Demonstrating leadership skills at work is a great way to show your value to your organization. Learn 11 Practices adapted by a Great Leader in 2023.
Why leadership is more about action and not position?
Can you imagine?
At some point in the career, during a job interview, one comes across a situation when one is asked to share an instance when one demonstrated leadership skills at the workplace.
When I faced this question for the first time, it shattered my misconception that leadership was a default accompaniment with a management position. Gradually, as I ascended the career ladder, I realized that leadership differs from what it says on your business card or not where you are positioned in the organization chart.
Still, it is the willingness of an individual to step up to change things for the better, at times at the risk of his sacrifice. Further, an individual’s professional success and growth depend on their ability to demonstrate leadership skills in everyday work.
Therefore, it is the actions and not the position of an individual that defines a corporate leader.
Let's dive right in..
How to demonstrate leadership at the workplace?
And this is what you need to do
- Act as a role model for your team
- Regularly compliment your staff for executing tasks well
- Communicate regularly with your team in person or by phone
- Offer unconditional support to your team
- Be focused and productive in meetings
- Coach people rather than control
- Having one-to-one meetings with team members regularly
- Take regular feedback and inputs from the team members
Demonstrating leadership skills at the workplace is by no means an easy task and is best understood by how one practices leadership at the workplace. Work leadership practice is simply using workplace skills that help develop leadership qualities.
11 Practices of a Great Leader
- Be a leader
- Be a part of Effective Decision-Making Process
- Communicate well
- Manage Performance
- Be a Torch Bearer of Change
- Be Customer Focused
- Manage Resources
- Manage Meetings
- Build Relationships
- Be Continuously invested in Improvement & Quality
- Develop People
1. Be a good Leader
And this is what you need to do:
- Take personal accountability and responsibility for making things happen
- Role modeling is the behavior that you want to see in others.
- Find out what motivates others and take action.
- Empowering people rather than just controlling them.
- Being comfortable dealing with conflict.
2. Be a part of Effective Decision Making Process
When you are part of decison making process, leaders must consider few things. Some are listed below:
- Learning and training yourself in problem-solving and decision-making methods
- Ensuring that you communicate the reasons behind decisions
- Running some of your more significant decisions past a few people for a sense check
- Challenge the status quo
- Reviewing successful decisions that you’ve made in the past and learning from them
- And also have an open mind.
3. Communicate like a True Leader
- Tailore your communication as per the need of the situation.
- Having open lines of communication throughout your team.
- Provide your team with the information that they need without them having to ask.
- Make complex things simple for the benefit of others
- Show sensitivity to the team’s needs and interests.
- Present information concisely, accurately, and in ways that promote understanding.
- Show empathy for others’ needs, feelings, and motivations
Related Article: 8 Ways to Improve Emotional Intelligence in Leadership
4. Managing performance well
- Ensure all team members have clarity around their roles
- Have goals and objectives in place for everyone
- Create action plans on how to achieve the objectives
- Have systems in place to monitor performance and quality
- Make sure that every team member understands the level of performance and expectations that are required for their role
- Deal with performance issues fairly and consistently for everyone
- Create a plan of action to keep the top performers motivated
5. Be a Torch Bearer of Change
- Be positive and have a “can do” attitude toward change
- Prepare people in advance for upcoming changes
- Offer support regularly during periods of change
- Take ownership of making change happen
6. Be Customer Focused
- Put yourself in the shoes of the customer at all times
- Putting processes in place to understand the needs and expectations of your customers
- Brainstorming and making suggestions to improve the customer experience
- Putting systems in place to monitor customer satisfaction
- Going that extra mile to really “WOW” your customers
7. Manage Resources well
- Ensure effective time management
- Allocate tasks to your team and ensuring they have clarity around them
- Create resource plans of the what, who, and when
- Expect the best but preparing for the worst. Anticipating what could go wrong and planning for it
- Learn the difference between essential and urgent tasks
- Make the best use of technology to help schedule and prepare as well as to automate tasks
8. Managing meetings well
- Start on time
- Finish on time
- Have a clear agenda
- Make sure meetings are controlled well
- Be focused on action points
- Make sure you follow up
- Make sure everyone knows why they are attending one of your meetings
- Review the action points from previous meetings
- Place a time limit on your meetings
- Have some house rules for your meetings. No texts, no emails, no checking phones
9. Ensure Effective relationship building
- Build an internal and external network of people that can help you
- Build relationships with others rather than just one-way requests
- Learn how to balance the conflicting agendas of people
- Appreciate that others can help you, no matter what their role
- Lose the ego. It doesn’t matter who is in charge or who gets the credit for a job well executed.
10. Be Continuously invested in Improvement & Quality
- Ensure everyone knows your standards and the reasons behind them
- Make sure everyone can contribute and suggest improvements
- Hold team meetings specifically focused on progress and quality
- See through some of the suggestions and making them a reality
- Create a team quality charter based on the standards you expect as a team
- Build a business case for your improvements and ideas
- Create improvement and quality champions within your team
11. Develop people
- Have plans in place to develop every member of your team
- Ensure that you regularly coach your staff
- Work with your team to identify their training needs
- Ensure that you are constantly evolving yourself
- Work out what you can delegate to others would be a significant development opportunity for them
- Provide people with feedback on how well they are doing and what they need to improve on
What are the Characteristics of a team leader?
Let me explain
An excellent team leader believes in empowering and enabling his team to achieve organizational and individual goals and whose core philosophy of leadership is to serve, is flexible, adaptable, and whose hallmarks are integrity, honesty, and integrity. Such leaders are decisively committed to their vision and mission, know themselves and believe in themselves and their organization, speak well, are good listeners, and excel at stress management.
Competencies of good leadership requires a combination of key competencies to guide their teams to success.
Here is what you need to do.
Being a good leader is much more than decision-making and delegating. It inspires, motivates, and guides individuals, teams, or organizations toward common goals.
- Being highly competent in communication skills,
- Emotional intelligence,
- A positive attitude,
- The ability to think critically,
- Make difficult decisions, create a compelling vision,
- Have excellent goal setting,
- Empower others, and
- Lead by example.
Impact of good leadership
Here’s how it works
- Turnover,
- Sales,
- Revenues,
- Profits,
- Customer satisfaction,
- Productivity,
- Employee morale, and
- Engagement.
Good leadership helps develop and foster a strong and positive work culture that helps organizations become more open and transparent and nurture positive values and work ethics.
Final Thoughts
In a nutshell:
Leadership skills, unlike management skills, are not tangible simply because leadership is a multi-faceted discipline and, therefore, is open to numerous interpretations. Also, unlike management, which is more about dealing with situations, leadership is more about dealing with people and, therefore, not an easy task given the challenges of constantly dealing with a diverse workforce. While some people have inherent traits of leaders, anyone can become a good leader with the right mindset, learning, training, and coaching.
Jammu is an ex – c-suite executive, a thought leader, passionate about
learning and sharing, with an insatiable appetite for helping individuals,
institutions and organizations pursue “EXCELLENCE” – be the best they
possibly can by the means of coaching, training & consulting.
As a professional trainer & coach he coaches leaders, entrepreneurs and
executives to help them build their physical resilience, accelerate their
professional & business growth and make an extra ordinary impact.
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