08 May Revising the 5 Areas of Leadership
If you have been on one of our Leadership courses, you will have explored the different areas within leadership in great detail. Sometimes we need to step back and revise the core elements to bring back focus to solve problems and re-establish our thoughts and behaviours.
Revising the 5 Areas of Leadership
Personal Performance – Before you can effectively lead others you need to concentrate on your own beliefs, thinking and behaviours. You need to understand yourself – and find your strengths and also issues to work on – before you can lead others. If you commit to your goals and dreams, and can show others by your actions and striving for excellence, you can be the role model, mentor and leaders others need to be inspired to follow. By understanding your own behaviours you can change them for the best so that you have confidence in your abilities and how you carry out your ideas. For people to be inspired by you, you need to be inspiring.
Personal Leadership – When you have identified your goals, and are striving for excellence in your own behaviours, you can work on finding your leadership style. How do you want to lead others as a role model? Why do you want people to follow you? What is and how do you share your own values and your core or “Why” – can you influence others to buy into your raison d’etre?
Leading Individuals – Building Relationships with your team is vital so that you can achieve your aims as a leader. People don’t want to know how much you know, they want to know how much you care. They need to know you know them, so as the leader you need to learn to understand them – find out what motivates them, build loyalty and trust.
Building relationships also enables you to Set Standards: “this is what I expect from you and what you can expect from me.” You also need to know a person to be able to unlock their potential and rewarding for excellent standards achieved and behaviours shown.
By rewarding good results and behaviours, this gives the leader permission to correct behaviour and inspire and enable an individual to improve. Building relationships gives us permission to correct.
Leading the team -The next step of leadership is leading individuals to put them together as a team, and understanding the team dynamics and how they will work well together. A leader needs to make sure people’s skills and strengths can complement each other to build the best team dynamics. Even a supposed perfect team will have conflict because we are all unique but it can be handled in the right way. By accepting learning opportunities from that conflict, it should help us to grow and develop as a leader in our own strengths and in establishing relationships within the team.
Leading organisations is the 5th area of leadership. Although many elements are required to ensure this area is successful, the vital ingredient is:
Communication, communication, communication!
There are many different types of communication which contribute to successful leadership of an organisation – presentation skills, creativity and innovation, strategic thinking, change and transition. They can all be prioritised at different times, and feature more prominently or less so depending on what is happening internally and externally.
At Advance, our clients often discuss the importance of transition in affecting a whole organisation and this starts with the leader. If an organisation instigates change, it is the people who have to go through the transition, and it is imperative the leader takes the people through a transition as smoothly and as quickly as possible, and in the best possible way. Once through the transition the people can be more productive and motivated again.
Each of these five areas of leadership builds from the one before. As we learn on our Advance courses, by changing our own beliefs and thoughts we can establish positive improved behaviours which become habits – which in turn, empower our own leadership traits and inspire others to change themselves for the better. We develop ourselves to develop others who enable the team and finally the organisation to develop and be the best it can be.