Re-defining Leadership is Imperative
Leadership, in a business setting or in life, is an art that motivates a group of people to work collaboratively towards a specific goal or mission. In an organization, leadership can mean the management’s ability to help teams achieve their goals within the set deadlines, make faster decisions, cope with competitive challenges, and inspire all team players to work at their best.
In the traditional leadership styles, neither did the workers have a say nor could they ever imagine remote work modules. The managers used to take important business decisions without taking any major inputs from the workers.
However, it’s time for a positive change. Today, leadership has taken a new shape and form, wherein the opinions of every team member matter. With new philosophies like servant leadership, leaders are able to focus on the individual growth, development, and well-being of each employee.
Integral Aspects of Leadership Today
With numerous technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and advanced analytics, workplaces have undergone digital transformations. Today, leadership has grown more flexible, digitized, and highly adaptable. Leaders are developing a more serving attitude to cater to the individual needs of their team players, thus enhancing beer collaboration and interaction within the team.
In modern-day organizations, employees’ opinions are given utmost importance during the decision-making processes, to help them feel more motivated and appreciated. Human Resource professionals are continuously building employee engagement to develop healthy work cultures.
Today, leadership has grown more people-oriented and collaborative in nature, as opposed to the autocratic leadership styles that were prevalent a few years back. Companies have started realizing the ill-effects of such dominating leadership norms, in which the higher authorities used to pass orders to the subordinates for carrying out certain tasks.
To ensure the highest productivity, growth, and success, the modernized organizations of today need to have the following key aspects in their leadership styles –
- Maintain Transparency
- Learning Agility
- Promoting Effective Communication
- Practicing Integrity
- Expressing Gratitude
- Focusing on Individual Member’s Growth and Development
Even if you think you are a natural leader from birth, you need to cultivate your natural abilities and skills to convert them into high-quality leadership that would benefit the company. In fact, according to a study, only 10% of people are born leaders. The rest 20% only show some leadership qualities, which need to be polished to be eligible for leading an entire team.
How Leadership Can Bring Changes to an Organization?
The success of a company is directly proportional to the productivity and efficiency of its teams. And the success of any team depends on effective leadership and collective responsibility of its members. Therefore, it becomes necessary to manage everybody’s needs, strengths, and weaknesses tactfully.
Leadership helps team members to focus their attention on the important tasks at hand. It enables them to prioritize their work and accomplish them faster without missing a deadline. Effective leadership also focuses on streamlining the workflow of individual group members to maximize productivity and efficiency.
Leaders are also responsible for encouraging their team members to grow and develop on personal and professional levels. An ideal leadership lets every team player acquire new skills and knowledge, which is both exciting and encouraging. It will keep teams highly motivated and give them a good reason to come back the next day.
Additionally, modern-day organizations believe in maintaining healthy relationships among team members through effective communication and transparency. This is why organizing team outings and activities would foster personal growth, develop strong interpersonal relationships, and build trust among colleagues.
In short, leadership is all about fostering team spirit, productivity, trust among members, and the overall success of the company. To bring a positive change in the organization, we need to break the age-old management models and change our leadership styles for long-term success.
Tips to Build Successful Leaders for Your Organization
No matter whether it’s a team of 5 or 100, leadership is never easy. Without having the right knowledge and skills, it’s difficult to bring everyone on the same page, especially when different team players are divided into their opinions and perspectives.
So, to build successful leaders in your organization, the following tips should help –
- Maintain Integrity and Honesty
Ensure your leaders are practicing integrity and honesty at various levels. They need to be transparent and be able to influence their team members, developing a highly productive team and effective leaders. Integrity and honesty are essential leadership traits that help to create stronger bonds between leaders and their subordinates.
- Foster Self-Growth and Self-Development
Leaders should offer every employee the space to grow and acquire new skills, both at the personal and professional levels. They should be able to promote the values of self-awareness, self-worth, and self-confidence among team members to promote greater efficiency.
- Focus on Effective Communication
Communication is a major aspect of leadership, and team leaders should encourage effective interaction and engagement among team members for higher productivity. Right from coaching team members to let them have healthy communications with one another, leaders must be able to encourage everyone to work towards a common goal.
- Delegate Effectively
Leaders should be able to delegate the right tasks to the right employees based on their strengths and weaknesses. Needless to say, team leaders should have the ability to analyze the string and weak points of their team members.
Every employee has a certain level of expertise, skillset, and knowledge. Your company’s leaders need to figure out the hidden talents and potential of every team player to ensure effective delegation. To gain a better understanding of that, leaders need to be more interactive with their employees on a personal level.
- Learn Agility
Ideal leaders should be able to learn agility to know how to face certain challenges and unexpected situations without affecting business continuity. Agile leaders and teams can help an organization sustain itself in the long run.
Build more confident leaders who can come up with quick but effective solutions in times of crisis. This won’t happen overnight, though. You need to ensure everybody in your team is able to learn agility through experience, effort, and, above all, practice.
- Empathize With Your Employees
Leaders should be able to empathize with every team member, thus developing healthy relationships among leaders and followers. It’s not only a vital aspect of leadership, but it also acts as a driving force in creating better employee satisfaction and productivity.
Team leaders need to go on a personal level with the employees and understand their pleasure and pain points. Leaders should also be willing to help their employees cope with tough situations. On the contrary, they must also try to understand what makes the team players happy. Such empathic behaviors in leadership would definitely improve the work cultures and bring more success to the organization.
- Express Gratitude and Be Humble
As per the servant leadership philosophy, leaders should be humble enough to serve their team members and express their gratitude for being a constant support in challenging times. Besides, studies show that around 79% of employees would quit if they don’t receive the appreciation they deserve.
It’s imperative to stay humble and put aside your ego, no matter how much power you have. Being an ideal leader, you should be able to inspire your followers and that comes from humility, gratitude, and appreciation.
Closing Thoughts
Change is always difficult to adapt to, but it’s necessary for the better. Effective leadership is nothing but helping team players adapt to a new environment easier and faster to ensure business continuity.
It’s important to abandon the age-old management norms that weren’t really healthy for the work environment and embrace more constructive leadership styles, such as servant leadership. Pragna Solutions helps organizations redefine your organization’s leadership models in a positive manner to ramp up employee engagement and success in the upcoming years. With innovative staffing strategies backed with data, they have helped multiple global clients build leadership within the organization to drive organization success.