10 ESSENTIALS OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP YOU NEED TO KNOW.

Infographic Credit: Tafadzwa Mhepoh

1. Engage and represent your people: Leadership means creating a common mission and vision with the people you lead, and representing it relentlessly. Do that, and we all tenaciously rally and do our best.

2. Collaborate and compromise

with colleagues: Leadership means working together -- with give and take -- toward a common goal of a shared good. When instead egos get in the way, people, rather than ideas, take center stage in distorted ways

3. Supervise at an appropriate level of detail: Leadership means finding a healthy balance between being "informed" and "involved." When leaders misjudge their needed level of scrutiny or involvement, they make mistakes of omission that lead to serious consequences.

4. Be decisive in a timely manner: Leadership means having the courage to take timely corrective action on someone or something that's not working. Timely decision-making is intrinsic to good leadership.

5. Be accountable: Leadership means owning inevitable errors and failures, even though fear or stress would tempt you to distance yourself from them. Aside from being good leadership, an error owned and transcended tends to result in great achievements. Our political "leaders" are epically far better at blaming or stepping back from mistakes than they are at owning a failure or misstep.

6. Innovate: Leadership means innovation. True innovation isn't in a method, process, book, or workshop. It's in the mirror of our imagination and courage. Intrinsic to the survival instinct of politicians is avoiding what takes courage to change. The key to change our leadership for the better is to remind our leaders that innovation -- like the privatization of space travel -- is a cool and popular way toward a rewarding shared future.

7. Make a positive impact on people, planet and economy: Leadership means making positive impacts on individuals, communities, natural resources, and on the economic ecosystem. A leader's achievements and legacy are ultimately measured and moderated by their impact.

8. Be honest: Leadership means candor with yourself and others -- both emotionally and intellectually -- and being willing to ask for and hear such honesty from colleagues, clients, and the communities you impact. Great honesty brings the humility needed for great leadership when things are going well, and the necessary fuel for critical change when things are in trouble

9. Delegate effectively: Leadership means delegating the "what," and not the "how," to launch people into effective, independent action. It's honoring them as adults, and coaching and supporting them to find their own ingenuity, even when telling them would be faster.

10. Listen: Leadership means asking and listening, rather than doing the talking the majority of the time. It's trusting the people who know best what's needed are the ones actually living with the results of your leadership. Your job is to quiet the noise of your own preconceptions and ego in order to hear those who know best: the wisdom of the people.

Adapted from the Huffington Post