The type of leadership style you have depends on your character to a certain degree. That’s why it’s important to develop personal values and beliefs that are going to be beneficial to your business.

Your personality should be a part of your leadership style, however there are certain underlying principles that can help each individual become an excellent leader.

1. Good communication

In any successful business communication is crucial. When there is a problem, an effective leader will be able to communicate to everyone involved in a way that allows that problem to be resolved as soon as possible. On that same note a leader must communicate in a way that helps the team understand how to resolve the problem without damaging the business or client relations.

2. An ability to provide the team with development opportunities

Leadership is also about creating an environment where individual talent is nurtured through training opportunities. Retaining the best talent should be the priority of every leader and training opportunities help the individual feel appreciated and engaged.

For example Pulse Marketing funds 48 hours of training per year and runs Pulse Ideas School – a weekly session where staff are challenged to crack briefs and present back to the team the following week.

3. Great mentorship

A good leader must be able to give as well as take. Mentoring should be part of leadership as it allows you to form a meaningful professional relationship with the mentee and help them develop professionally. On the other hand a leader also has to have sounding board for themselves, which can come in the form of mentoring from others.

4. A willingness to learn

A leader is no different from his/her team in needing to develop their professional skills. The best leaders are constantly learning about new developments in their industry, attending seminars and listening to inspirational speakers who can help give them a new perspective.

5. An ability to engage and motivate staff

It’s important to understand how to motivate staff in order to help them reach their potential and further the goals of the organisation. While people can be motivated by monetary rewards, this doesn’t lead to organic motivation because once the rewards stop coming, the individual is no longer motivated to perform.

Instead a leader should motive their staff with non-monetary rewards that make the individual want to do the best they can regardless of the circumstances. Pulse implements several initiatives to create organic and genuine engagement for staff.

Some initiatives include:

-       Over and Above trophy: each month the team vote who has gone over and above in their eyes the previous month, and the winner is then announced at a team morning tea.

-       Cultural Grants: this is a set amount of money that each person can spend on activities outside of work to get their creativity flowing. Some to date have included learning a language, going to the see a play, or getting a ballet subscription.

-       Team activities: without fail, we take a Friday afternoon off each month and do a team activity together. This can range from seeing the Archibald’s, lawn bowls, visiting the MCA to fish + chips and outdoor sports at the beach.

While each leader will bring something unique to their organisation, these underlying principles will help provide a good foundation that will help them to gain the respect of their staff and run the business more efficiently.

People's trust in you is largely determined by your intentions. Here are three ways to prove your sincerity:

Talk explicitly about what you want. Tell your team the values and motives that guide your decisions. Don't assume people will see them. Say them outright and invite discussion.

Walk the talk. Maintain integrity between what you say and what you do. This will prove your authenticity.

Be consistent.. What you practice should be the same from day to day, from person to person, from situation to situation. If it's not, people will doubt you. When there are discrepancies, explain them.

The wealth you possess in life directly reflects your perception of what you have. If you think you're rich then you will be and if you think you're not then you will be too... #richard austin

Just as the growth of tropical fish is limited by the size of the aquarium in which they live, we also are affected by our environment. If your current circumstances do nothing to help you grow, you're going to have a hard time enlarging yourself to reach your potential. That's why it's crucial that you create an environment of growth around you. That kind of place should look like this:

1. Others are ahead of you.
2. You are still challenged.
3. Your focus is forward.
4. The atmosphere is affirming.
5. You are out of your comfort zone.
6. Others are growing.
7. There is a willingness to change.
8. Growth is modeled and expected.

A life of continual growth is never easy, but a good environment makes the swim upstream a little less difficult.

Trust is the foundation of leadership. It is the most important thing. Leaders cannot repeatedly break trust with people and continue to influence them.

Your people know when you make mistakes. The real question is whether you’re going to fess up. If you do, you can often regain their trust.

How does a leader build trust? By consistently exemplifying competence, connection and character. People will forgive occasional mistakes on ability. And they will give you time to connect. But they won’t trust someone who has slips in character.

Character Communicates – a person’s character quickly communicates many things to others. Here are the most important ones:

Character Communicates Consistency – leaders without inner strength can’t be counted on day after day because their ability to perform changes constantly.

