Does your leadership need a renovation? How do you go about making changes to the way you lead without loosing credibility?
Have you received feedback that your management style is causing problems with the team culture? This article looks at how leaders who recognise that they have areas to focus on improving, should proceed with out freaking your team out.
Planning your renovation
Leadership is about exercising influence to mobilise others to collectively tackle difficult challenges and achieve organisational results, whether they are in a management position or not.
“competencies get us to the doorway of leadership, but character gets us through the doorway of leadership. Managers tend to control resources to get results, but leaders exert character to build a sustainable future”
Kevin Cashman, CEO at Korn Ferry
It starts with humility
The journey needs a level of transparency so that your team members can understand what you are looking to improve and invest in your success.
By being clear on what you are working on changing you can get that buy in and support from your team members.
Don’t keep it high level – provide specific details about what you are planning to do differently in the future and explain how that should look. Modelled behaviour that comes with an explanation is easier to understand and rapidly moves from “hey the boss was having a good day to day” to “its great to see that the boss recognises me, this change he has made makes me feel much more included”.
Five Traits of Great Leaders include:
INTEGRITY – Having integrity means that have the strength of your convictions to put personal interests aside and ‘take the right action’.
HUMILITY – Being humble and curious, recognise that personal success is almost always the result of the efforts of many others.
EXPRESSING CARE – Everyone deserves care, a great leader can put themselves into someone else’s place and deeply empathise with their underlying motivation and desires. Weak leaders are oblivious to others points of view and don’t care about them.
CONSISTENCY – Leadership consistency sets the tone for the team, erratic or inconsistent leadership behaviour creates team stress and disharmony.
INFLUENCE – Having a positive impact on others is a superpower, empowering others and serving others is possibly the most important trait of great leaders. Poor leaders believe that staff are there to help them.
Ask for feedback
When you check in and ask for feedback from your team and they understand exactly what you were looking to change in your behaviour, the responses will be more intuitive and less subjective.
It gives your team the chance to go beyond achieving performance metrics buy in to your personal success in helping improve your leadership and ultimately a higher performing team culture.
Synopsis of an article from Lets Grow Leaders How Do I Change My Leadership Approach Without Losing Credibility by Karin Hurt Published: 8th October 2020 https://letsgrowleaders.com/2020/10/08/how-do-i-change-my-leadership-approach-without-losing-credibility/ and Inside HR 6 keys to building world-class leadership development capability by Sebastian Salicru Published: 30th October 2017 https://www.insidehr.com.au/building-leadership-development-capability/