Leadership is not an easy task – it comes with a lot of hurdles and challenges. There are many who aspire to be a great leader but living up to the task is not easy.
The CEO of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma has some invaluable advice to share. He says that leadership is not the task for the faint-hearted – if you want to lead a simple life then being a leader is not for you.
You have to have love
Ma spoke about the three types of IQ you need as a leader–IQ and EQ, which are well known, but also LQ, which is the love quotient. You have to genuinely love your team and what you’re working towards together because money can never be the sole purpose of your entrepreneurial journey.
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Also, you have to love your team because their lives are in your hands. Being a leader is actually being the humble servant to the talent, to make sure they get what they need and you understand where they need to go.
Being the chairman is not the fun job
There is a lot of pressure for a leader. The second anything goes wrong, it needs to be fixed irrespective of the time. There is not much of a written mandate that can help leaders to know what to do as a leader and what not to do.
You must push people
When it comes to solving really hard problems, Ma has a famous quote:
“Today is hard. Tomorrow will be worse. But the day after that will be beautiful. Most of your talent won’t make it past tomorrow.”
As a leader, you must inspire people through those hardest times: to stick with it, to move through it, and to see past it, so they can make it to the day where things are beautiful. It is important that the leaders interact with those who work under them.
They should try and see their picture, their concern, their point of view, and understand that people feel passionately the way they do. Your job is to see the 360-degree view and come up with the answers.
On the flip side, you have to balance this by pushing people to their boundaries.
There are different types of leaders who are all responsible for solving different equations. But one thing is clear that leadership is not something that is easy.
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