Leadership is a topic that I've written a lot about during the past decade, in this blog but also in several books that I've published. I've written a lot about the poor leadership I've seen and experienced personally, but also about the good (and even great) leaders for whom I've had the privilege of working. What characterizes the latter is their generosity, expansiveness, visionary abilities, and their emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence involves knowing your employees' strengths and weaknesses and acting on that knowledge when trying to find the right person for the job. In order to know this as a leader, you have to be able to talk to your employees.
It's a pleasure to come across an article that makes a lot of excellent points about how to identify leadership potential. More specifically, this article focuses on identifying the next generation of leaders in your company:
https://www.clicktime.com/blog/identify-your-companys-next-generation-of-leaders/
It also makes the point that extroverts don't necessarily make the best leaders. I couldn't agree more. So many 'introverts' have been ignored or passed over when it came time for promotions to leadership positions. During the past decade, the focus on extroversion has been intense. I have no idea why. I've participated in countless numbers of meetings, many of them dominated by extroverts. There was little exchange of ideas; the outcome was often that the introverts declined to participate in future meetings or found ways to get out of them if they could. Not a win-win situation for a company.
Modern workplaces during the past fifteen years or so have often been dominated by extroverts, by Newspeak, by trendy business philosophies, and by a dilution of responsibility that serves no one. Let's hope that the next generation of leaders gets back to business and to an understanding that "your company is only as good as the employees who work for you, and your employees are only as good as the leaders who lead them".
