by Greg Patterson, REEF
The role of a leader is to lead! As simple as that sounds, it is not something that happens just because someone is in a leadership position. Richard Flint, one of America’s top personal development speakers and coaches, describes an organisation where the leader does not lead but rather participates in the problem as one trapped in existence not growth.
A major objective of successful leaders is to build a bridge between the company and its people. According to Flint, for leadership to provide this bridge of connection, the leader must:
But how do you lead for high performance and get the best out of people? This issue was tackled at a recent leadership development course at the Centre for Workplace Leadership (CWL) in Melbourne.
Participants identified the following key learnings:
1. Know yourself –
it is important to understand your own personality with regard to your need for affection, control and inclusion as this will ultimately influence how you lead. Some people have a tendency to seek control, which explains why such people often end up micromanaging. Others may tend to want to be everyone’s friend, which explains why they avoid having difficult conversations. Once you better understand yourself, you have a better appreciation of what to work on and to be wary of. The key point being that we all have blind-spots that hold us back as leaders. If you know what they are, you can make sure that they don’t stop you getting the best from your team.
2. Support your team
– good leaders are highly supportive of those they lead. The participants in the CWL course agreed that listening well, asking questions and taking a coaching perspective got a much better result than confrontation or avoidance. The key point being, that although you sometimes have to be tough, it is much less frequent than people think. If you can build trust through supportive conversations, you’ll get much better outcomes.
3. Learn when to delegate and when to coach – when you have a highly skilled employee, giving them autonomy to get the work done is most important. When you have an employee who needs development, they need support. In the former case, a common manager’s mistake is micro-managing. In the latter, a common manager’s mistake is neglect! Understanding when to delegate and when to coach is one of the greatest challenges of good leadership.
4. Leadership style will vary –
there is no perfect formula to good leadership. There are times to be directing and telling people what to do. There are times to fire staff for poor performance. There are times to listen, ask questions and be supportive. The most important thing is to develop a tool kit that allows you to be malleable and adaptive. Finally, in the words of former US President Ronald Reagan, “the greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” As leaders, we should all take something from that observation.