Tips For Great Leadership

Tips For Great Leadership

• Build trust in your team – show that you count on them and that they can count on you too.
• Enhance Communication- don’t build gossip mills, build thinktanks
• Build Openness- don’t build a cult following build an enduring system that supports growth
• Nurture Integrity
• Respect for personal views ensures ethical performance.

Leadership in business, management, and governance requires tact, ingenuity, risk-taking, and emotional intelligence. These all boil down to the question of capacity, competence, and character. Leadership is all about creating influence and effecting change. Therefore, leaders must be persuasive, have a contagious mien, and be ready to learn while leading. Today, most people in leadership fail because of the skewed nature of their competencies, character, and capacity. Building trust as a leader entails that such a leader must be trusting too and ready to give the followers the benefit of the doubt when sharing power and delegating activities.

Leadership is a call to duty, it can be canvassed for, but it must be handled with a high level of responsibility, commitment to purpose, and desire to effect change. Leadership is all about effecting change through persuasion and taking initiative when no one else is willing to do so. Leadership is all about taking risks and being the fall guy when things do not go on as planned. In some of my training sessions on leadership, I have been able to discover a pattern of what it takes in effecting change as a leader, a manager, or even as an employee. I will share some of them here.

• Build Trust in Your Team: Like marriages, leadership thrives on trust. Trust is the integrity of purpose. If you desire to become a leader that gets things done, you must learn how to build trust in your team. When leaders show that they trust their followers by sharing their powers with them, it boosts their confidence and self-esteem. Trust enables one to commit to the purpose that they have come to embrace. As a leader, you need to show that you count on your team and that they can count on you too.

• Enhance Communication: Communication is the oil that drives and lubricate the team’s engine. When you communicate with your team, you close the room for assumptions, hearsay, and suspense which can lead to erratic behavior from your team. When information gets diluted, and communication seems scarce, you may be setting yourself up for failure. Using divide-and-rule as a strategy to stifle communication and entrench cliques will always boomerang; avoid it; don’t build gossip mills, build think tanks.
• Build Openness: Openness in any relationship be it personal or official builds respect, trust, and clarity. Leaders must be clear on what they want, how they want them and who they want, and why they want the same. Being shrouded in secrecy might lead to mystery, however perpetrating mystery in place of openness would fuel discord, disharmony, and probably a revolt that might topple your rule. While I do not advocate naivety, being open in this sense means setting and living by the same rules, conduct, and regulations without favoritism.
• Nurture Integrity: Leaders who exude integrity in their conduct encourage followers to do the same. You cannot give what you do not have. If and when you show integrity, you are unconsciously building and cultivating a seed of fidelity that when nurtured will grow into a behemoth of principled and purposeful team members that say what they mean and mean what they say. There is no substitute for integrity and that is why you see that as a core value in almost every organization even if they don’t mean it. Nobody wants to associate with anyone that lacks integrity.
•   Respect For Personal Views Ensure Ethical Performance.: Leaders are not slave drivers; they are privileged partners that have been thrust with the duty of care to show direction., Don’t abuse the trust and privilege that was given to you to be the face of the movement or the team. Respect is reciprocal and this must show in your conduct and utterances. If you have to remind your team that you are the leader, I suggest that you take a step back and retrace your step. You might be ripe for some new learnings on leadership and team management.

As you read this piece, chances are that a lot of leaders are dealing with team apathy, lack of unity of purpose, and in severe cases; a breakdown in communication and lack of trust between them and their team. Taking time to review the performance of your team and the impact of your leadership on their results will allow you to take a critical look at what you have been doing with a view of taking things up a notch higher. Lead your team by trusting them. Leadership is a position of trust. If people trust you to lead them, why would you not reciprocate this gesture?