The Art of Effective Leadership: Strategies for Success

 

Leadership is an art. It is the ability to inspire, motivate, and direct people in order to achieve a common goal. Good leaders must have the right combination of traits, skills, and knowledge to be successful. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to leadership, there are certain strategies that can help leaders become more effective in their roles.

First, good leaders must possess strong communication skills. They must be able to clearly communicate their vision, set expectations, and provide feedback. Good leaders should also be able to recognize and encourage the development of individual strengths and talents.

Second, good leaders need to be organized and have good problem-solving skills. They should be able to quickly identify problems, develop solutions, and delegate tasks. A good leader should also have the ability to stay focused on the desired outcome, despite the obstacles that may arise.

Third, effective leaders must understand the importance of collaboration. They should be able to bring people together to work towards a common goal and be able to motivate and inspire their team. Good leaders should also understand the power of diversity and be willing to learn from different backgrounds and perspectives.

Fourth, effective leaders must have the ability to inspire trust. They must be trustworthy and consistent in their decisions and actions. A good leader should also be able to create an environment where people feel safe to express themselves without fear of reprisal.

Finally, effective leaders must be willing to take risks. They should be willing to try new strategies and approaches to reach their desired objectives. A good leader should also be able to recognize and learn from their mistakes and successes.

By following these steps, leaders can become more effective in their roles and better able to motivate and inspire their team. Effective leadership is an art, and it takes time and practice to master. However, with dedication and the right combination of traits, skills, and knowledge, anyone can become an effective leader.

Effective Strategies for Team Leadership

 

Team leadership is an essential aspect of running a successful business or organization. It involves creating a unified, innovative and cohesive group of employees who are as much as possible all working towards a common goal. It also requires having an effective leadership that encourages collaboration, motivation, innovation and communication among team members.

To ensure that your team is the best it can be, here are some strategies for successful team leadership.

1. Set Clear Goals and Objectives

Before you start leading your team, it is important that you establish a clear vision and set of goals and objectives. These should be specific and measurable, and they should be communicated to the team in a way that is easy to understand to each member. Having a well-prepared plan with specific goals and objectives in properly defined periods, will help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same end.

2. Provide Support and Encouragement

Leading a team requires providing support to each and every employees. Encourage them to take initiative, offer feedback, think creatively, and are not afraid of bringing “bad news”. Giving praise and recognition when it is due will go a long way in helping to boost morale and productivity. It is also important to be available to answer questions and address any issues that arise.

3. Foster Collaboration

Creating an environment of collaboration is key for a successful team. Encouraging team members to work together, share ideas, and communicate them can lead to breakthroughs that individual work cannot achieve. Setting team-based goals, using interactive techniques, and encouraging peer-to-peer communication will help to increase collaboration.

4. Develop Your Team

Effective team leaders understand the importance of providing their team with opportunities for growth. Providing access and stimulating to develop professional knowledge via courses and seminars, will help to increase the skill level of the team. Stimulate team-building opportunities, such as team outings and activities, can also be effective for fostering better communication, relationships and understanding.

5. Delegate Responsibilities

Delegation is one of the key components of successful team leadership. You should divide tasks among team members in a way that will best utilize their skills and abilities. It is also important to delegate authority to staff members so that they can take initiative and make decisions on their own and do not blame them for mistake.

 

Fostering an effective team leadership will help to ensure that your team is able to reach its full potentials. By setting clear objectives, providing support, fostering collaboration, developing the team, and delegating responsibilities, you will be on your way to creating a successful team.

Who is the greatest leader of all time and why?

If you ask the question publicly expect nothing less than argumentative and disagreeable discussions.

We may consider leadership politically, historically, from the business prospective and many more aspects and settings.

This topic has been rolling in my mind for a long time now because I am looking for the best leadership practices and also the people performing them. I was amazed by people’s approach to this question on the internet. It has almost nothing to do with leadership but rather about personalities that important people have or had.  You may find ‘answers’ under the titles like ‘XYZ Things the greatest leaders all have in common’,  ‘Who are the greatest leaders of all time?’ or ‘The greatest leader of all’ and similar.

Are they describing basic leadership methodology and then, based on it, show who the great leaders were (are)? No, they are not! Do these articles have anything in common then? Absolutely yes!

Most of the researches are listing what a leader should not lack. See what I wrote in the blog Added value of leadership names or labels: “Is it all about different behaviors, different styles, or just to give a new label in front of the word leadership?” Those articles just state the “names” (mostly applied in western societies while forgetting the other parts of the world) and what those leaders were great for. Some go deeper and explain what leaders contributed to their societies.

Leadership and Mindset

Does a leader need a special mindset to lead?

Gap International consulting firm conducted in-depth interviews with more than 500 global executives to get a sense of a leader's mindset. These interviews revealed that leaders accomplished great things when they envisioned a larger sense of purpose they contribute to. They become more energized and could better motivate followers to keep pushing for results.

Leadership, unlike management, cannot be reduced to a set of skills although many contemporary authors are just doing that (see Labeled leadership). But, while styles of a leader may vary, successful leaders share very similar mindsets. A personality radiating a proper mindset is then a defining factor for an exceptional leadership. Lacking it the leader’s chances of being effective aren't very good. Without a proper mindset a leader could be as well seen as powerful dictator but hardly a well-regarded or accepted person in charge.

