Dear friends,
I am excited to share with
you that I authored a book on soft leadership titled, “Soft
Leadership: A New Direction to Leadership.” It is dedicated to Peter Drucker who is the father of ‘Modern
Management’. Philip Kotler, Father of Modern Marketing wrote the foreword for this
book. Here are the details about the book with a free chapter. I would
appreciate if you could share your thoughts about this book on social media
channels including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
About The Book
“Your first and foremost job
as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate
the energy of those around you.” ―Peter F. Drucker
This book is a short course
on soft leadership, engaged leadership, employee engagement, millennials,
emotional intelligence, innovation, soft skills, and hard skills. You can easily
toss the book into a briefcase or purse and read here and there as time allows.
It is a quick reference guide for scholars, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and
leaders at all levels.
“Soft Leadership” is the
Future Leadership
“Soft leadership can be
defined as the process of setting goals; influencing people through persuasion;
building strong teams; negotiating them with a win-win attitude; respecting
their failures; handholding them; motivating them constantly; aligning their
energies and efforts; recognizing and appreciating their contribution in
accomplishing organizational goals and objectives with an emphasis on soft
skills. It is based on the right mindset, skillset, and toolset.” ―Professor
M.S. Rao, Father of “Soft Leadership”
When you look at leaders like
Booker T. Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King,
Mother Teresa, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dalai Lama, and Aung San Sui Kyi, there is a
common thread connecting all of them ― soft leadership. They are all soft leaders who silently
performed and led the people to accomplish their dreams. They have
character, charisma, conscience, conviction, courage, communication,
compassion, commitment, consistency, consideration, and contributed extensively
toward society and made a difference in the lives of others.
What
is Soft Leadership?
I have coined a new concept
‘Soft leadership’ to overcome the drawbacks in the existing leadership
styles. I have authored a book on this
concept titled, Soft Leadership: Make
Others Feel More Important and published several research papers and
articles for international journals and magazines. It is getting overwhelming
response globally. One of the award-winning research papers titled, Soft leadership: a new direction to
leadership, URL: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/00197851311320559/full/html
was amongst the most frequently downloaded in
Industrial and Commercial Training, Emerald UK.
Here is the description of soft leadership.
Various leadership
researchers, experts, educators, writers, consultants, and practitioners in the
leadership domain have pioneered specific styles and types of leadership. As a
result, we have various styles and types in leadership, thus enriching the
leadership domain. Similarly, soft leadership is another new concept to add
value to the leadership literature.
Soft leadership is leading
through soft skills and people skills. It blends soft skills, hard skills, and
leadership. It emphasizes the significance of precious Human Resources. It
helps in managing the emotions, egos, and feelings of the people successfully.
It focuses on the personality, attitude, and behavior of the people, and calls
for making others feel more important. It is an integrative, participative,
relationship, and behavioral leadership model adopting tools such as
persuasion, negotiation, recognition, appreciation, motivation, and
collaboration to accomplish the tasks effectively.
Soft leadership is not a
submissive leadership or a lame-duck leadership but an assertive leadership
where soft leaders adopt pleasing and polite communication to execute the
tasks. It is a blend of courageous
leadership, thought leadership, servant leadership and inspirational
leadership.
Professor
M.S. Rao’s 11 C’s and Soft Leadership
Leadership basically depends
on three aspects — how you communicate with others; how you make decisions; and
how you take action. When you can execute these three activities effectively
you become a successful leader. However, to evolve as a soft leader, you must
communicate with an emphasis on soft skills; make decisions by blending your
head, heart, and gut; and take action keeping the ground realities and goals in
your view without compromising task-orientation. There are 11 Cs that
constitute soft leadership. They are character, charisma, conscience,
conviction, courage, communication, compassion, commitment, consistency,
consideration, and contribution. It is highly challenging for people to
cultivate these 11 characteristics. However, if people possess more than 6
traits they get into the fold of soft leadership.
Soft
Leadership and Knowledge Workers
Soft leadership helps lead
knowledge workers effectively. Previously there were more manual workers who
needed various leadership styles. However, in the present rapid changing
digital scenario, the knowledge workers need a different leadership style —
soft leadership style. The knowledge workers are ambitious, intelligent, and
tech-savvy. They have totally different expectations and aspirations than their
predecessors. They have an advanced mindset, toolset, and skillset gained
through unique professional experiences. And soft leadership is the ideal fit
for their needs.
Currently, the employees are
more diverse than ever, and this offers both opportunities and threats.
Opportunities include creativity and innovation to improve products and
services; and threats include looking at differences, not similarities. Hence,
we must convert this threat into an opportunity by celebrating diversity in the
workplace. It also calls for a unique leadership style that brings employees into
one common platform to achieve the organizational goals and objectives.
Soft
Leadership is the Future Leadership
Globally the philosophy of
‘employees first, customers second, and shareholders third’ is gaining
momentum. Keeping this philosophy in view, global organizations need
leaders who can navigate their organizations through a network of
relationships. Presently the days of positional power work less and referent
power works more. Above all, global organizations must be networked, flat,
flexible, and diverse. Hence, soft leadership can work for any company and
country regardless of its size or budget.
The days of
command-and-control leadership doesn’t work anymore. What works presently is
trust-and-track leadership. As the world is changing rapidly, the knowledge,
skills, and abilities essential for employees are changing rapidly. The
employees are reinventing themselves to keep pace with the rapid changes in
technologies. Additionally, they are more focused on their careers and are
ready to sacrifice their families to fast-track their careers. Their
expectations and aspirations are rising. Hence, leaders at the top must
reinvent with their leadership styles, tools, and techniques to lead their
employees in this digital age. To conclude, exploring soft leadership helps
greatly for the leaders to satisfy all stakeholders to achieve organizational
excellence and effectiveness.
Life is great!
Professor
M.S. Rao
Founder of MSR Leadership Consultants,
India
Thanks for reading!
Kindly share your thoughts
and comments below, I’m sure someone out there will find your story useful.
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