Leader's Way 1

The nuts and bolts of leadership is your ability to get groups of people accomplishing astounding things together that individuals working alone could not accomplish.

It’s entirely dependent on your ability to communicate, listen to and inspire others and limited by your ability to adapt to the needs of others so that they actually do understand what you expect from them, truly do feel that they are heard by you and really are inspired to do what’s needed.

Leadership is all about how well you understand people and the first person you need to understand intensely well is… you.  Leadership requires self-awareness.  In order to develop a clear picture of yourself, you have to be a bit of a scientist - observing, recording and testing out new hypotheses so you can gather new feedback and data about yourself, your impact and your options. 

Here are some high level questions for you to start observing and recording:

• What’s your communication style?

• What’s your decision making style? 

• What are your beliefs about what success looks like?

• How do you recognize a great idea when you hear it?

• How do you like to receive input and feedback?

• How do you manage ambiguity? 

• How do you cope with change?

• What environment do you tend to create so that great work can get done?

• What do you look like when you’re stressed? 

• What impact do your stress behaviours have on your team in the short and the long term?

We’ll be delving more deeply over the next several blog articles into each of these topics so if you don’t instantly have the answers, no worries.  Keep following along and we’ll discover some great stuff together that will help you better communicate, listen to and inspire your team and allow you to adapt to their needs as you go.  ie, be a great leader.