As a leader it's your job to guide your team towards success and reaching specific goals. You might successfully reach those goals, but are you leading or managing that team? Are you able to really relate to your team and drive engagement & retention? How are you driving performance and development of your people and how are you helping your team members relate to one another who come with different values, filters and experiences? Do you influence and inspire or do you organize and direct? Big differences. Here are five tips to help you evaluate and improve your effectiveness as a leader.
What's Your Motivation?
Let's start with you. How are you viewing your leadership position? What are your motivations in leading? Don’t tell me that it is one of the requirements of your job. Really? Where is the enthusiasm in that? Your attitude is going to show your true colors and your team will see right through your façade.
In order to be an effective leader, you need to have the right motivations based on your values. Just as important, you need to know and understand the motivational values of your team and your team members so collectively you can deploy the right strengths to the right situations at the right time to more effectively achieve the outcomes desired. You really need to ask yourself why you want to lead and if necessary hire a coach to help you through this process. If you look at leadership as an honor and in your heart you feel leadership is your destiny, ask yourself what difference can I make in the lives of the people around me. You will be starting from the right place.
Connect & Communicate
Leading others requires a mutual sense of trust and understanding between leader and all team members. Leaders make other people feel important through effective listening. As a first step toward that goal, leaders should learn to connect. Building a real personal connection with your teammates is vital to developing the shared trust necessary to build a strong culture of accountability and exceptional performance. With that kind of culture in place, the team can achieve success, develop a more engaging environment and create greater team and individual fulfillment.
See our previous post on emotional intelligence as we believe that being a “more human" leader requires positivity, purpose, empathy, compassion, humility and service. These key traits will put you on the road to genuine connections and successful engagement with the members of your team.
Focus On The Positives
As much as leaders wish that their team's day-to-day operations could run smoothly all the time, they're bound to run into an obstacle(s). Whether it's a minor miscommunication or something major, the way a leader handles a negative situation says a lot about his or her leadership skills. Robert Mann, author of "The Measure of a Leader," recommends focusing on the good in any set of circumstances.
"Look at three positive things about a problem before you identify what makes it dissatisfying," Mann said. "The more you look at the positives in a problem, the more positively people react with one another." This involves moving from a focus on what is going wrong to what is going right. Here is something to think about, Don't let perfect get in the way of better."
Show, Don't Tell
Effective leaders show others what is required rather than simply telling them. Leaders should coach their team members toward a more collaborative, committed work environment - without coaxing them. Leaders that control their teams to do certain things in certain ways will not get the level of engagement the leader is looking for. It also will not get your team accountable and feel ownership. Coaching is about helping the people you lead recognize the choices they have in front of them. People will then take a ownership over the direction of the project.
Ask for feedback
An honest self-assessment of your own leadership can be difficult. This is why feedback from mentors, accountability partners, or team members is invaluable in evaluating your effectiveness. Also working with a professional coach can also help you discover areas that need improvement. A professional who helps you develop a plan to achieve your leadership goals can be more highly motivational and lead to sustainable changes more quickly.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. How would you begin to break through your thoughts, emotions and actions to becoming a more self aware leader? We would love to hear from you with comments or questions. Send me a note via email at brad@aperiocoaching.net or on Twitter @bparcells.
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