My Vision Statement

Last Wednesday, we discussed what should be the major qualities that good leader have in common.
We have come up with overall 20 kinds of abilities. However, I think cooperative is the one that I think is the most important of all.

Endurance, optimistic, cooperative, responsibility, creativity all these features have connection with cooperative. Thus I will make cooperative to be my main goal of this course.
I will declare my vision statements at this point.

I, Xiaotian Zhao, living at my highest and best, am cooperative, positive, responsible, and hard working. This is so with every situation in my life.

My home town "SHENYANG"

Hi, this is Xiaotian. On this post I will give you a brief introduction about my hometown.

My home town is SHENYANG(瀋陽), located in north-east of China. Lot of people I met seems to mistake with Xi'an (西安) since the pronunciation is quite similar. SHENYANG is not a big tourist attracting cities like BEIJING, SHANGHAI and many other places in China, however, in my opinion, I love the food and environments there. SHENYANG's food culture is the combination of China and Korea. Especially I love "shao kao(烧烤, same as BBQ)" in there, only at this place, can we enjoy both Chinese and Korean(N)  tastes of "shao kao" which is incredibly tasty. At the center of SHENYANG, there is a large park called "Beiling Park". this is the park which used to be the cottage for Qing Dynasty. They have chinese garden with big lake and fantastic scenery at every season. But what I like this park is not really the scenery, but the people in there. especially in the morning, park is full of people who come to exercise.  People sings, dance, write （calligrapher）in there, many encounter with talented people. I live in this place until age 7 and move to Tokyo.

After reading "Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership"(HBR)

This article mainly discuss about the importance of being "social intelligent". Social intelligence is, as the authors say, exhibit empathy and attuned to other's moods. First I noticed that what they call "social intelligence" is almost same as "kuukiwo-yomu(空気を読む)" in Japanese. In Japanese society, people are expected to guess how others feel and take action according to it. The ultimate of this is "ishin-denshin(以心伝心)"、in which people don't need words to tell their feeling or situation, because they know each other well. However what we  need in leadership is not to shut their mouth and rely connection based on nonverbal communication, but good and active communication. To take the example of Janice, abilities to communicate with management and peers, create moods that employee will enjoy their work and feel little frustration to the work or boss. Thus, the Japanese style of communication goes too far from becoming social intelligent. Now, the questions goes to can we apply social intelligent to Asian culture or Japan. After some discussions with my classmates we noticed two key features that successful leaders in Japan have in common. One is the frequent use of complimentary words. Especially when you have to provide give negative feedback to the employee, delivering with positive moods or negative moods will make great difference on employee's future performance. Harvard Business Review (HBR) also provided some techniques to deliver this in positive moods. "Weigh the trade-offs, Keep your tone collaborative and help her get in the right mindset" as the websites says is what we need to be care of ( http://hbr.org/tip/2013/07/05/deliver-negative-feedback-with-care ) . These clearly show that leader needs to be socially intelligent in order to manage their employee and that is not easy jobs. The other one is smile, as this article shows smile will activate others' mirror neuron which will overall create happy moods. Happy moods will create comfortable working environments since workers have sympathy to each other and can achieve better productivity.     

              As conclusion, leaders should be very careful on how they interact with their employees and peers. Lack of ability on communication will dramatically reduce the capabilities as leader.