Skills of Leadership

My Four Key Leadership Strengths

My supervisor told me that my four key leadership strengths are very interesting: (1) strategic thinking, (2) entrepreneurial drive, (3) credibility, and (4) team player skills.

Over the years, he met few other persons who had a similar profile.

I have an arts background and International Cultural Studies major at the University of Passau, but also took super advanced statistics and coding classes at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, got A’s and perfect math scores. In other words, I have the skills to be engineer, but love arts, too. With this I got into strategy consulting at my previous employer. In my case, my supervisor says that I am one of those exceptionally rare people who is both left brained (hyper logical) and right brained (hyper creative).

1. My choice of careers and training in statistics and coding is a sign of the logical side of the brain and those skills. I did very well in my standardised test scores and got close to perfect scores on the math side, that is very highly correlated with the analytical skills that my supervisors at my previous employer liked.
2. In addition, I sought intellectual diversity in my career and work in a fast-paced environment of continuous learning. At my previous employer I shaped the organisation and grew into different roles that have not even been invented yet.
3. In my Associate Partner role with my previous employer, I have gained credibility as a trusted advisor whom our clients’ executive team calls for opinions and solutions.
4. In general, I raise the performance bar with every team member I mentor and coach: I build on other people’s ideas, manage information flows and am willing to follow when appropriate.

An example of these happened when in addition to my usually pushing myself to grow outside of my comfort zone, …

by 22 miles road bicycle training per day and upskilling myself with AWS Cloud DevOps engineering skills, I came out as the hero of the day.

I managed the large-scale transformation to the new CRM platform with our customer’s CEO and CTO, despite interpersonal dynamics, major disagreement, and controversy within the demanding three senior stakeholder organisations team and customer team transitions, exceeded deadlines and not met deliverables of the two other depended processor migration and product portfolio strategy review engagements.

• I proved again that I am a problem solver with leadership abilities and analytical skills as well as creative thinker who has impact.
• I showed that I had built a solid C-suite customer relationship through my strategic leadership skills: I spoke our customer’s language and understood which problems they tried to solve, asked thought-provoking questions, embraced my role as an expert in the room, recommended, persuaded, and led.
• Furthermore, I recognised my team members with exceptional talent and willingly moved them throughout the organisation. I developed leaders on the engagement and was serious about my role in coaching others.

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