Are you a Leader?

What is leadership? Well, lots of people think it means leading others. But did you know that we lead ourselves too? You can only lead others successfully if you lead yourself well first.

Leadership in a traditional meaning, means – management, control, but it also means guidance, direction. If you are in a leader role, which of those two words do you think would produce your desired results? If you said ‘guidance and direction’, you get the prize! A true leader leads by guidance and direction. They understand that ‘manage and control’ do not evoke the warm and fuzzies from those they are responsible for. We can lead ourselves in the same way. We only need to listen to our internal guidance — our instincts, intuition or gut.

I worked with one manager of a fast food chain and she was struggling with her supervisors. The supervisors were taking a very strong position with the employees and the employees were pushing back and pretty much doing everything but what they were responsible for doing. My client was getting all up in arms about why her supervisors weren’t listening to her advice regarding the situation. It was quite interesting because the manager was behaving exactly as the supervisors were! She was taking a strong position with her supervisors so no wonder the results were less than expected.

What the manager soon realized was that she was being ineffective because she was managing and controlling the situation. What she needed to do was to guide and give direction. They all knew the outcome they wanted to achieve, yet were nowhere near reaching it. So she and I worked together to come up with the steps she needed to take — in a guiding and directing way — in order to reach the goals.

Here are some steps to guide and direct others so that you are in a leadership role in your work.

1. Get the employee buy-in. In order to work in a team environment you need to know what motivates your team members. Now, there are a number of ways to do this but what I’m talking about is making the person(s) feel like they are an integral part to the overall goal and outcome. If someone feels like they are going to be making a difference, they are much more inclined to take action without resistance.
2. Ask the employee how they see themselves involved in the work. People love to be asked for their opinions and thoughts — and even expertise.       If you engage your employee in the goal, and ask them how they see themselves participating and contributing, you will gain their trust and they will be eager to please and go above and beyond your expectations.
3. Don’t take things personally and get out of the way. Many managers fail to become proficient at leading. They go back into the old manage and control paradigm and forget about the guidance and direction paradigm. This mostly happens because you are in charge and the fall-guy if people are not working out, so you feel that you need to manage and manipulate your workers. As we already found out, that doesn’t work out so well! Maybe you feel that if you don’t do things in a certain manner, you’ll be the one looking for a new job. So you actually manage/lead by fear; fear of you not living up to the expectations of your superiors and that is never a good place to be.

Leadership is a fine balance of allowing some independence of your employees and being the driver of the situation. Yet as the saying goes, and how true it is, “You get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.” Do you want happy, productive, willing employees or do you want unhappy, disgruntled and negative employees? My guess is the former!