2020-01-15
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The new breed of leaders recognizes that autocracy no longer works, yet that employee empowerment alone is not enough. The skills of coaching have lately been rediscovered by more effective organizations and teams. You cannot be a leader without followers, and you have to delegate appropriately. The leader is best placed to enhance the performance and learning abilities, on the job, of colleagues. Coaching aims to enhance these abilities. “It involves providing feedback, but it also uses other techniques such as motivation, effective questioning and consciously matching your management style to the coachee’s readiness to undertake a particular task”.
Text 5.Super-Leadership - Leading Others to Lead Themselves
Super-leaders help each of their followers to develop into an effective self-leader by providing them with the behavioral and cognitive skills necessary to exercise self-leadership. “Super-leaders establish values, model, encourage, reward, and in many other ways foster self-leadership in individuals, teams, and wider organizational cultures”.5
An important measure of a leader’s own success is the success of his or her followers. The strength of a leader is measured by the ability to facilitate the self-leadership of others. The first critical step towards this goal is to master self leadership. If leaders want to lead somebody, they must first lead themselves.
| Key Benefits of Super-Leadership |
| · high team performance and flexibility · high follower development and self-confidence · high team creativity and innovation · high long-term performance · high ability of the team to work independently in absence of leader |
| Why Super-Leadership? Super-leadership is a new form of leadership for the era of knowledge-based enterprises distinguished by flat organizational structures and employee empowerment. A super-leader is one who leads others to lead themselves through designing and implementing the system that allows and teaches employees to be self-leaders. “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers” Empowered Self-Leadership The best organizations have a theory and practice of leadership that subscribes to and promotes the concept that leadership exists at all levels within the organization. “Everyone provides leadership for those responsibilities that have been assigned to them. For the highest performing organizations, even the lowest-ranked staff within an organization must assume leadership and attention to detail for their responsibilities in a manner similar to the most senior and powerful”. With super-leadership, followers are treated - and become - self-leaders. |
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Text 6. The Difference between Managing and Leading
“Understanding people will help you make the shift from managing to leading a business.”
Leaders are the heart of business. The essence of leadership means inspiring a group to come together to common goal. Leaders motivate, console and work with people to keep them bonded and eager to move forward. That means setting a direction, communicating it to everyone who will listen (and probably many who won’t) and keeping people inspired when times get tough.
Managers are the brains of the business. They establish systems, create rules and operating procedures, and put in incentive programs and the like. Management, however, is about the business, not the people; the people are important as a way of getting the job done.
Most business executives and owners have a mix of management and leadership skills. Both skill sets are necessary to run a successful business. Leadership skills provide the direction, while management skills provide the systems that let a company grow with success.
Unless you have the luxury of hiring managers and concentrating solely on leadership, you‘ll still be managing. But now, you must also lead. And, in many ways, your leading – which produces no tangible results – is more important than your managing.
Only the top executives can set direction in a company. Setting direction is different from setting goals. A goal is concentrate and measurable. “We must sell 10 widgets by next Tuesday” Direction is broader. Leaders set direction with a vision, a mission and operating principles that embody the company’s direction and values.
For instance, a mission statement for the imaginary “Personal Assistant Inc.” company might sound like this: “We free people from life’s drudgery, freeing them to live a life of doing only things they do best”. This mission doesn’t give measurable goals, but rather points to an overall direction – it gets people exited and moving in one direction. A Personal Assistants employee wouldn’t suddenly decide to diversify into heavy farm machinery; it doesn’t fit the mission. Yet the mission is broad enough that the company can create a rich set of offerings over many decades.
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Specific projects and products may come and go, but the mission gives the company an enduring direction.
As a business owner, you need to know your business direction. It might be broad, sweepingand world-shattering. Or it might be smaller and local. But your job is to set the direction for everyone around you and communicate it well.
People sometimes forget a company direction in the heat of excitement over a new ideas or market development that happens once or twice, it’s not a problem. But too many diversions can cause a company to lose focus and end up serving many different customers, none of them well.
Your job is to bring people back to the company direction gently and consistently and always challenge them to evaluate ideas and decisions with respect to the decision. If Personal Assistant proposes asking clients to give 24-hour notice when they have a project, the leader simply asks: “Does this help us free clients from drudgery or make more for them?” The team can then decide (or even ask customers) whether the suggestion aligns with the mission.
Keep in mind that people easily lose sight of the big picture when they get caught up in life’s daily details. As leader, you must know how to bring them back and make sure they know the way.
There’s much more to a business leader’s job, but you’ll start off on the right foot by developing a direction, aligning your organization behind the common goal and bringing them back when they stray.
Setting direction sounds easy, but it requires vigilance and work. And you’re the only one who can do it. Pointing the way and rallying the troops forward are two primary responsibilities of a successful leader.
