According to research from Gallup , 24 percent of employees are actively disengaged as a result of poor management, leading to teams that are less productive, less profitable, and more likely to cause turnover. And that turnover adds up quick: translating into nearly two times the annual salary of every employee who quits.
Early in your career, you might exercise authority by being the go-to person on a certain subject within your organization, or by actively listening and building consensus among your team. As you advance, you may exert influence by knowing how to articulate the direction you think the company should head in next. Influencing others requires building trust with your colleagues. Focus on understanding their motivations and encourage them to share their opinions.
You can then use that knowledge to make change and show that their voice matters. Seek quality information to base your approach on. If I were coaching you, I might point you toward practical, research-based articles on encouraging proactivity , developing learning agility , and facilitating learning on your team.
Identify measures of success. What would increased proactivity in identifying and solving problems look like in practice? Ground yourself with an intention. You commit to learning to support proactive behaviors. Whenever you meet with team members, you call this intention to mind so that it functions like a beacon to guide you, keep you on course, and prevent you from sliding back into your habit of jumping in with the answer if no one else comes forward right away.
Choose behaviors to implement. Seek feedback. Ask them to let you know whenever you do something that either hurts or helps. Based on this feedback, commit to refrain from criticizing ideas and instead ask team members to assess the pros and cons of each idea. What excited me about this experience was the necessity of getting things done through others, and gaining their trust and commitment to succeed in every mission we undertook together.
All of us learned the power of a group of talented, well-trained individuals in attaining an objective where each one knew his role and executed it flawlessly. Well-prepared, well-educated, well-motivated individuals perform well in every part of life. Business should be more of a partnership, rather than master and employee.
Leading by example is by far the most important characteristic of a good leader. Being decisive, firm but fair, and setting well defined goals for yourself and others are also very important. Every successful leader must articulate a clear vision in a way that everyone in the corporation understands. Integrity and candor in dealing with your management team, employees, and investors, together with treating customers and your community fairly and with that same degree of integrity, is to me the real key to leadership.
There is little need to take credit for success. That was a key take-away message from my years at the Harvard Business School. George P. Baker was the dean of Harvard Business School during the s. He was a leading authority on transportation and the organization of business and government. They have a clear vision they can communicate to others, and they make decisions easily. They have high standards, clearly articulated, to which they hold their people.
A successful leader maintains an image at all times. People are following you, and you need to always be out in front for them. A good leader must manage the present in the context of the future, and keep both balls in the air. He needs to be a coach, a leader, an inspirer, and a taskmaster.
He must respect his people. He has to trust and mistrust — trust but verify — at the same time sort of a blend of several forms of managerial schizophrenia. Successful leaders seem to have several common characteristics. Most of all, they really know the business and the environment in which it exists. They are often good spokesmen or women and, most important, they seem to enable people and help them perform. Really good leaders are rare. A business can become successful if it focuses on delivering exceptional performance to clients.
Personality characteristics do not define a leader. A leader must present a recognizable objective and explain why achieving the goal is important.
No one wants to follow a person who does not know where he is going or is unable to explain why achieving the goal is important. Each person brings a unique set of skills and personality traits and thrives when their bosses recognize them for who they are and how they can contribute to the team effort. It is no coincidence that the focus on T-shaped professionals arose at the same time that many companies were becoming more matrixed in their organizational design. Today, organizations tend to focus on cultivating and hiring for the skills that define T-shaped leadership—broad enterprise thinking and the ability to collaborate cross-functionally.
We focus more on developing soft skills and expect people to bring deep functional expertise and then learn the business as they go along.
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