The world needs great leaders, your company also needs great leaders, and your family needs a great leader too.
Anybody can be a leader, but not anyone can be a good one. According to Vince Lombardi:
“Leaders are made; they are not born.”
Vince Lombardi
Making a good leader requires excellent leadership skills. Good leadership comes with great responsibility. The best thing about it is you will have the opportunity to make another future leader out of the leadership skill you possess.
Honing your leadership skill will not take you overnight, but it takes overtime to be a good one. And as the cliche says, learning is continuous, so thus developing your leadership skill should improve every day of your life. And to develop your skill, here are the best tips to help you become a good leader, as told by expert business and executive coaches from Coach.me’s coaching directory.
1. Understand Your Leadership Style
Before you start to lead, it is crucial that you know and understand your leadership style. Know your strengths, your weaknesses, and the areas for improvement. This is one way to assess your skills and your qualities. When you know all these, you will start assessing and understand which areas to improve. By then, you can now bridge the gap, fill the space, and begin to lead efficiently.
2. Show empathy in tangible ways
Being a good leader, you should be ready to listen to even the most absurd problem that your people bring to the table. If they share their concern, they trust you, and they expect you to be a great source of help. Listening to their problems does not necessarily mean you can always give them the solutions, but by listening, you let them know that you want to understand them and see things from their perspective.
Your response might not always please them, but they feel accepted when you empathize with your people.
3. Respect the past, and build the future
People have loyalties to their past organization; when you lead a new team, honor what the past organization has. It doesn’t make sense to demean everyone and everything who does not conform to you. After all, they’ve reached their milestones before you came.
When you start building a team, you need their loyalty and don’t expect it to be given to you if you do not respect them. Before you join the company, the team already has success, and you can not discount that. To build your team’s future, honor their past success, and walk with them to win.
4. Be clear with your vision
Your vision is not only for you but for the entire team; that’s why you must let them be aware of it. Making your team know the company’s vision gives them that sense of involvement and importance. They would feel that each of them is important in realizing your goal.
Your vision makes your people excited and focused and act with clarity on their tasks. So always share it with your team and allow them to take part in your success.
5. Always tell the truth
Truth matters regardless of how uncomfortable it is; always tell the truth and nothing else. Truth to tell may include your company’s status about the business, your team, or even about yourself. Pretending to be otherwise won’t change the situation. And know that addressing a truth is better than beating a lie.
Telling the truth also means being transparent to your team. Your team can tell if you are withholding something. Don’t make the team suspicious and uncertain. It would just make the people search for more truth. Tell your team where you are heading, what you are doing, give them the rules of the game and work together forward.
6. Lead with character
When you lead, lead with character. Leaders with character are influential because they are knowledgeable, respected, admired, and trusted. They need no harsh rules to implement to enforce compliance and gain respect and loyalty from the team.
7. Be human, not humanoid
Humans have feelings, and humanoids don’t. If you think leadership needs no emotions, think again. Because in the workplace, you are dealing with humans who have emotions. Let the feelings that flow in the workplace be positive. A workplace with positive emotions manifests a harmonious working relationship, so invest in relationships with respect and witness how your team works hard and grows.
8. Act Accordingly
Being a leader requires you to follow certain etiquette with your character and your personality. Be consistent and intentional in the way you act, the way you dress, or the way you speak. Be aware of your posture, like the way you sit, stand, and walk, and always act appropriately and decently. Be cautious also of how you speak, including your choices of words.
9. It’s not about you; it’s about them
Think of yourself last. Good leadership is not about you, but it’s about your team. Not about your promotion, not about being right, or projecting the best of you. But make leadership about the organization, the people, and the team. This would encourage belongingness to everyone.
10. Be a Role Model
A good leader is a role model. Put your words into action, in short, ‘walk the talk”. Be an ideal influencer or a transformational leader. A transformational leader epitomizes the behaviors that they encourage the team to follow. And thus, expect the team to emulate the behavior.
11. Be Passionate
Great leaders have a genuine passion and enthusiasm for every team’s effort and do not focus only on results. Let your team know that you value and appreciate each contribution to the team, immerse yourself, and understand each contribution. You can never be passionate if you do not have the passion for learning about it. Take part in knowing about something.
12. Listen and Communicate Effectively
Never assume; always communicate. A transformational or a great leader provides everyone space to talk, and you have the ears to listen. By doing such, you are empowering your team to be involved and motivated to achieve the vision.
Express verbally and non-verbally. By keeping your communication lines open, you can encourage understanding, higher quality of work, and trust between employers and employees.
13. Have a Positive Attitude
A positive attitude is contagious; likewise, a negative does also. Spread positivity to inspire your team. You do not want to see your followers discouraged and uninspired if you are apathetic and disheartened. So keep that spirit on, be optimistic, and spread positivity at all times.
In a positive environment, people are inspired to work and deliver because of the positivity you brought into the workplace. Also, a workforce embodied with positive emotions has a personal relationship as co-employees and as a family; they have mutual concerns and respect.
Thus it begets cooperation and understanding among them. It is just so inspiring to be in a workplace with positive emotions. And all these have to be initiated by a good leader. The leader has to set the values, and thus he should have that emotion to give to everyone.
14. Give Rewards and Recognition
If people are appreciated, they get inspired, so make it your best practice to give rewards and recognition to those who deserve them. More so, rewarded people feel valued and essential in the team, and it’s no surprise that they perform better at work. So never fail to recognize them and reward their efforts, successes, and milestones.
Leadership is more than a pursuit of influence; it is about realizing a goal while creating happy people.
15. Encourage people to contribute
Let your team know that every idea is welcome and appreciated, while the final say remains to be with you. People who are encouraged to contribute and be heard would be more involved and have a higher sense of accountability. They would become more creative in problem-solving because they know they have something to contribute.
Applying these tips to your leadership style would make you a good leader in making another good future leader. And that makes sense of being a good leader.
