Leadership as an Art

When do you become a leader? When your boss gives you that promotion? When you are paid the salary?

Being a leader is not a job title. The leader is someone that people want to follow. The person who has gained respect from his/her peers because of their actions.

Often the job title comes because the boss sees this and not because of any other reason.

To quote Kouzes and Posner, "Leadership is the art of mobilising others to want to struggle for shared aspirations”.

Therefore if you find yourself in a leadership position, how do you motivate people to do this?

The first thing to do is ensure that you model the behaviour that you want in your team. It’s about the actions rather than the words. A single negative action will undo everything that you have said.

To do this, you need to ensure that there is a common purpose. This is shared from the top down and everybody knows the purpose and how their particular role contributes to this purpose.

With this common purpose there comes a sense of belonging. Everybody seeing their own role brings about a sense of a team. As a leader, it is important to ensure that everyone appreciates how their role fits in with the rest of the team and that as a team more is achieved. The removal of silos means that as a team, more is possible.

Where everyone is working together, the innovation starts. The team members suggest better ways of working and challenge the way of working in order to achieve better results. They also look after each other by reporting incidents and near misses because any injury could lead to absence which would result is a reduced effectiveness of the team.

All of a sudden, you have a team of consultants suggesting improvements. They know the work better than anyone else. They understand the customer because they are closer to them, and they want to work more efficiently.

As the leader, you build mutual trust which means that you can dedicate time on improving the workplace and the culture. You listen to the input from the team and help implement the changes to make it more effective. Rather than micromanaging, you are introducing improvements and ensuring that your team has the skills and competencies to push further. You have time to understand what makes each member of your team work better and you can challenge them accordingly and at the right time. Not everyone is ready for the challenge at the same time, but knowing their lives means that you know when they are ready or when they should stay in their comfort zone.

Finally, as the Leader, you can promote the good work that your team does to others - your bosses or clients, and celebrate success with them.