LEADERSHIP AND OUR LIFE
What is leadership, anyway?
Such a simple question, and yet it continues to vex popular consultants and lay people alike. I’ve now written several books on leadership for employee engagement, and yet it occurred to me that I never actually paused to define leadership. Let’s start with what leadership is not.
Leadership has nothing to do with seniority or one’s position in the hierarchy of a company. Too many talk about a company’s leadership referring to the senior most executives in the organization. They are just that, senior executives. Leadership doesn’t automatically happen when you reach a certain pay grade. Hopefully you find it there, but there are no guarantees.
Learn how to be a good leader to improve your team’s engagement and success
Learning how to be a good leader can greatly impact the success of your team, your organization and yourself.
To be an effective leader, you must understand your own motivations, strengths and weaknesses.
Great leaders connect with their team by facilitating open communication, encouraging employee growth and development, and giving and receiving feedback.
Anyone can sit in a corner office and delegate tasks, but there is more to effective leadership than that. Effective leaders have major impacts on not only the team members they manage, but also their company as a whole. Employees who work under great leaders tend to be happier, more productive and more connected to their organization – and this has a ripple effect that reaches your business’s bottom line.
“I think a great leader is one who makes those around them better,” Dana Brownlee, founder of Professionalism Matters, told Business News Daily. “There are many litmus tests for a great leader, but I really look to those around them: Are they growing, becoming better leaders themselves, motivated, etc.?”
If you look around and see that your team members have become disengaged or stagnant in their work, it may be time to reassess and reform your strategies. According to Brownlee, the following behaviors are signs that you may have a poor leadership strategy:
• No one on your team has criticized one of your ideas in the past month.
• You spend more time planning your own career progression than that of your team members.
• You haven’t had at least three completely non-work-related conversations with a team member weekly.
• Different team members would provide different answers if asked your top three priorities for the year.
• Team members are afraid to fail.
A recent study by the Center for Creative Leadership showed that roughly 38% to more than half of new leaders fail within their first 18 months. Leaders can avoid becoming part of this staggering statistic by incorporating good leadership strategies that motivate their team members to accomplish their goals
21 Examples of the Most In-Demand Leadership Skills
There are many different leadership skills required in the workplace, but the most in-demand ones include:
• Active listening
• Empathy
• The ability to share clear messages and make complex ideas easy to understand for everyone
• Strategic thinking skills
• Creativity
• The ability to inspire and convince others
• Flexibility
• The ability to turn information into action
• Project planning
• Active listening
• Business storytelling
• Time management
• The ability to build trust
• Strong communication skills
• Positivity
• Reliability
• Management skills
• A strong leadership vision
• Recruiting skills
• Persuasion skills
• Strong charisma