My Leadership Collection
By: Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Writing, Technology, Business

I am a leader, inventor, and entrepreneur in technology, cognitive science, and content development fields with four decades of experience. I have been researching leadership in various settings. My views are reflecting observations of technical and technology leaders published in a book titled “A Technical Excellence Framework for Innovative Digital Transformation Leadership.”

Apart from researching the leadership field as a scholar and documenting my findings, I am a dedicated learner reading of the literature voraciously. Not only show guidance to aspiring entrepreneurs as a mentor and development coach, but I am also a humble protege of many great leaders in the industry and academia.

In this story, I want to introduce and share my recent leadership articles, presenting them in a single story. This story allows my readers to find my leadership stories easily.

I aim to share my knowledge and experience of outstanding leadership.

How to Recognize Distinguished Leaders

Prominent traits that attract us to exceptional leaders

In this article, I want to share a dozen of traits which are observable in recognizing distinguished leaders. To set the context, I want to define leaders in this category. The adjective “distinguished” is the keyword to understand this leadership type. The terms success, authority, and respect define the distinguished leaders at a high level. In simple terms, distinguished leaders are incredibly successful, authoritative in their domains, and respected by all stakeholders. Let me share my observations and findings under 12 categories so that they can help you recognize distinguished leaders in your industry.

How To Be An Excellent Technical Leader

26 key characteristics of excellent technical and technology leaders

This article provides an overview of the 26 key characteristics of excellent technical and technology leaders who can survive and thrive even in the most critical situations to deliver outstanding business results, keep their team members sane, make their stakeholders happy, and delight their customers. My aim is to provide practical guidance to aspiring digital transformation entrepreneurs for Startup companies or intrapreneurs working in large business organizations. The context of the leadership in this article is related to new technology business, transformational environments, and enterprise modernization initiatives. However, these traits might also apply to leaders in other domains. My views in this article reflect my 37 years of experience working with hundreds of technical and technology leaders. To keep this article at a reasonable size, I extracted, simplified, and summarized my recorded observations as part of my studies in technical leadership domain. My study on technical and technology leaders working in digital transformation initiatives was recently published in a practical book titled “A Technical Excellence Framework for Innovative Digital Transformation Leadership”.

Six Things Real Leaders Don’t Do

If they do, they are not leaders but…

I usually write about what leaders do. In this post, I look at leadership from a different angle to recognize fake leaders. I encapsulated many points under six headings to make it easy to read and learn. I use daily language so that any reader can benefit from this post. Explanations are short because the headings are self-explanatory. The fake leaders reflect the attributes of charlatans, shams, hoaxers, fraudsters, mountebanks, and swindlers. They disguise their motives using tricky methods and raise their voice like a bully. It is crucial to recognize fake leaders as they resemble sneaky viruses attacking the human immune system. Small viruses don’t have substance. They are not even full organisms, but once they enter the body, they can be toxic, dangerous, and life-threatening.

What Exactly Matters To Followers

Ten critical leadership traits expected and desired by followers

The purpose of this story is to share my leadership experience from the perspectives of followers. Under ten significant headings, I encapsulated a massive amount of research content. My intention aims to simplify the complexity, present with clarity, and make the content digestible to my readers. The focus is on influential and transformational leaders.

How I Sustained My Motivation

And Produced Like a Boss in These Challenging Times

Motivation comes and goes. It is a manifestation of millions of neuro-chemicals flooding like a gigantic cocktail in our body. It resembles a vast ocean at the nanoscale — not easy to touch, see, hear, or smell. In other words, with our current human capability, it may look impossible to understand the details of this vast ocean showing itself as emotions in our lives. However, there are viable approaches, such as using our cognitive skills in terms of pattern recognition for taming the metaphorical monsters within us. Seeing the patterns with the power of our cortex is a proven technique to make sense of complex and complicated phenomena. I discussed the use of cortex versus limbic system — particularly in amygdala context — when proposing a practical solution for anxiety. Even though anxiety relates to motivation, it is out of scope in this story. In this story, rather than discussing the scholarly details of emotions, feelings, and thoughts for maintaining motivation, I want to share my personal experience of how I sustain my motivation in challenging times like the ones we are experiencing as a lock-down situation now.