The next issue in mindset research is represented by work of Warren Bennis who interviewed great leaders and found out that they all agreed in that leaders are made, not born. But they are made more by themselves than by any external means. This shows that mindset has to be properly attuned.

Leadership attitude

In last two posts I have written about the difference between two, many times interchanged, organizational functions that are necessary to any organization: management (To manage people) and leadership (To lead people). As there is more to both of them, here I’d like to share with you some more of my views on leadership attitudes, the ones that I consider important.

Many of you will agree that leadership is more about who the leader is than what he/she is actually doing. Therefore, we may assume that the attitude is important when influencing, impacting and leading people.

Free will and entanglement

I watched Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and the author of Predictably Irrational, TED talk: “Are we in control of our own decisions?”. It triggered a huge amount of my discussions with people. Mine definition on our control over decision was so radical that most just could not accept it. I spoke in favor that “our free will (and decision-making) is not only  created by our conscious mind” but also by our unconscious. Bottom line is whether it was ‘I’ that decided and no ‘someone else’!  I strongly prop as a true that ‘I am’ conscious and unconscious part and my gens and cultural impact of environment and more together in all I do, think, decide.

Most people, due to their “background noise” (see my TEDx talk) generated by the philosophy of René Descartes (1596) believe that only conscious mind is a seat for our “free will” decision. It is due to Descartes who clearly identified that the mental and the physical—or mind and body or mind and brain—are, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing. Therefore, only the mind ‘holds’ consciousness and self-awareness. It was supported by theology to impose believes that Good and Evil—or God and the Devil are independent against more pragmatic views of Blaise Pascal (1623). Pascal’s development of probability theory and his ‘Wager’ were more systematical approaches and therefore closer to pluralism, which is the view that there are many kinds or categories. This last idea is also much more in accordance with Far East ‘Yin and Yang’ principle. The principle where there is always something Good in Evil and some Evil in Good.

Back now to my understanding of “free will”. According to David Hume, the question of the nature of free will is “the most contentious question of metaphysics.” Minimally, to frame “free will” would be in the ability of agents to have the capacity to choose his or her course of action unconstrained by certain factors. But animals seem to satisfy this criterion too, and we typically think that only persons, and not animals, have “free will.”

Leaders and Self confidence

Why, if self-confidence is so important in nearly all aspects of our lives, do so many people struggle with it?

A child playing with the father who throws him in the air: does a child laugh and ask for more? Then, when a child is high above your head you ask him “Would you be a star fighter pilot?”  Child won't hesitate to say yes! However, why then most adults are so fearful of choosing a career that could provide them a professional satisfaction and leave those they are not satisfied with? Is it because of a vicious circle in which people who lack self-confidence can find it difficult to become successful and consequently self-confident?

In martial arts, when you face the opponent your level of self-confidence is shown in many ways: by your posture, your movements, your reactions, your behavior during the combat, your body language and your verbal language (if you speak, what you say etc.). Everything reflects your (lack of) confidence. If you hesitate, you lose. A well-known truth is that self-confident people inspire confidence and/or respect in others.

Inspiring the confidence in others is one of the key ways in which a leadership process perpetuates. A leadership is all about having the confidence to make decisions, to show to your followers the vision, to communicate good and bad news, to inspire others. If someone is afraid to make and commit to a decision, all of the communication and empowerment in the world won't make any good to get confident.

Leadership “style”

What kind of style a good leadership reflects? Can it be defined uniformly? Is it in fact a style or is it personality? Both or something else?

Questions that fire up discussions, writings, blogs, books …

Alexander the Great, Mao Zedong, Mandela, Hitler, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, all were leaders. Some of them were charismatic, all of them influential, some fierce and some inspirational. What attracted people to follow them? Was it their leadership quality that attracted masses, or their actions made them the leaders? They were definitely heroes or anti-heroes. They all failed many times, yet they were remembered for their greatness. Failures are soon forgotten, greatness will always be remembered.

Most western books describe and define leadership process with explanation of the way the leader exercises and manifests his leadership process. Thusly, they try to combine them into the most common leadership styles: laissez-faire, democratic or participative, charismatic, bureaucratic, and autocratic. We all know that nobody complies in full with only one style, but the prevailing one is then assigned to that leader. Due to this, the researchers identify subtypes to those five main leadership styles, such as strategic leadership, team leadership, facilitating leadership. Even further distinct divisions about leadership are made based on influence styles, such as cross-cultural leadership and coaching. Some authors characterize leadership as people-oriented or relations-oriented, for instance, servant, task oriented, transactional or transformational leadership. Others classify leadership characterized by situation, such as emergent leadership style, innovative, visionary, command and control, and again also transformational leadership. There is a plethora of definitions of styles and how leaders exercise the leadership process over subordinates. But does this really explain what a leader is and what his style is?

