Great leaders have their team first
When you have to lead a group you first take care of your team, with no working team you lead nothing, your team is your tool to make things work. If your company is a store you need to have the best group of salespersons, you need to take care of their needs and training.
Great leaders like Abraham Lincoln could not be that great without their staff he had surrounded himself, and he fostered daily. Your individual goals should be left aside and focus on the organization’s targets.
Here’s how to put your selflessness into action and become a successful leader:
1.Develop your Emotional Intelligence EQ
Management one thing and Leadership is another thing. Managing is comprised of successfully planning objectives and do what it needs towards the fulfillment of this objectives.
Managing is more like a technical action, and a manager needs to use the ability to manage the time and understand the business functions, make the workers the right tasks and make sure it all works in coordination.
A leader needs to be able to understand, motivate and direct people on individual and collective levels. Good leadership requires being emotionally intelligence.
Understanding what is EQ in the workplace will help you to understand people and their motivations, their way of thinking and how to get their attention and better action. The Importance of Emotional Intelligence at Work by Mariah DeLeon.
2. Establish a collective vision
Great leadership will have the ability to show its people a common objective and holistically lead to them the execution of the targets presented to the workforce. Leadership means having the whole group in mutual understanding working for the common goal where the group synergy makes better productivity and not each on his own with his view and way of working that will have less productive results.
4 Steps to Creating a Shared Vision that Will Energize Your Team
As a leader you can inspire your employees to think bigger, to think out of the box. As a leader, you have to make your team to follow you making real the big picture by working together, each one with his little piece of the whole vision.
When you have your employees open to thinking about the bigger picture it will encourage context and loyalty to the common purpose.
To achieve such selflessness, you will have to demonstrate it by example.
Express your primary goals to your team in a way that they will accept to put themselves second to reach their full potential for the common goal.
3. Analyze situations impartially
The leader should continuously be analyzing all that is going around. When a new challenge is presented you should be asking yourself:
-
What is the reason that cause this to happened and what is the conclusion I should have?
-
How it happened that I have reached this point?
-
Go back on your recent decisions or negligence to see what has made the current situation?
To analyze situations impartially, you will have to take the external factors that are beyond your control and consider the internal cause that you do have the power and examine with unbiased manner.
A good and honest leader will take full responsibility for anything that he does no matter if it is a good or bad situation. Escaping responsibility by shouldering the blame will leave you blind to the reason of this situation and short on the way to avoid or resolve this and future similar cases, and leave open the possibility to repeat the same mistake. By shouldering the blame, you will lose your team’s sympathy while taking the responsibility will give you a tool to endear yourself to your team and implement the culture that learning from error is part of the job in your organization
.4. Forgiveness should be done quickly
Mistakes are an important part of our lives; one can not avoid some mistakes happened. Not always we know it all, there are many factors in life and work that we do not know or even have the wrong information or imprecation of the situation so we take a decision and it may become a mistake. To b able to continue with our work we must be able to learn the lesson and forgive ourselves and our subordinated employees. Experiences give your mistakes to learn from
If we don’t take the risk, we make another kind of errors, those that are made of not doing anything when we should make a risky decision.
5. Expand your network of trust
Training and preparing your team by letting them take some experience and gain confidence in their ability. The more they will know about your part has their manager they find it easy to assist you in your work and make your life easier.
EQ is the tool to lead with people in the workplace, a good leader will have a good level of EQ and will use it to see who is the employee that is ready to take extra responsibility, and show your staff that you trust them and looking to make of them more competent professionals:
Delegating responsibilities creates a cohesive and effective team that his more confident and motivated. Employees need a degree of autonomy at work to feel that they are competent.
A friend of mine used to have in his office a poster that said “HEED IS FIST MONEY IS SECOND” to show that human are tending to prefer being taken care and participate in building their workplace