I believe that there are two sides to leadership: One is
about creating value (results, innovative culture, next
line of leaders, passionate employees), and the other is
about living the values (integrity, honesty, accountability,
perseverance, self-awareness, etc). Both value creation
and living the values are important for a leader to build a successful and sustainable organisation.

In the agrarian and industrial economies, the focus was just on getting things done and employee engagement was not essential. But in the knowledge economy, we need to find a way to engage the ‘heart and spirit’ of employees and their teams if we want them to be inspired, passionate, innovative, and committed to producing results.

What factors affect the heart and spirit of employees?

• Globalisation and Diversity - How do we handle the complexity that comes with distributed locations – some outsourced and some handled internally? How do we appreciate diversity, communicate effectively and make decisions while working with people across multiple cultures, age groups, and time zones?

• Accelerating change - How do we meet the escalating productivity and performance expectations every quarter without giving in to stress and disturbing work/life balance?

• Rewards and recognition - Are people fairly rewarded? Are monetary incentives sufficient?

• Too much emphasis on individualism and rationality - How do we tap into the collective intelligence of the team, organisation and society? How do we honour diverse ways of knowing, intuiting, deciding, and acting?

• Profitability and non-stop growth at all costs - How do we include other measures related to corporate social responsibility and sustainability? How do we ignite ethical and value-based choices instead of fear and survival- based decisions in building the business?

I found that the heart and spirit of employees get engaged when they see their leaders demonstrate vulnerability, openness, risk-taking, and other such values while addressing the above factors. Authentic leadership, I believe, is about producing high value while being a living expression of values in action.

Values for Global Leaders
In an article titled ‘Global Capabilities’ in Smart Manager (Dec-Jan 2005), Laura Tyson, Dean of London Business School, and Nigel Andrews, Venture Capitalist, report the interview results with over 100 corporate leaders in 2004 on what they were looking for in the new generation of business leaders. The results surprised the authors. They stated: “The corporate leaders… produced an extensive list of qualities they desired in future recruits, but almost none involved functional or technical knowledge.”

Unyielding integrity - defined as the ability to remain consistently true to clearly expressed values - is cited by many corporate leaders as the most universal attribute, and the one regarded as critical to business success. Other attributes identified as important in the LBS interviews are: “worldly awareness, thrive on change, judgment and intuition, perseverance and tenacity, passionate and persuasive, curiosity and creativity, self awareness, self confidence to involve others, boundless energy to motivate and energise, judging performance and capacity, desire to learn, and being coachable.”

In addition, in my survey of several executives from UK, USA, Belgium, and India, the following values were identified to be important: honesty, empathy, gratitude, humility and selflessness.