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According Brian O'Nail, the author of Test Your Leadership Skills, "leadership is influencing people to get things done to a standard and quality above their norm. And doing it willingly."
As an element in social interaction, leadership is a complex activity involving:
- a process of influence
- actors who are both leaders and followers
- a range of possible outcomes – the achievement of goals, but also the commitment of individuals to such goals, the enhancement of group cohesion and the reinforcement of change of organizational culture.
Building Better Leaders through Attributes
Leadership attributes are the inner or personal qualities that constitute effective leadership. These attributes include a large array of characteristics such as values, character, motives, habits, traits, motives, style, behaviors, and skills.
Forming and Inspiring a Shared Vision
As a leader, you must envision the future and passionately believe that you can make a difference. You must see a changed world beyond the time horizon, create an ideal and unique image of what it could become and believe that your dreams can become reality. You must open eyes to your followers and lift their spirits. Through your attitude, magnetism and persuasion, you must enlist others in your dreams, breathe life into your vision and get people to see exciting opportunities and possibilities for the future.
Leadership as a Source of Competitive Business Advantage
Entrepreneurial leadership is imperative for molding a group of people into a team, shaping them into a force that serves as a sustainable business advantage. Effective leaders have an inspiring vision. Foresight and change anticipation is their hallmark. Leaders know how to make people function in a collaborative fashion, and how to motivate them to excel their performance. Leaders also know how to balance the individual team member's quest with the goal of producing synergy – an outcome that exceeds the sum of individual inputs. Leaders require that their team members forego the quest for personal best in concert with the team effort, write Mark Stevens in Extreme Management.
→ Entrepreneurial Leader: 4 Specific Attributes
Inspiring People and Helping Them Achieve More
Effective leaders supply a shared vision; and inspire people to achieve more than they may ever have dreamed possible. People change when they are emotionally engaged and committed.
To inspire, you must both create resonance and move people with a compelling vision. You must embody what you ask of others, and be able to articulate a shared vision in a way that inspires others to act. Your must offer a sense of common purpose beyond the day-to-day tasks, making work exciting.
Learning to Lead
Effective leaders recognize that what they know is very little in comparison to what they still need to learn.
To be more proficient in pursuing and achieving objectives, you should be open to new ideas, insights, and revelations that can lead to better ways to accomplishing goals. This continuous learning process can be exercised, in particular, through engaging yourself in a constant dialogue with your peers, advisers, consultants, team members, suppliers, customers, and competitors.
Leading others is not simply a matter of style, or following some how-to guides or recipes. Ineffectiveness of leaders seldom results from a lack of know-how or how-to, nor it is typically due to inadequate managerial skills. Leadership is even not about creating a great vision. It is about creating conditions under which all your followers can perform independently and effectively toward a common objective.
James O'Tool, a noted management theorist proposes a new vision of leadership in the business world – a values-based leadership that is not only fair and just, but also highly effective in today's complex organizations. It is based on:
- your ideas and values
- your understanding of the differing and conflicting needs of your followers
- your ability to energize followers to pursue a better goal that they had thought possible
- your skills in creating a values-based umbrella large enough to accommodate the various interests of followers, but focused enough to direct all their energies in pursuit of a common good.
Leadership Style
Leadership style is the pattern of behavior used by a leader in attempting to influence group members and make decisions regarding the mission, strategy, and operations of group activities.
Positioning of a Leader
Anyone who gets a leadership position has not made it. It is only the beginning. Being a leader doesn't make you one. After you get to be the leader of a group, you are going to have to do a lot to earn the acceptance of the group members and have an influence on their behavior.
To be a leader you have to be first to get into the mind of the prospect – and then follow the strategies to stay there. The essential ingredient in securing the leadership position is getting into the mind first. The essential ingredient in keeping that position is reinforcing the original concept.
Leading People Is All About Perceptions
Leadership – setting goals, communicating, teamwork, influencing people, etc. – is all about perceptions. The essence of leading is coming to grips with people's perceptions.
Emotional Task of the Leader
"A leader is a dealer in hope." ~ Napoleon
Research show that 67% of the essential competencies required for effective leadership today are emotional competencies.
Great leaders move people – they work through emotions. They have found effective ways to understand and improve the way they handle their own and their followers' emotions.
As a leader, you should act as your group's emotional guide. When you drive emotions positively you bring out everyone's best. You ignite people's passion, inspire the best in them, and create resonance. The key to making this work lies in your competencies of emotional intelligence (EI): how you handle yourself and your relationships.
Coaching – a Vital Skill for Leaders
The new breed of leaders recognizes that autocracy no longer works, yet that employee empowerment alone is not enough. The skills of coaching have lately been rediscovered by more effective organizations and teams. Your cannot be a leader without a following, and you have to delegate appropriately. The leader is best placed to enhance the performance and learning abilities, on the job, of colleagues. Coaching aims to enhance these abilities.
NLP Solutions: Pacing and Leading
Pacing is having the flexibility to meet another person in their model of the world, rather than making them come to yours. Matching body language, voice tonality and words, and respecting beliefs and values are examples of what NLP, the Technology of Achievement calls pacing. You need a strong sense of self to pace others well.
Pacing establishes a bridge. Once you have that, you can lead another person to other possibilities. "By matching body language with an angry or upset person, for example, you acknowledge what is important to him, so he no longer needs to insist on the validity of his experience and becomes more available. You then lead him to a calmer state by moderating your voice and changing your posture. You cannot lead without first pacing and gaining rapport," write Joseph O'Connor and Ian McDermott in Ways of NLP.
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