Leadership comes in various forms, sizes, and shapes. You may want to look at the leaders of Apple, such as Tim Cook and Steve Jobs. These men lead differently. Cook is known to be communicative and friendly to everyone, and he’s known to talk about many things and require transparency to the job that everyone is doing.
On the other hand, Jobs was famously quoted to say that all the larger decisions in a company usually involve just a few people. Many individuals at the workplace have different habits, traits, work styles, and personalities, and Introverts have widely varied styles to extroverts. Regardless of your personality, know that collaborative leadership is essential when you want to inspire, create new paths, and win as a team. The organization should be more inspired and dynamic because you’re at the helm.
What Leaders Do
1) Create an Inspiring Future and Vision for Everyone
Businesses need to have a realistic vision. This is an attractive, achievable, and convincing goal that many should strive for in the future. The vision sets priorities, provides direction, and dictates what the employees should work on every day. They will tell you whether you’re working towards your goals or not.
Many leaders focus on their strengths and use various tools to analyze their current situation. They think deeply about their industries and how they will likely evolve in the future. They will also see the trends on how their competitors will behave and how they can keep up with it.
They are more likely to be more successful in innovating and shaping their businesses to the trajectories of the marketplace. Their visions are tested with accurate marketing data and research. They assess their risks and solve problems. Leadership is a very proactive role that anticipates issues, and the people leading the way are not usually satisfied with the way things are.
Once a vision is developed, the leaders should make everything convincing and compelling. Compelling means that the team can understand, feel, see, and embrace the vision and make them personal. Influential leaders usually provide a picture of what the future looks like after they have achieved their goals. Everyone can generally relate to their vision and is inspired to achieve them.
With this said, a leader often combines a vision’s analytical side as well as the creation of value for the people who are being led. More about vision statement on this site here.
2) Inspiring and Motivating
Compelling goals and vision can provide a strong foundation for leadership. However, the person’s abilities at the helm are the ones to inspire and motivate people to deliver a company’s shared mission and vision.
For example, if a team starts a new project, it’s understandable for everyone to be enthusiastic initially. Everyone is so supportive at the start, but things can go on a drastic turn when there are difficulties along the way. If the organization undergoes a significant change, many of the team members may lose the motivation to follow these modifications. Leaders tend to recognize these things, and they do their best to keep everyone motivated throughout the project.
There’s even an Expectancy Theory that others utilize to make things more manageable. These two different expectations are often linked together:
- There is an expectation that every hard work brings in excellent results
- Excellent results are expected to have incentives and attractive rewards
This motivates a lot of people to achieve more success in the workplace. The rewards are not only extrinsic but also intrinsic in nature. Along with the promotions, prizes, and recognition that employees get when they achieve success, there’s also the inner satisfaction some people feel after working hard,
What’s helpful is when the leaders begin to exert their power. Many individuals tend to believe and admire them because these people are natural experts at what they do. They have a lot of training, experience, and knowledge that they have gained throughout the years.
Generally, they are credible and have earned the right to make others listen to what they have to say and follow their orders. These kinds of managers are what inspire and motivate most people.
Some have a natural charisma that helps in influencing others. More about charismatic leadership here: https://teamworkdefinition.com/charismaticleadership/. Their appeal can be their source of power. These are the things like the power to pay or assign some tasks to certain people. However, excellent leaders don’t usually rely on much charm to inspire and motivate others.
3) Managing the Vision
Management is essential in any area of a business or company. Leaders should be able to communicate effectively and deliver their vision so they can delegate tasks and responsibilities. They need to ensure that everyone is working at the same goal at a reasonable pace.
For them to ensure that the vision is followed, many utilize key performance indicators as benchmarks for the job at hand. These performance indicators provide useful and accurate data about the performance of each person every day. Some can learn about their areas for improvement, while others can get rewarded when they come out at the top.
There’s also a need for the manager to wander around and engage with people. If a manager usually sits inside an office and detaches from his team members, he might not gain valuable insights about the daily operations of the company, and the other members won’t gain his knowledge and experience. What’s worse with this scenario is that the leader won’t know how to solve problems the first time they appear, and they may miss out on the essential information that they need to make wiser decisions.
Management that wanders around is staying abreast of the latest news as well as other people’s ideas. These may require observation, proactive listening, appraisal, and recognition. Informal and spontaneous communication also happens when the members frequently see their leaders becoming hands-on with their tasks.
These are important so the changes can be effectively more manageable. Changes are delivered on time, and the vision can be implemented smoothly. People will support a leader who cares about them and knows that the change will improve the company’s overall operation.
