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Obviously, any manager can sit at a desk and delegate. But with effective leadership, employees are more productive, happier and are the proudest of their company. As a result, profits are maximized.
The key is to use the right strategies and to avoid mistakes. Leaders constantly assess their skills and avoid missteps.
Typical red flags:
- When queried about goals and priorities, employees are inconsistent and provide different answers.
- The manager fails to show adequate interest in employees. For example, they fail to have three or more weekly conversations about non-work topics with employees.
- Employees are tentative in carrying out tasks and are afraid to fail.
- Employees don’t feel the manager is approachable.
- Employees don’t feel management takes an interest in their welfare.
It’s little wonder such new leaders fail.
Ten best practices that enable successful leadership:
1. Honest, open communication with employees.
By fully understanding employees, leaders use customized communication techniques with each person.
For example, does an employee like in-person chats, texting, emailing or telephoning? Plus, leaders are great listeners and learn about an employee’s aspirations and goals.
7 Management Tips – Communication with Difficult Employees
2. Excellence in developing personal connections.
Leaders learn employees’ interests, personalities, strengths, weaknesses, hobbies and lifestyle preferences.
Attributes include empathy, compassion, humility, positivity and purpose leading to trust, cultural strength in accountability and high performance.
3. Empowering employees’ personal and professional growth.
In essence, leaders are cheerleaders.
They even set aside budgets for employee growth in skills and opportunities, as well as encourage creativity and freedom.
For Business Success, How to Keep Frontline Employees Happy
4. Consistent positivity for an engaged staff.
Leaders see every situation, even negative, as opportunities. They envision three positive aspects of a problem before they analyze the root causes.
They show confidence and enthusiasm by continually focusing on solutions and even recalling past actions that worked.
5. Excellent teaching skills.
Leaders know when to demonstrate or teach rather than just telling employees what to do.
Coaching is a necessary skill to encourage employees to take ownership of their activities. Leaders coach employees to recognize choices. They also develop a highly collaborative, and dedicated workplace.
6. Set expectations and goals.
When explaining objectives, leaders encourage feedback and questions.
Once employees know the company’s vision and how their achievement of goals will lead to overall organization success, employees become more engaged.
Also, continually revisit goals. Make changes when needed and discuss them with your employees.
Best Manager Conduct in Setting Goals for the Team
7. Give constructive feedback and performance reviews.
Be direct and honest in your feedback to guide your employees in the principles you want to achieve.
In performance reviews, it’s important to focus on accomplishments as well as shortcomings. In all scenarios, explain how employee performance affects the company in the marketplace.
8. Seek feedback.
Leaders conduct self assessments, and seek input about their leadership approach from colleagues and employees. But they don’t rely on online courses.
For truly critical insight and an eye for sustainable change, seek counsel in leadership coaching. Allow sufficient time to integrate, process and review the information and your progress.
9. Enhance your emotional intelligence.
To fully understand processes in change and innovation, emotional intelligence is vital. In other words, be open to new ways of thinking and how to approach your situations.
Encourage input from your employees. Consider their ideas. You’ll be amazed at their wisdom and your ultimate success.
For High Performance Create an Emotionally Intelligent Culture
10. Self-assessment.
For the most important best practice, we can all learn a great deal from the philosophy of Socrates, who lived from 469 to 399 B.C.E. He is famous for writing: “Know thyself.”
Do you understand what motivates you? The usual motivations are the desire to lead people to success, achieve prestige and/or money. These are all good.
Plus, ideally, you’ll want to make a difference in your marketplace and the world.
But most importantly, you must know your own strengths and weaknesses. In this way, you can hone your strengths and take efficient steps to alleviate your weaknesses.
Avoid leadership mistakes
In addition to knowing how to act, it’s just as important to avoid five typical mistakes:
1. Micromanaging
Micromanagers hurt team morale and performance. Remember, all good employees want to able to act and make decisions.
2. Being rude or inconsiderate
Being too abrupt, giving too-little notice when rescheduling meetings, or constantly assigning tight deadlines are all detrimental.
3. Disregarding concerns and suggestions
Trust is eroded when feedback is ignored. Strong listening skills are imperative to becoming an outstanding leader.
4. Failure in keeping commitments or in follow-through
Employees don’t respect bosses who continually fail to keep commitments.
5. Not taking responsibility for mistakes
Mistakes are being human. But for leadership, bosses need to admit to errors, not engage in pointing fingers, and take proactive steps to make corrections.
Conclusion
Some people have great upbringing from astute parents and for them leadership comes naturally. Most have to start in management and develop leadership skills. Success is achieved with dedicated hard work, and thinking and acting strategically.
From the Coach’s Corner, see these related leadership strategies:
To Avoid Management Landmines, Assess Leadership Skills — Good managers are successful in managing employees. However, if you aspire to true leadership, first learn how to manage your own thinking and practices. Six questions to ask yourself.
Coach Average Employees to Top Performances — Success in sports is often analogous for business. So take a lesson from successful sports teams into recruiting and coaching employees. Here’s how.
For Profits, High-Performing Cultures Have 7 Traits — Why is it that some company cultures have teams of high performers who generate profits? Such team members collectively excel because they share seven inter-related traits.
Lead by Example: Be a Manager Always Learning to Inspire — Training-development specialist Emma Parcell explains: 1. What is Leading by Example? 2. Six Ways of Leading by Example. 3. Significance of Leading by Example. 4. Project Management Certification.
How You Can Take Risks to Capitalize on Opportunities — Many factors are at play when it comes to risk-taking and embracing change to take advantage of opportunities.
