover your leadership niche, and enforce your own leadership strength. Top Leaders are also quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging transformation initiatives. Therefore, the strong will of the leader can differentiate a transformational leader from a transactional manager. The top leaders as Chief Initiative Officer has become necessary to manage strategic alignment from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives from the C-level to the front lines. Historically Top leaders have been frontrunners in transformation initiatives and it is anticipated that they'll bring their learning, best practices and working knowledge of past transformations into newer initiatives.
Brain Power: Leadership is complex and situational and there are numerous variables need to be leveraged in assessing leadership effectiveness. Even High IQ + High EQ are not sufficient to make a great leader. Today’s digital leaders must have multidimensional intelligence, to practice brain power for boosting creativity, dealing with paradox, overcoming silos, cultivating culture intelligence, and embracing holism. Because today’s top leaders need to deal with constant ambiguity, they naturally gravitate to a leadership role when things are unknown, things will change, technology is involved, a tough problem has to be solved, etc. The authentic leaders with high intelligence have adaptability, consistency, profundity, and empathy to master business dynamic and cultural differences. Because the top leaders with high brain power and energy can manage a clearer vision, advanced mindset, and a portfolio of leadership capabilities in lifting leadership effectiveness.
Knowledge Power: Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and highly influential. Coaching and mentoring are going to be increasingly important now, and that’s why expert power is perhaps more powerful than other types of powers in the age of digitalization and globalization. What keeps leaders successful is their intellectual curiosity and ability to continuously be open to learning and applying these learnings as they move forward. A top leader needs to have both broad business acumen and digital fluency and deep expertise in the specific field as well, transdisciplinary knowledge, cross-functional experience and leadership skills required for professionals in any organization must be built on the foundation of the moral competencies –wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, skill sets- a balance of hard skills and soft skills; thought leadership and strategy execution capability.
Leadership niche or strength is different from leadership style, the style is often at the skin level, but strength is built underneath. The leadership niche is based on leadership substence + leadership strength + leadership style + Leadership brand.  The power of effective leader depends on a number of factors, the purpose to lead, leadership intelligence, the mix of knowledge and experience, the quality of information they receive and their collective leadership ability to operate as a team. And leadership is a journey!


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