Kevin Mulleady recently discussed the main components that go into being a leader.
Everyone must find their leadership style, there are some things which everyone must have to be an effective leader,he explains.
The Key Components of Leadership
- Communication: Communication is more than just talking. It is following up with what you say you are going to do. It also means listening and learning and working collaboratively and facilitating in creating the most innovative environment.
- Empathy: Being a leader isn’t quite the same as being on the team, but it is essential to understand the team. This is what makes working with the team and helping to develop the best work possible.
- Decisiveness: At the end of the day, a leader is there to lead the team and the company towards achieving goals. This requires decisiveness in defining those goals and then laying out the plans to achieve them.
- Flexibility: Anything can happen at any time. And sometimes the best way isn’t always the original plan. Being flexible is an important leadership quality.
Kevin Mulleady understands the challenges that come with being a leader. As the founder and Executive Chairman of Prospero Pharmaceuticals, he has experience in developing his leadership skills. And so he acknowledges how hard it can be for a person more new to leadership. For a person looking to advance their skills, he advises beginning with searching for a mentor. This relationship can prove invaluable in the journey to becoming a leader.
Additional key characteristics needed for future leaders include:
- Humility: A leader understands that they never achieve their goals alone, and they are only as strong as their team.
- Responsibility: At the same time a good leader does not shirk off their responsibility or lay blame elsewhere.
- Courage: It might seem counterintuitive but being a leader is a vulnerable position, and this takes a good deal of courage.
- Persistence: No one did anything great by quitting. Achieving goals takes persistence.
Leadership comes down to not where you lead but how you do so and how you interact with your team. A big part of what a leader needs to ask themselves is what kind of team building they have done.
The Importance of Team Building
There is no leadership without a team being led, and a major concern of the leader must always be in first forming the team and then maintaining it in good form. This means listening to both the needs and ideas of the team. And adapting the structure of the work based on this feedback.
In founding companies and achieving his goals, Kevin Mulleady has learned how important it is both to rely on a strong team, but also how important it is to manage one with flexibility, decisiveness and empathy.
Outside of the Business World – Leadership through Movie Production
Kevin Mulleady is not just the founder and Chairman of Prospero Pharmaceuticals. He is also a movie producer known for the film, Escape Artist. In that capacity, He also learned a great deal about leadership, and that it extended beyond the world of running a pharmaceutical company, and was extremely important in navigating the land of filmmaking as well.
While the pharmaceutical industry is very collaborative, that is not as directly felt at how collaborative a process filmmaking is. It is so critical to have strong leadership in making the singular product of a film that so many are working on at once. While the director is one side of the leadership picture, very front and center, there is also another important leadership role in the producer.
Kevin Mulleady shared how much he enjoyed this more behind the scenes leadership role where his decisions helped drive the film towards its goals.
He concluded his address of the topic by returning to his original point about how important the core qualities of a leader are.