The Roadmap to Exceptional Leadership Part 1: Common leadership attributes and competencies

Episode #25 // This week’s episode is a big one! Once again I've developed a two part episode to deal with what I think is one of our larger topics, The Roadmap to Exceptional Leadership. Shoehorning this topic into a couple of brief podcast episodes is going to be tricky, but I am up for the challenge!

This week in part one, we'll start by looking at common leadership attributes and competencies, the best place to start when we’re defining what an ‘exceptional leader’ actually is, without all the fluff! In this episode I’ll cover:

• The ideal leadership attributes that we so often hear are ‘important’, but are also strangely intangible
• The difference that personal perspective makes in creating meaning around leadership attributes
• An example of how when I was CEO of CS Energy, I used key descriptors to explain certain attributes to my organisation, providing greater understanding of what behaviour I expected
• Why I think that leadership competencies are far more tangible (and relevant) than leadership attributes
• Some of the competencies of senior leadership that I learned from my time at Harvard Business School - you can download these competencies for free at www.yourceomentor.com/episode25 to self-evaluate, and evaluate those in your team
• I’ll touch on The 7 Pillars of Leadership Performance which will give you an insight into next week’s episode where I’ll give away my ‘secret sauce' to becoming an exceptional leader!

My hope is that this episode gets you thinking about what leadership attributes and competencies you currently have, and which ones you want to develop. Becoming an exceptional leader takes time, patience, discipline and an unwavering commitment to improving. It’s not easy, but the payback is incalculable.

If this episode has given you a new perspective on leadership, and you feel as though you want to dive deeper into what it actually takes to become an exceptional leader, I strongly encourage you to check out our 7-week online leadership program, Leadership Beyond the Theory. Enrolment is only open for another 8 days before we close the door to this cohort.

I’d love to know if this has helped you reframe your perspective on what great leadership is, so please send me an email (hello@yourceomentor.com) with your feedback!

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