5 tips for Effective Leadership

Leadership is the action of leading a group of people or an organisation, or the ability to do this. Leadership is exceptionally important for a business to run smoothly. Effective leadership guides employees and the organisation in the face of challenges.

Five tips are needed for effective leadership:

Using the right styles

Use a range of leadership styles are used for the right situation to get the best out of your performance and that of your team.

Having flexibility in your approach

Be flexible with your style/approach to future demands and personalise your approach to the individual needs of your team.

The Four S’s

You should build self-awareness, social awareness, self-confidence and support of others through understanding.

Having self-control

Practise this to avoid negatively impacting your team.

Practice makes perfect

Make sure you regularly use new leadership styles, approaches, and behaviours and make sure you get feedback from your team about your performance.

Graeme Yell believes that it’s self-awareness and self-control that are sadly missing in leaders today. To overcome this, leaders need to cope with the new demands of pressure to improve performance. They need to make sure they have flexibility in the styles they use, have an approach where they adapt to the demands set before them, and personalise their approach to their specific people.

Leaders today should be able to display self-awareness and understand how they come across to others and manage this appropriately in situations, making sure they show resilience in dealing with the consequences of a tough decision. In conclusion, leaders today need to possess the right skills to perform at their best, making sure they work on the biggest pitfalls of lacking self-awareness or self-control. Not having this ability leads to harmful effects since they won’t have a clear picture of how they appear to others. Then this can lead to unintended consequences or the tendency to ‘blow their top’ when the pressure is on.

As the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tse said

“A leader is best when people barely know they exist. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: ‘We did it ourselves!’.”

Even though in modern society leadership is constant, it’s surprising how few people do it well.

Take a look at our Becoming Series to find out how some of the Leaders implement this in real life.

—

David Waddell is the Managing Director at Harvey John.

If you would like to see our company updates and industry insights, follow our LinkedIn page here.