"A prerequisite of a high-performing organization is a leader driving high-performance ethics deeply within their organizations to continue thriving past their presence." – Dr. No Days Off
What is leadership? Leadership is the art of organizing, motivating, and inspiring people to want to do what needs to be done and work on the organizational vision instead of using direction and control. Outstanding leadership is an art form that creates movement and organization in groups, allowing them to achieve goals, help people make sense of the world, or serve as ideals and ideological symbols for those who follow. Understand leadership stands above management; they are not on the same level. Management is more of positional science that follows a business plan with preset guidelines and developed policies or procedures. Management operates in a box of these policies or procedures to organize teams, allocate resources, build sales, and execute plans to achieve organizational leadership's objectives. Leadership goes above the science of management and operates in the arena of aligning, organizing, motivating, and inspiring those management tasks into the organizational mission and vision. The art of leadership is inspirational, and charismatic, and takes time to develop.
"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed." — Booker T. Washington
Before you can provide useful and successful leadership, you must first learn to lead yourself (self-leadership) by building and developing the right behaviors and strategies, i.e., personal development. Self-leadership influences directs, and motivates you to engage and accomplish tasks and work before being told to work. Self-leadership behavior-focused strategies help you increase your self-awareness to ease behavioral leadership, especially those behaviors needed to handle those unpleasant leadership tasks.
Self-Leadership Behavior-Focused Strategies
¨ Self-Observation
¨ Self-Goal Setting
¨ Self-Reward or Self-Punishment
¨ Self-Cueing
Along with behavior-focused strategies, constructive thought-pattern methods must form and inhibit to positively impact leadership performance. With these two strategies, you should intentionally create situations where your team members are motivated or receive rewards by inherently enjoyable aspects of the leadership activity. A developed self-leadership strategy allows you to put forethought into challenges, get more control over the feelings associated with challenges, and devise a plan to handle those challenges. The process of self-leadership is inherent to your success!
"In business, authentic leaders are more motivational, decisive, ethical, opportunistic, creative, and ambitious with a less self-centered vision than prototypical leaders." – Dr. No Days Off
Authentic leadership does not have ties to a position or community status. With authentic leadership, people do not follow your position; they choose to follow you, the leader, that creates a vision that enlightens them. Effective leadership executes using different traits, attributes, and characteristics to inspire a vision, a mission and handle changes. The art of authentic leadership focuses on bringing people together to pursue a common ideal by developing an achievable plan with goals and sticking with those goals until achievement. The authentic leadership model deals with the importance of challenging people's thinking and encouraging a focus on solutions.
Authentic Leadership Foundational Characteristics:
¨ Exhibiting powerful modesty
¨ Shunning public praise
¨ Never boastful
¨ Acting with quiet, calm determination
¨ Relying principally on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate people
¨ Channeling ambition into their organizations and not themselves
¨ Setting up successors for more greatness in the next generation
¨ Demonstrating unwavering resolve to do what is necessary and required to produce the best long-term results
¨ Looking at themselves in the mirror, not out the window, to take responsibility for poor results, never blaming other people, an external factor, or bad luck
Authentic leadership contains these foundational characteristics while promoting a vision, inspiring passion with conviction, and maintaining high leadership qualities. Your genuineness as a leader will move people with the right mindset to become a success in their organization instead of a person with the right skill set. The authentic leader always works to cultivate team members' minds and makes daily commitments to grow them intentionally. Authentic leadership extends beyond traditional authority figures. Authentic leadership relies on influence through personal interactions, positive relationships, and behaviors such as networking, reading social situations, empathizing, and making others feel confident and comfortable. To be an authentic leader, you must leave your comfort zone and give team members the power to take ownership by giving them a voice in the developing process with collaborative efforts to succeed in ways they could never achieve individually. Access your team members' experiences and advice to assist in handling challenges because that helps inspire success!
Many organizations suffer a decline in authentic leadership, which is a major cause of business failure because practical leadership skills directly relate to organizational success. Organizational leaders fail to recognize, abide by, and stand for fundamental corporate values through personal example and enable authentic leadership strategies that eliminate unethical cultures. There are leadership-learning strategies you can develop that will help them lead your team, department, or your entire organization by making practical decisions, handling challenges, and learning on the go. All leaders must deal with meaningful changes during their careers, such as layoffs, mergers, or restructurings, and people respond in different ways to such changes. The best leadership response is authenticity!