Effective leadership

By Danielle Grant, Director, LeaderShape

Leadership and management are two entirely different (but complementary) things but, too often, effective leadership is simply assumed to result from good management practice. This isn’t the case.

In the past, it was believed that invariably a leader must know everything and tell people what to do. This may have worked once, but society has moved on and leadership practices now need to catch up. Leaders need to earn the respect and loyalty of their followers, even as their desire for continuous learning, engagement, involvement and recognition increases.

Self-awareness

The need for self-awareness has increased as leaders look to maximise the potential, productivity and loyalty of their followers. In order to do this, leaders need to ask themselves the following questions.

• Do you think or feel your way to solutions?

• Do you like to leave things open or make quick decisions?

• When making decisions, do you think rationally, intuitively or both?

• How do you best learn – through reading, just doing, planning or trying alternatives?

• Are you competitive?

• Are you optimistic?

• Do you like change?

• What are your values and moral principles?

Self-management

Leaders who can understand their own emotions and know how to handle them effectively can significantly improve their own performance as well as that of others. Think of the person who shows anger in a meeting for little reason, then leaves the room unaware of how they have affected the performance of those who experienced the outburst.

Leadership styles

Traditional leadership (based on knowledge and power) can be difficult to shake off, but most good leaders successfully develop a leadership style that suits their own personality and environment.

Choosing the right leadership style at any particular time depends on the context and the people being led.

A good leader should be able to call upon all six styles (visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pace-setting and commanding) to cover the full range of contexts in which a leader might find himself. But nobody is naturally able to use all six styles intuitively: they have to be learned by developing new behaviours.

Performance-enhancing culture

Many leaders believe they have a direct impact on the performance of an organisation. The truth is that, except when leading the negotiations of an acquisition or major contract, they can only influence organisational performance. The single most important thing that a leader can do is to set the right environment, thereby setting the whole tone for the development or change of the organisation’s culture.

Leaders who want to enable the development of a performance-enhancing culture need to create a climate where change, honesty, transparency and mutual respect are the norm. The leader must set the example, which lays the foundation for followers to create the culture which, in turn, determines the level of performance. One enabler of a performance-enhancing culture is increasing the emphasis on achievement and support structures.

Leader-follower contract

Strangely, leaders rarely clarify their expectations of their followers and this frequently leads to misunderstandings. To enable an individual to perform effectively, there needs to be a clear mutual understanding of expected behaviours.

A leader’s responsibilities include:

• delegating;

• empowering;

• supporting;

• developing and maximising potential;

• sharing as much information as possible;

• delivering on promises on time;

• being actively involved; and

• avoiding a blame culture.

A follower’s responsibilities include:

• taking personal responsibility;

• accepting accountability;

• being self-disciplined; and

• showing initiative

360-degree feedback

The real barrier to getting people to change is finding out what to change and how. In this respect, 360-degree assessment is a vital ingredient in informing an individual of his key strengths and development needs. Myriad assessment tools just don’t do the job effectively and suffer from poor process and follow up.

The assessment should measure behaviours – not skills – and be confidential to the individual, with all inputs (apart from the line manager) given anonymously. It should be supported with an effective implementation process to enable development of the key behavioural changes identified.

Some leaders resist such an assessment – perhaps through fear of the findings. Overcome that barrier and you are well on your way to excellence.

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Max Goodison with this article.