Important Building Blocks of Excellent Leadership

Can leadership be learned? In principle, yes. However, some things must already be present in the personality of the leader. Above all, this includes a positive view of humanity, a deeply rooted optimism, the ability to trust others, as well as an inner call for and joy in leadership. Leading people means to serve people, to guide and accompany them, to sense what the other person needs in order to recognize his or her potential. I speak of excellent leadership when there are some important cornerstones for leadership that guarantee one of the most important prerequisites of leadership, and that is clarity. If there is confusion instead of clarity, it can only lead to chaos. Such clarity requires a framework that gives people support, orientation and hope, a so-called team mission statement for teams or a strategy roadmap for organizations and companies. Such a framework provides the answer to questions that are enormously important. It is the guarantee for a maximum of intrinsic motivation of all employees and thus for a holistic success. These are questions such as why do we exist, what is our reason for being? What is our contribution to society? What would the world lose if we ceased to exist tomorrow? Where do we want to go, what is our goal for the next few years? How do we determine that we have reached our goal, what do we use to determine that? What specifically do we have to do to reach our goal? What team principles do we give ourselves for our behaviour so that we are successful as a high performance team and how do we ensure that we live these principles? What potentials and strengths do we have in the team and how do we best use them? The answers to these questions give employees clear direction. Then they can identify with the team’s mission, be inspired and ignited by the vision, and know exactly their valuable contribution to achieving it. All successful high performance teams in sports have such a team mission statement, because without this framework with its important pillars they would not be successful. Therefore, it is only logical and consistent to use this tool in companies and teams as well.