Cross-Pollination at Work

How to share and interchange ideas for high performing teams in Transforming

In this article, I want to highlight the value and importance of cross-pollination for high-performance teams in transforming business environment. I’d like to share a simple example which helped transform a competitive, rigid, and difficult culture to a pleasant learning environment. Cross-pollination is a metaphor taken from botany. The literal meaning of it is the transfer of pollen from plant flowers with different DNA which enable the creation of new types of plants carrying different attributes. Cross-pollination is a powerful metaphor to understand the importance of diversity to create fusion in the workplace. I introduced the fusion principles and their importance in this article.

Innovative Use of Negative Criticism

High achievers’ & inventors’ perspective to creativity, productivity, and growth

Fear of negative criticism is natural. Our primitive brain creates this well-known fear. We all are hardwired and feel this fear in the fabric of our soul. This psychological phenomenon is widespread in the body of knowledge. Mental health practitioners developed processes and procedures to address this fear, especially when it passed the threshold levels and turned into a chronic psychological problem interfering life functions of individuals. We humans do not like negative criticism. This type of criticism is usually undesirable and signals threat alarms to our survival. The hard-coded survival mechanism tries to protect us from this perceived threat. Yes, it is a perceived threat, not a real danger. My central premise in this article is looking at the topic from survival versus thriving point of view. While survival keeps us safe in our comfort zones, thriving requires effort to move out of our comfort zones and challenge our abilities. This significant yet straightforward viewpoint is the major success factor for humans to grow and design their lives based on their desired goals and objectives.

Inventor’s Perspective to Leadership Growth

Personal responsibility and risk of vulnerability

One of the best lessons I learnt in my childhood from my parents was taking full responsibility for everything I did in my life; whether good or bad. This well-rounded principle has been an important transformational success factor in every aspect of my life, including my leadership pursuits in later years. This life lesson helped me explore and discover the leadership capabilities hidden in my DNA. I enjoy experimenting and learning from trial and errors. I have been inspired by many inventors particularly Nikola Tesla and Marie Curie who were my childhood heroes. I always imagined them as two genius couples. I had childhood dreams having personal conversations with them on how to overcome the fear to invent. Madam Currie taught me nothing to be feared in life but all to be understood.

Truth over Facts

A winning proposition for relationships and politics

Despite the noise and chaos, social media can be serendipitous sometimes. I rarely read or watch about politics on social media. It is a topic foreign to me. In this story, I want to share my unusual experience on social media today. As fitness and art are my strong interest topics, I have an affinity with Dwayne Johnson. I follow his fitness and art contributions to social media platforms. His experience and wisdom are inspiring to me. As a follower of Dwayne on Twitter, I received a tweet from him today. It has already gained 10.4M views on Twitter. The video he attached to his tweet captivated me. Within a few seconds, I got hooked into the video and continued watching it. Watching a video about politics was surprising to my emotional brain, but my open mind motivated me to finish the video. I am glad I did.

One Core Leadership Capability To Empower Writers

How three essential points can get you started, increase your confidence, and sustain your motivation

This story reflects hard-learned and practical lessons. The opening statement does not intend to convey a message of regret or boasting. Its purpose is to highlight the validity and relevance of content reflecting practical experience rather than pure theory. I want to share a useful learning construct from my leadership experience, which may be a useful tool for writers. My approach may not gel initially or may even conflict with common beliefs on motivation because even I wouldn’t believe what I said now if I read it 30 years ago. I encapsulated a broad topic to make it digestible, but it is not an oversimplification, and the construct is solid. No rush to react promptly as your feedback after trying it is what I want to obtain. My point is that motivation may not be what you think; therefore, it may not serve your needs. Consequently, I take the liberty of explaining it from hard-learned lessons. This story’s premise is you may need to revisit the motivation factor and correct your perceptions about commonly promoted motivation factors such as getting ready and gaining external inspiration. You may unlearn and relearn things as I did.

Prominent Adult Learning Theories

A condensed literature review for a leadership cognitive study

In this article, I share the summary of the literature review which I conducted to underpin learning characteristics of technical leaders. In this review, my aim is to introduce major adult learning theories and models as well as their major principles. These principles are used to recognize cognitive patterns of technical leaders whom I surveyed and interviewed both qualitatively and quantitatively for validation of findings. These theories and models were used to support key ideas and discussions included in the major themes of the research study. This condensed review of the theories aim to give introductory ideas to human cognitive scientists and leadership learning researchers. Understanding these theories can also be useful for educators, teachers, lecturers, trainers, instructors, mentors, and executive coaches in leadership disciplines.

Vision, Discovery, Strategy, And Promotion

Remove fear of promotion