Leadership

The art of creating Followers.

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While leadership is easy to explain, it’s not easy to practice. Leadership is about behaviour first, skills second. Good leaders achieve a ‘Followship’ because people trust and respect them. Leadership is different to management. Management relies more on planning, organisational and communications skills. Leadership relies on management skills too, but more so on qualities such as integrity, honesty, humility, courage, commitment, sincerity, passion, confidence, positivity, wisdom, determination, compassion, sensitivity, and a degree of personal charisma.

Essentially, Leadership is emotional, Management is transactional

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So, what do leaders give an organisation? Clarity of vision, direction, a strength at its very core, a brand, almost. As a Leader, what are you giving your organisation? Who are your personal role models for Leadership? What are you learning from them? How are you developing your emotional and business skills to become a better Leader?

Great Leaders recognise how to lead their teams in all manner of situations. People new to leadership (and supervisory roles) often feel under pressure to lead in a particularly dominant way. Dominant leadership is rarely appropriate however, especially for mature teams. Misreading this situation, and attempting to be overly dominant, can cause problems for the new leader, the team and the business. Resistance from the team becomes a problem, and a cycle of negative behaviours and reducing performance begins. Much of leadership is counter-intuitive. Leadership is often more about serving than leading.

Delegates on our courses often quote two specific individuals when asked ‘who are the great leaders’; Ghandi and Hitler. At opposite ends of the scale, both achieved massive following and unquestioning devotion. Sometimes delegates quote the unsung heroes, those who ‘spend themselves in a worthy cause’ within their own businesses.

These things are certain:

• To have a successful business, positive Leadership must exist
• Some kind of Leadership already exists in your business but is it helpful or hindering?
• Leadership can be learned

If your organisation has Leadership, but your business and personal goals are not being met, then it may be your Leaders lie elsewhere within your business, perhaps in those that are disaffected with the way things are. We call these ‘terrorists’ as opposed to ‘accolytes’, they are the previously motivated individuals who are experiencing some sort of pain that is not yet strong enough to make them leave, but sharp enough that they stay and wreak quiet havoc!

Please see our section on Personal Interaction Management for help in this regard.

Spark specialises in:

• Creating and effectively communicating a compelling vision.
• Influencing skills.
• Motivating people.
• Leadership vs Management.
• 360% feedback
• Measurement of Engagement levels and alignment to the goals of your business
• How to make ‘raving fans’ of your people and how to achieve ‘followers’
• How to create more Leaders for the future of your business

“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I’. And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I’. They don’t think ‘I’. They think ‘we’; they think ‘team’. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit…. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”

Peter F Drucker