Leadership Excellence – 5 Practices
- Value your teams. Your leadership requires you to inspire, empower and unite people.
You are creating a culture that is exciting, value driven, effective, fun and worthwhile in your enterprise. So, the value you have for your team is essential.
Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel.
If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
- Sam Walton
- Show courage. To be an even more outstanding leader, you need to be courageous; you sometimes need to go down the untraveled path.
Being bold in the face of uncertainty will help give your people courage and motivate them to keep striving when the going gets tough. Leading with courage goes hand in hand with leading with character and when your leadership is rooted in character, your leadership matters because it reflects your integrity.
You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.
- Ken Kesey
- Be a trailblazer. Outstanding leaders are trailblazers, navigating the path for others to follow. Outstanding leaders, however, encourage their people to climb higher, inspire people to be their best, dream bigger, and achieve greater. An even more important leadership skill you can develop as a leader is the ability to provide inspiration to your people.
Trailblazers empower others and when you lead with empowerment, you will instil confidence in others and empowered people take ownership of their work.
- Listen to People. Your people are your greatest resource; listen to their feedback and encourage their dreams. You never know where your next great idea will come from, so empower everyone up and down the corporate ladder to contribute and innovate.
To lead people, walk behind them.
- Lao Tzu
- Lead with communication, listen to people and seek to understand the issues, understand what is needed for innovation, what is working well, what is not working, how resources can be better utilized and harnessed.
When you invest time in listening to people’s concerns and ideas you fuel your leadership with communication because you remember that communication is a two-way process. In so doing you are also leading with recognition, valuing and treating people the way that makes them feel valued; as well as leading with connecting for when you surround yourself with quality connection to people and you invest time in building genuine relationships, you then extend your leadership beyond your personal strengths.
Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.
- Reed Markham
