Learn how to become an exemplary leader.
To be an exemplary leader, you must be able to establish just and nurturing relationships to cultivate not only your employees’ proficiency but emotional state as well. You would be surprised how motivation can turn your employees to responsible people who consider your trade as their own.
This article will help you learn how to achieve just that. You will also learn:
- How to be an elegant leader
- The different forms of great profit you will make when you listen to your employees
- How swearing can affect your business and your people
A good leader guides employees toward pursuing a company’s shared mission.
We all know about the ‘evil boss’ characters we see in classic movies revolving around the hard office life of a thriving employee who gets bullied by someone of a higher ranking. You would know that it is the ‘evil boss’ when he acts unapproachable, daunting, and offensively barking orders at nervous employees.
Good leadership is nowhere near that description. It is actually the direct opposite of that lame excuse of a leader. A great leadership is not masked by rudeness or disrespect. Instead, it is governed by kindness, approachability, supportiveness, and motivating presence. And a good leader provides values, vision, and goals to his people. These three will be their guide toward professionalism and outstanding performance.
It is your task to make your people well-aware of the company’s values. Do you aim to be family-friendly, client-oriented, or the company known to advance the rights of animals? It depends on your company’s values, really. You just have to make it understood by your people. And once they see the values as their own, they will start acting based on them.
Aside from the values, you should make your employees understand your vision. It is vital in your success that your people know what they are working toward. Is your vision to target a wide range of customers or a specific group of people? Making this known to your employees would guarantee teamwork, especially when they start knowing the vision by heart.
And finally, make known to them the company goals that you must outline. After all, they will be the ones to embody those goals. If your employees do not know what your target is, it will be impossible to achieve that ambition.
Having engaged employees who are invested enough to treat the company as their own is the dream. This is the kind of environment where the company’s success becomes their mission, because it is what they want to accomplish willingly.
Some leaders would reward ownership shares to their workers for them to own stocks in the company. By doing so, your people will get motivated to work to generate profits for their own benefits. As a result, the company wins.
In 1950, Herman Miller set an example by encouraging his employees to enhance the productivity of his company by rewarding them a cut from the gains they generate. By implementing this, the company saved $12M of expenses in 1987 that lasted for a year. And not just that, Herman Miller remains cited in Fortune magazine’s ‘most admired companies’ up to this date. Speak about a lasting legacy.
Healthy leader-employee relationships are based on respect and good communication.
Being an excellent leader comes with the responsibility to cultivate healthy and positive relationship between you and your employees. You can start by remembering that your employees are humans with strengths and weaknesses that should be embraced with respect and kindness disregarding the title.
You can start focusing on their unique strengths. If you can make those unique skills work in your favor, then you will be able to create an unbeatable workforce. Moreover, never compare skills as this act only taints their confidence, creates unwanted divisions, and cultivate unhealthy competitions.
Another thing that you must establish is good communication.
As a leader, your task is to communicate in a sense that would make your people properly informed and feel heard within the same conversation. They should be made aware about your ideas and thoughts in a very clear manner. If they know exactly what you want to happen, they can work on it efficiently.
Change can be beneficial in a company, but employees need to be involved in the process.
Understand that not all people can easily adapt to changes. That said, you should be compassionate and considerate of their adapting curve. Communicate with them how important change is to the company’s survival. The more they know, the better their understanding will be. And while you are at it, you can make these changes favorable by promoting creativity while the transition takes place.
Allow your people to take advantage of the transition by letting their creativity arise during this change. Let them suggest ways on how you can work on the ideas you all have been holding off for years. This way, you provide a different perspective about change.
You can even mix match with their roles for the time being. You can allow your employees the chance to perform on roles that they wanted to fill in for a while now without creating a stressful working environment for everybody.
The primary objective is to make them feel valued, so they do not lose their interest in advancing your trade. After all, what good is a business without efficient people to make success possible?
Intimacy and inclusivity are an important part of leadership, even in a capitalist system.
Capitalism has been viewed in a negative light in the business world. Should you ever wish to apply capitalism in your company, you must learn how to reshape and profit-focus the system in such a way that will benefit your people.
The capitalist systems have been exclusive systems that outcast employees ever since established. The systems have had reputation about excluding people from the production process and poorly benefiting the workers no matter how successful the company grows. This practice leaves the workers feeling neglected and discouraged.
When it comes to inclusive capitalism, it is quite the opposite. Every single employee plays the role in maintaining the system and success of the company. It is established on intimacy between you and your employees that is based on respect and genuine care.
Instead of going for contractual relationship that is based on contracts and not the well-being of the employees, opt for the covenantal relationship that is governed by intimate pacts between you and your people.
For example, a waiter has covenantal relationship with the customers he should serve. His goal would be to make sure that his customers enjoy their meal, because he values not only his job but their satisfaction. If this virtue can be applied to your company, you can guarantee a much better working relationship that observes cooperation instead of coercion. This way, everybody wins.
Listening attentively to employee concerns gives you a head’s up when things start to go south.
Intuition can also be useful in the business. Not everything is known even to a boss like you, and some gut feelings are not easy to shake. But do not just rely on your intuition. Seek for facts, and focus closely on strategies to confirm your instinct.
Be on the look-out for warning signs. Most of the time, they should be visible enough for you to spot them right on. You can save more time and efforts by doing so.
Seeking over-control is not beneficial for you, your people, and your business. At the end of the day, you would not want to use all your time watching over your people and not trust them with freedom. It is not only counterproductive but very stressful for everybody. Not to mention, you also hinder their creativity by enclosing them in your box of paranoia. Let the communication be open enough to institute reliance.
Swearing is also something you want to address early on as it builds negative tension and uninspiring ambiance. Make it a point to monitor and address the problem while involving the employees in the process of solving the dilemma. Do not just giving orders.
Another trick for spotting a problem early on is by keeping track of everyone’s performance including yours. Establishing a personal goal is important in tracking performance, and if anything does not feel good toward that goal, you must address it right away.
Great leaders lead elegantly, making decisions carefully and thoughtfully.
A bespoke suit and expensive watch are not enough to bring elegance to a leader. Elegant leadership is definitely more than the appearance of the one exercising headship that classifies the sophistication in his way of leading.
Leading efficiently, taking decision-making critically, and caring are the things that characterize an elegant leader.
An elegant leader knows how to take his time. He does not let pressure make him impulsive when it comes to decision-making. He weighs the situation carefully before he comes up with the right approach to any situation.
He also helps with the transition before he retires, because an elegant leader knows that departure is never an excuse to lose care for the company. And so, he would make sure to find the right successor who will continue the legacy, because he cares. Keep in mind that compassion is a very important factor when establishing elegance in leadership. Caring can help you develop a higher sense of leadership wherein messy process rarely arises.
Learn how to control your authority and never let it touch base with your ego, because great leaders are never blinded by supremacy. No matter what position or title they hold, treat your people with reverence and impartiality.
Let kindness, generosity, and humanity put the elegance in your leadership.
Final Summary
To bring out the elegant leader in you, the primary thing to learn by heart is respect.
Show respect to gain respect. This has been proven to be more effective than imposing it through fear. Do not be the kind of boss that employees dread and extremely dislike.
Instead, make them feel valued by including them in the problem-solving, making them feel heard, making sure they feel comfortable with the changes your company needs to adapt to, allowing their creativity to break-free, giving them enough room to grow, and observing a healthy working relationship with them.
At the end of the day, you would rather be known and loved as the leader with benevolent guidance than the evil boss everybody wishes to see retire early. And it is a true story.