In every relationship, there is always a leader and a follower. There can be leading across( within colleagues ), leading upward (Subordinate to Superior), and leading downward(Superior to subordinate). This means that anywhere you find yourself, you can either be the lead or amongst the followers.
Developing leadership skills can enable you to improve your performance in your current workplace and advance your career pathway. With the right approach, you can establish your ability to lead in any role or industry you find yourself.
Leadership is all about influencing people positively. This ability is not hereditary but can be groomed. That is to say, leaders are made (trained) not born. Leadership skills are the abilities that you use to guide coworkers toward successful outcomes with workplace objectives. Whether you are the manager of a company, department head, or simply the guy at the gate, your leadership skills can inspire others to reach their shared goals and also help you to succeed. This is because the people you work with will determine whether you succeed or fail. Some of the most common leadership skills you must possess in the workplace include; Motivation, communication, creativity, positivity, to mention but a few.
As a 360 degree leader, you have to work at giving your subordinates reason to respect and follow you. This can only be achieved by helping them win. It is worthy of note that people won’t go along with you if they don’t get along with you. To be an effective leader, one has to understand, practice, and complete the seven leadership loop. The leadership loop starts with caring and ends with succeeding.
7 steps that form a leadership loop
- Caring
- Learning
- Appreciating
- Contributing
- Verbalizing
- Leading
- Succeeding
- Caring: Show genuine interest in the people you want to lead. You must have the desire to better know the people working with you, not so you can make token enquiries from time to time because you feel you should, but because you want to know your people and encourage them to be the best they can be. People always move towards someone who increase them and away from anyone who reduces them.
- Learning: Learning requires a significant level of commitment. Get to know people. Appreciate their differences, discover their best skills and help them make the best out of it.
- Appreciating: You should strive to see others’ unique experiences and skills as a resource and try to learn from them. If you treat your people with this kind of respect, appreciating them for who they are, then they will be more likely to respect and listen to you in return. Treat them with respect but be firm. Be authentic. Ask for their opinion and mean it.
- Contributing: Be a people builder. Add value to people. Invest in their growth. When you go out of your way to add value to people, they will understand you have their interest at heart with no hidden agenda. That way, they will be more likely to respect and follow you.
- Verbalizing: Affairs people. Acknowledge their accomplishments. Be their cheerleader. When you affirm people, you make firm things you value about them. Praise their strengths. That way, they can be better able to accept and take corrections from you without being defensive.
- Leading: When you have been able to implement all these steps mentioned above, you would have been able to build a relationship with them. It will also help to display that your motives are genuine and build your credibility. This type of history will go you an edge in influencing them and leading them in the process.
- Succeeding: Great people don’t use people so that they can win, they lead people so that they can all win together. When you help other people to win, you also win and this in the long run will be for the greater good of the organization. In leadership, we rise by lifting others.
