Year of Zayed: Top 5 Values young leaders need to learn from a great idol

Having spent a great portion of my life learning, reading and reviewing several leadership models, I have seen a great deal of students being obsessed by well-designed leadership models and theories like situational leadership, transformational leadership, inclusive leadership.. and so on. Despite those models and theories are well designed to tell leaders what to do and at which time, they do not explain the “How” to do it.

For example, situational leadership provides guidance to leaders on when to “tell” employees and when to “delegate”, but the art of “telling” and “delegating” is a totally different game that greatly depend on the “How”, which in turn, greatly depends on the true beliefs and values of leaders.

Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr. author of “From Values to Action: The Four Principles of Values-Based Leadership” (Jossey-Bass, April 2011), focused on 4 key principles of “Values-Based Leadership”, and those were: Self-reflection, balance, self-confidence, and humility. For that, and coinciding with the announcement of 2018 as the “Year of Zayed”, it is an opportunity for young leaders to reflect on the top 5 values that were lived by HH and installed in the UAE leadership model.

1. Humility

G. K. Chesterton described “Humility” as “The Mother of all Giants”, debating that the more one creates distance between himself and his surrounding, the less he sees of gifts and love around him.

As a leader, getting close to your followers is essential for you to understand them, feel them and also for them to understand and feel you as an individual. After all, the leadership-followership relation is a human to human relationship that needs continuous contact. Leadership humility remains one of the most obvious leadership traits for the UAE leadership model across all generations.

2. Focus

The ability to focus, especially during tough times is a key attribute of strong leaders. Being able to focus means that you will be able to set priorities according to your vision and not being driven by other people priorities.

Today, this is crucial more than ever, with hundreds of distracting tools and incidences around us, we all need to learn to come back to some simple basics.. like simply walking with a diary that reminds us of our objectives, and surrounding ourselves with people who are positively engaged with our mission.

3. Clarity of vision

Leading with a clear view of where you want to be exactly is key to making the right decisions. Setting a clear direction of your way is very important for the followers to engage with the journey. This will not only help people move in the right direction, but will also enable them to offer advice on the best routes to take in order to reach the vision.

Do you want to test this? Ask your team today “what’s our vision?” And if you don’t get an answer or you get conflicting answers to the right vision, then start acting today on communicating this to your followers and clarifying the picture you have in mind for your team and organization.

4. Inclusiveness

In April 2011, the term “Inclusive leadership” was introduced by Sonia Ospina, Waad El Hadidy and Grisel Caicedo with Amanda Jones, (Research Center for Leadership in Action, NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service), and in 2016 Juliet Bourke and Bernadette Dillon suggested six main traits that leaders need to have in order to show inclusiveness, and those were: commitment, courage, cognizance, curiosity, cultural intelligence, and collaboration.

To make it simple, in today’s world, where the globe is becoming more and more like a small town and people moving around all across, leaders are required to show respect and openness to “others”, and here comes inclusiveness as a new value.

It is simply a combination of the values of respect, openness to change, empathic listening and innovation, and those leaders who are good at this, will always have creativity and innovation at the center of their attention. Look around you in UAE, with over 202 nationalities working in harmony across several sectors.. it’s an inclusiveness pace that was set long back by the founder of UAE and is practiced daily in the country, with no better evidence of success than the great innovative achievements that we hear about every day across all sectors in UAE.

5. Wisdom

“Books carry science, civilization, culture, knowledge, literature and arts. And nations are measured not only by their tangible wealth, but by their cultural originality.” Those were the quotes of His Highness Shaikh Zayed, God bless his soul, clearly encouraging generations to read, learn and develop, and leading them to the source of wisdom… Books..

Wisdom is a capstone of all values, and is something that leaders could not acquire easily, but need a lot of time, resilience, thirst for knowledge and very big open eyes. Probably this is one value that our young generations need to focus on a lot.. Read, read, then read more .. Understand the world around you, look at things from different perspectives, listen to the elderly and learn from their experience.. with wisdom you grow from good to great, you see a whole new life around you..

Learning from our ancestors is an invaluable source of greatness. We have so many great examples to learn from and we need to start practicing today.. Make a positive impact to yourself, your team, your community, and your country in 2018.

Written by:

Engagement Expert, International Speaker & Pragmatic researcher