I believe that visionary leader has clear picture of where to go

This week leadership development committee meet to conduct personal interviews with 10 semi finalists of 3rd generation of AmCham Young Professionals program. Even though intensive and somewhat exhausted process I must admit that overall impression and satisfaction at the end was great. Congratulation to all participants, semi-finalist and five finalist, you are all winers and we are proud of you.

Based on 1st and 2nd generation input we defined qualities that young professionals valid most as essential prerequisite of modern leader. Ten leadership qualities we were looking for in random order are: communication skills, professionalism, creativity, accepting responsibility, vision, motivator, social responsibility, integrity, ambitiousness, empathy. Each member of committee took responsibility for one of listed quality and based on all interviews assigned appropriate grade. No need to emphasise that some of those qualities are lacking in our society and without them one can not proclaim himself as a leader in business or political arena and furthermore can’t expect others will follow him or her.

As usually my focus during interviews was on one’s understanding of vision. I believe that visionary leader has clear picture of where to go, as well as what success looks like. Understanding how to achieve it it’s not enough since he or she must share it and act upon it. Communication of a vision is crucial in order to cause followers to buy into it. The best way to get message across is when one uses clarity and passion. Sincere passion is contagious and plays important role in communicating vision. As Jack Welch once said, ” Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion.” After everyone is on board sailing toward bright vision leader must direct his or her actions and those of the team toward the goal. Leader shouldn’t suffer “analysis paralysis” but be action oriented in pursuit of the vision and inspiring others to do the same. Call me romantic idealist but I believe that our current economic situation and all other issues will be solved when we’ll have real leaders uniting nation, showing the way and lead us toward prosperity.

Summarising this year generation capabilities on vision understanding I’m really glad to find it on seriously high level. It’s refreshing to know and learn from youngsters their way of thinking and acting in their professional and personal life. They have ideas, values and attitude that are sound and desperately needed in today society. This year we have two finalist from public sector. I find this very encouraging since we need high potential people in public sector to. If we can contribute in their personal development than this is minimum what we should do. After all they are the one who will cary on after our generation retreat.