Leadership takes on various forms and can be attributed to those who lead a project, those who lead a team or those that lead a country. With such varying degrees of leadership it can often be difficult to identify what it takes to be a good leader.
Whether you’re an aspiring leader or a leader seeking advice, how can you break it down into simple terms, when there are so many conflicting views on the subject?
Any google search will see you overwhelmed with responses … ‘Seven Leadership Skills Needed in the Workplace’, ‘Leadership Skills You Need’, ‘Top 10 Leadership Skills’ and the list goes on. According to one person, you might already be be able to tick off the top ten skills leaders need to be successful. However, according to someone else, you might only have two of the five key skills.
With so much written about leadership toady, the only thing that’s clear is that everyone seems to have an opinion on what it takes to be a leader. We invest so much time and energy into ratcheting up how smart we need to be to lead that we’re almost at the point of exhaustion. When did it all get so complicated?
In simple terms, leadership has two key areas: (1) Drive business numbers so that it’s profitable, and (2) Provide an environment where people can commit to excellence.
If we unpack it a little, leadership can become a skill we can all develop, regardless of our title or level in the organisation.
When it comes to leading people, leaders needs five essential elements to create the right environment for them to perform at their best. These include:
- Focus
- Judgement
- Tension
- Coaching
- Review
FOCUS revolves around your vision for the business and how best the members of your team align themselves with it. This can be broken down into direction on achieving the dream, direction on achieving desires and direction on doing what needs to be done to achieve the vision overall.
JUDGEMENT is about responsibility, both personally and professionally and is the basis for determining one’s character and how they make decisions.
TENSION is related to your ability to move people out of being comfortable, where only average results are achieved to a committed environment, where excellence thrives.
COACHING is directly aligned with results and your ability to identify what’s up, what matters and what people need to do now to achieve outcomes.
REVIEW is a combination of attitude, actions and results and is an essential element in leadership. As a leader, your ability to work with your team in critically reviewing and analysing performance will better prepare you for building an effective response.
As a leader, you need to structure how you spend your energy around these five essential elements to create rhythm, tools and processes to bring it to life.
Leaders who create an environment where team members can commit to being at their best, create a culture of accountability, which in turn supports winners at all levels.
As a leader, if you’re not doing this, then what are you doing?
If you need help and/or support in creating the right environment for your people, give us a call.
