Leadership isn’t a perk for those who stick around. It’s to enable those we’ve been entrusted to lead to deliver the outcomes the organisation requires from their role.
For this reason, leadership is about serving people, not asserting ourselves ‘over’ people.
Successful leaders think about leadership differently. From the outside, it’s easy to assume that to be effective as a leader, we need control over our people. However, to those who know, it isn’t about control, it’s about influence i.e. our ability to cause our people to do what they need to do to excel (noting the word ‘our’ doesn’t imply ‘ownership of’, it’s about the ‘responsibility for’).
Yes, to succeed as a leader, we have to change people but that doesn’t come about by trying to manipulate them, but by enabling them to develop the capacity to perform to their potential.
To deliver such a change, you need to believe in your people. You need to commit yourself to their progress and development; not because you owe them, but because you are there to enable them to deliver on their purpose.
As their leader, you need to engage with them in a way that causes them to not only learn (self-reflect), but to advance as a consequence of their experience.
As organisational demands intensify, the need for more effective leadership at every level of a business continues to grow.
If you are to deliver the value your employer is presumably looking for from you as a leader, you need to focus your efforts on enabling your people to not only deliver better outcomes, but to strive to perform at increasingly higher levels. You need to enable them to understand that delivering better performance is better for all, including themselves as a member of the organisation.
Because performance is a consequence of mind-set, and self-belief is imperative to advancement, you need to enable your people to believe that greater things are possible. You need to enable them to believe in the organisation and what it’s doing but most of all, you need to enable them to believe in themselves and what they are capable of producing as an individual.
If you get this right, realising greatness is easy. However, overlooking the importance of your role and its impact on your people’s mind-set will do nothing for them, nor therefore for the team, function or organisation as a whole. In other words, this is the critical difference between leadership and management.
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