Least of effort in leadership

The Mandarin Chinese word wú wéi could be described: ‘by inaction nothing is left undone.’ It may well be also translated as ‘non-acting makes all action possible.’ Lǎo Zǐ, a philosopher of ancient China and the author of the Dào Dé Jīng, in stanza 38 ‘About Dé of the Dào’ described it as:
High virtue by obliging not acquires moral force.

Low virtue obliges always and thus lacks moral force.

High virtue neither strives nor acts for its own ends.

Low virtue does not strive but acts for its own ends.

Dào is usually translated as way, road, channel, path, doctrine, or line and by Chinese opinion cannot be obtained as virtue cannot be approached. The legendary Chinese sovereign and cultural hero Yellow Emperor (reigned from 2.696–2.598 BE) said that once Dào is lost, virtue arises; once virtue is lost, humaneness arises; once humaneness is lost, righteousness arises; once righteousness is lost, formalism arises. But formalism is the flowery representation of Dào and the beginning of disorder.

Two sides of the same coin

What constitutes to be a superior leader? F. Marcos said: Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone (brainyquote). So, is it a head or is it a tail?

My lessons from “the other side of a coin” started when, together with my sons, we decided to go to the Mount Kilimanjaro. My decision had nothing to do with Kilimajaro being the biggest free standing mountain in the world or because it is the tallest mountain of the African continent and not even because it bares my name in it. I joined the idea because it was my long lived dream since the times I lived in Africa.

To climb the summit of 5.895 m in eight days via Lemosho route had to be planned well in advance as we were not physically fit for such a challenge. For months prior to the challenge we have been successful at climbing and trekking to each and every hill or mountain available to us in Slovenia. After Kilimanjaro I realize that it was not the trekking of more than 70 km or freezing temperatures that we have underestimated. It was “the other side of a coin.”

High altitude and lack of oxygen proved to be subjected to our naivety in thinking that climbing such a mountain is only a physical challenge. Slow walk, introduced by our guides from the ANDA African Adventure, at the beginning of our tour seemed ridiculous to us, but each succeeding day on the mountain proved that it was the only compulsory physical possibility for success.

Leadership catch: Adjustment and listening

Imagine walking through the woods. You carefully move and step slowly on the uneven ground where even the exposed tree roots are all covered by leaves. We adapt to environment. Although trees might seem static and unmovable they are still flexible and adaptive. They adjust to the surrounding environment and therefore become even more stable. They do not consume extra energy to rise straight up. It is natural for them to adapt to the floor declination when they grow.

We all have to adjust to our environment, or in martial arts to opponent, and to the mistakes you make during the fight. You can do this only by being flexible. In everyday life there is an abundance of events and issues that require our adaptation. But are we able to adapt quickly? How do we know what to do? When someone trips and is just about to fall, his brain starts to function at high speed. When we are very young or very drunk, we just let it go and fall down. Kids roll with it or just fall loosely, and because of this reaction, they are not severely injured most of the time. What about the rest of us? Our first reaction is violent; we start to gesticulate wildly with our hands. We start to contradict the obvious that happens all the same. Most of the time, instead of bending our knees, we stop our fall with our arms and quite a lot of times break our wrists. We forget how to fall and do not know how to adjust to this event that has happened to us many times before in our lives. We react in panic.

Leadership and “happy” organization

Have you ever wondered what the ultimate goal of an organization is?

Today’s management will conclusively respond that organization strives to achieve only one ultimate goal: to become a profit oriented “machine”. That is why the key device of modern management is in lowering costs: pushing on suppliers’ side, on employees, on product development and production, to name just some. But is this “ceteris paribus” solution, focusing only on one parameter and all other things being equal or held constant, sustainable in long term? Or it spirally aims down and not up? Cost reduction – instead of cost optimizing in an economic system causes the only possible outcome – less money in circulation. The customers are also reducing and optimizing their costs according to their income.

How often have we heard that people are the biggest asset of a company? They, on the other hand, are costs. If they work, they produce cost, if they attain a training program it is again cost, if they visit a customer ... costs. How differently people are treated from tools that for us represent the investment. But the smallest football club in the league knows that buying a player is not a cost – it is an asset, an investment. And they treat him accordingly. Not so in many modern companies. By, among other things, ignoring this, leads us to risky situations far away from the business objectives. There is a Gallup-poll of a 1.5 million sampling, and the result is: 30% of employees are happy with their managers, 20% are not, and 50% have disengaged themselves in having any feelings at all.

Leadership and Charisma

What makes a leader motivating others? The most common answer I have come across is "charisma." People want to hear what charismatic leaders have to say and do, what they advise. “Charismatic people always combine two messages,” says Fox Cabane. “They give the impression that they have a lot of power and also that they like you, or could like you, a lot. Humans are hard-wired to dislike uncertainty, so when they come across someone who shows none they tend very hard to resist.” Therefore, it is not surprising that in nowadays of crisis many organizations seek to hire those who exhibit charisma.

Today more than ever we are in need of inspiring employees to confront problems, the need of workers that focus on tasks, and voice their opinions. Here leaders and not managers are setting their organizations up for needed transformation. Leaders, which have virtue, vision and “internal” power to do it.

It is not about the definition of a bad or good leader, it is about how he or she should behave and what she or he should aim for to be a successful one.