Day 4 in MIT Sloan Fellows Class 2023, Leadership and Teams Lab -1

We finally started the official core class today.

The first course is about leadership.

According to the professor, leadership is one of the most difficult words to be defined. Leadership is dynamic and always needs to be updated. Also, it is significantly difficult to quantify leadership. 

So in this course, the broad definition of leadership is "the process of solving problems that won't be otherwise handled in the existing systems." In this meaning, leadership can be broken down into three components. Strategy to break the frontier between efficiency and effectiveness, insightfulness to find hidden problems and interpret them into a solvable problem, and inclusiveness to leverage diversity. 

Leadership is not a special skill set. Anybody can demonstrate his or her own leadership style. The easiest one is self-disciplinary leadership to hold the tension between your personal attention and current capacity. The next one is team leadership to construct and confront problems that you can't solve by yourself. The final one is organizational leadership to create organizations that catalyze and coordinate joint problem-solving. 

In this sense, self-awareness and reflection are keys to maximising your leadership skillset. Diagnosing where you are and identifying the issues are activities through reflection. Then, you need to be objective about your subjective experience. 

Attitude to unlearn existing assets is another key. Everyone needs to admit their weakness and vulnerability if he or she wants to drive their growth. You set a higher goal and lower starting point, and then you can draw a steeper growth curve. 

Finally, the professor introduced "mindset". We should have "growth mindset" not "fixed mindset".  Welcome feedback about effort, not about the whole person. Ask for someone's help, show your vulnerability and choose learning goal, not a performance goal.