The importance of a good leader walking by your side

My name is María Flores, I am 36 years old and I have 15 years of experience in the finance field. I started as an accounting assistant in the payable department in a metallurgic sector and since then, my objective always was to become CFO in a company. Finally, I got this less than three years ago.

When someone asks me about my professional career, the first thing coming to my mind is that to get where I have arrived, I always needed good leaders to guide me. Therefore today, I would like to share my thoughts, with the readers, about the importance of good leadership in your professional career.

Leadership requires a “set of skills, and most important, a series of impersonal communications through which the individual who leads a group influences his/her environment, with the purpose of achieving a voluntary and more effective realization of the objectives of the organization“. Leadership is, therefore, a discipline. Whoever exercises it, has a commitment to himself, because the true leader exercises a special influence on the people around him.

Being on my path to self-knowledge and looking deep into the behaviours patterns has allowed me to know the leaders who make a difference in my professional career, and help me to list those characteristics and qualities which I think a “perfect” leader should have. Below I would like to detail the ones that stand out for me:

• Vision, if a group is leaded by a person who has no vision, confusion and disorder will appear.
• Vocation, a leader will always guide us from love, never imposing his/her norms, nor exercising fear as a form of imposition.
• Courage, having courage is sometimes doing the right thing for an organization even though this supposes a high price for the decision maker.
• Communication, the leader must be able to communicate and transmit the vision of the company to his/her employees and encourage them to overcome the difficulties that arise.
• Energy, produces enthusiasm, effort, and the ability to act.
• Ability to identify opportunities and overcome the fear of making mistakes. It is possible to learn from mistakes to obtain the expected benefits.
• Delegate and encourage teamwork, delegating effectively will help develop and empower your team members and will increase trust and a sense of belonging to a group.
• Emotional intelligence and positive attitude, who manages stress well and accepts constructive criticism.
• Time management, learning to prioritize, set and define objectives is essential to become a good leader.

There are many people who does not leave companies, they leave bosses. That is why it is important that a good leader has most or even some of the characteristics that I mentioned above.

I cannot qualify myself as a good leader, this should be done by the people I work with, but what I do know is that throughout my professional career I have met good leaders who have helped me get to where I am. And consequently, they are a role model to me to become like them.

There have also been some of the opposite, although few, and for that reason I want to highlight that bad leaders scare away talent. Luis Huete, professor at the IESE Business School, affirms “Toxic bosses do enormous damage not only to talent, but to the human fiber of their teams. A person who works in toxic work environment losses at least 10 years of his/her life”.

The years of crisis have caused many workers to endure bad behaviour and humiliation from some bosses in the world work, but experts say that this situation is already changing and fewer bosses are opting for “command and control” as a tool principal of leadership.

Finally, I would like to share a phrase that I always have in mind and that motivates me to try to do things well.

“A true leader has the confidence to be alone, the courage to make decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. He/she does not set out to be a leader but becomes one because of his/her actions and the integrity of his/her intention” (Douglas MacArthur).