It will not have escaped your notice that recently, there has been a lot of talk about leadership. In the era of influence, organizations would like their managers to transform themselves into leaders.
Why? Because we leave a manager, but not a leader! Because we will commit to a leader, but not to a manager. Because we will surpass ourselves for a leader, not for a manager.
This awareness of the roles of motivation & commitment in the performance of individuals and organizations revives a debate that is almost as old as the world: "Is leadership innate or acquired?" Can I teach my employees to "lead"?
Without claiming to be able to decide this quasi-philosophical question, I will share with you one of my strongest convictions:
To be inspiring, you have to be inspired.
Each of us carries within us the seeds of Leadership. And to make them blossom, there is nothing better than experiencing, in our flesh, the positive influence of the Leader.
My first leader was a woman . I was 25 years old, and watching her as a leader, I understood that she drew her greatest strength from her loyalty to her human values, much more than from her technical expertise. Her inspiring values were resilience, creativity and optimism. If I had to sum her up, I would say she was “the one who didn’t take NO for an answer.”
When in 2012, in Moscow, a month before an event that we had been preparing for a year and a half, the Moscow administration called us to inform us that "our site was requisitioned for a military parade", it decided to see the glass as half full:
- “ We have 6 weeks to reinvent the event differently and preserve its value! ”
We had then traveled through Moscow together to find a site. We had thought several times that we had found the place, suffered setbacks. When we had finally found a site, we had to re-build the whole event: technically, commercially, and operationally.
I never saw her lose sight of her course. With resilience and agility, she had taken us on a wind of optimism. She had calmed our fears and frustrations 100 times, before always relaunching us towards the next little piece of territory to reconquer.
15 years later, I am still amazed at the holding of this show and its success. What had we not accomplished in 6 weeks!
I have kept this bodily imprint of leadership with me ever since . In contact with him, I felt my human values awaken. Thanks to his model, I wanted to let my values speak, had the audacity to free my potential as a Leader, and was able to dare to have a positive impact on others.
To experience the leader is to learn or re-learn to trust one's own leadership . It is an energy that is transmitted from heart to heart, from body to body too. Even today, I like to surround myself with Leaders, who inspire me, by their example. And you, who is your Leader?
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