I don’t believe anyone can be a leader without followers….
One can lead a project, a company or even an entire industry, but to effectively accomplish those goals, one must first successfully lead people. It takes a comprehensive list of talents to reach leadership levels, and co-workers will respect and perhaps even admire that expertise, but converting them to believers — followers — takes more than some fancy strategic game plan. Some of the most common themes that resonated from the articles – especially the one from Kotter was the ability to communicate, credibility, trust and motivation — often referred to as “the soft skills” in the real world. The human element of doing business and leading one can never be dispensed of and many of the bright ideas fall short of execution due to the lack of attention this critical component deserves.
Although people tend to describe these types of skills as ’soft,’ the most successful leaders (as evidenced in “Good to Great”) understand that to motivate, persuade and advance the business’s interests, such skills are essential, indispensable and equally important to the ‘hard’ skills’. A direct connection needs to be made between a leader and a follower (as witnessed in the video we watched last class) with a clear message that has some human element of emotion. It also has to communicate clearly the “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me?) factor as this helps a follower to understand what the expectations are and how it will benefit them.
As a manager and team lead I have personally refined the following skills that have benefited me:
- Avoid dry, technical, jargon-heavy language. This makes individuals feel “talked down to” more often than not. People hate being made to feel ignorant and would be reluctant to ask questions since they don’t want to depict themselves as unknowledgeable.
- Lead by example. There is no better way to have people follow you than to model the behavior you expect yourself. Although it might sound cliche, Actions DO speak louder than words.
- Political Neutrality – I was quite amazed to find the word “politics” or “office politics” not mentioned in any of my readings thus far in this course. Anyhow, the amount of self-discipline it requires to not get involved in office politics (especially the ones involving your boss!) is remarkable. There is no good outcome of this in my opinion and as a matter of fact co-workers will eventually appreciate you for it. This could be categorized as “tough empathy” depending on which side of the equation you are – a leader or a follower.