Character Communicates Potential – weak character is limiting. Who do you think has the greater potential to achieve great dreams: someone who is honest, disciplined, and hardworking or someone who is deceitful, impulsive and lazy?

Character Communicates Respect – When you don’t have character within, you can’t earn respect without. How do leaders earn respect? By making sound decisions, by admitting their mistakes, and by putting what’s best for their followers and the organization ahead of their personal agendas.

No leader can break trust with his people and expect to keep influencing them. Trust is the foundation of leadership. Violate the Law of Solid Ground, and you diminish your influence as a leader.

Great leaders are idealists. They are optimists. They overestimate what we are capable of and inspire us to believe the same.

Executives are not working together as a team? Is the team is struggling with their situation and are unable to come to agreement on an appropriate solution to their problems? Is the team dynamics erode into naming, blaming and shaming, no one is accepting responsibility, deadlines are being missed and moral is on the decline.…

The is know as a dysfunctional team.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

To get the people in a team aligned and rowing in the same direction requires the CEO and the executives to address the following five dysfunctions of their team

Dysfunction 1: Absence of Trust

The first dysfunction is the absence of trust amongst team members. The type of trust we are talking about here is the ability of group members to show their weaknesses, to be vulnerable and open with one another. Trust is never generated in teams when the team members are not prepared to be vulnerable. Instead they feel the need to be right, to be strong and competent, so much that they are unable to be vulnerable and open with one another. 

Trust requires that team members have confidence in each other intentions, that they are good and therefore have no reason to be protective and careful in the team. The when I ‘m vulnerable it will not be exploited and used against me by the team. The lack of trust amongst teams is a huge waste of time and energy as team members invest their time and energy in defensive behaviours, reluctant to ask for help and to assist others.

The key to overcoming a lack of trust is shared experiences, multiple follow – throughs and integrity. A Myers Briggs assessment or a 360 degree assessment is a good way to get the team talking about one another’s strengths and weaknesses and so become comfortable with one another.

“…teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.”

The primary role of the leader is to lead my example, be the first one to be vulnerable, and create an environment where it’s safe to be vulnerable. Building trust makes conflict possible!

Dysfunction 2: Fear of Conflict

Trust is the foundation of great teams and it’s trust that makes team conflict possible. Teams become dysfunctional when they are unable to productively deal with conflict. All meaningful relationships require productive conflict for them to grow. Healthy conflict occurs when people talk about the issue at hand avoiding personal attacks, looking for the best solution for the team. Teams tend to avoid conflict often replacing it with an artificial harmony.

“Harmony itself is good, I suppose, if it comes as a result of working through issues constantly and cycling through conflict. But if it comes only as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it’s a bad thing.”

We wear masks and focus on being nice to everyone. however, productive conflict is required for teams to become functional. This allows for meaningful dialogue where people are open to share, without feeling fearful of reprisal or criticism. One of the worst team dysfunctions is when you have a team of “yes men”.

Leaders need to encourage debate, support it and keep it productive. Teams who avoid conflict spend much time “off-line” never making decisions that the group can commit to. Healthy and productive teams accept that conflict is a normal part of being in a team to learn to deal with it productively.

“…meetings and movies have a lot in common…A movie, on average, runs anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours in length. Staff meetings are about the same…And yet meetings are interactive, whereas movies are not…And more importantly, movies have no real impact on our lives…. [and]…Every great movie has conflict. Without it, we just don’t care what happens to the characters.”

When working with teams a leaders need to understand the importance of conflict in teams, being careful not to try and steer the team towards premature resolution of conflict with the intention of protecting people. It’s important for leaders to help the team members to learn and develop positive conflict resolution skills. The beast way to do this is for leader to “lead by example”, modelling the appropriate behaviours, rather than trying to smooth over the conflict.

Dysfunction 3: Lack of Commitment

When teams engage in productive conflict they can confidently commit and buy-in to decisions. Commitment is a function of clarity and buy-in. Productive teams make clear decisions and are confident that they have the support from every team member. A lack of commitment usually arises from not hearing all the teams concerns before making a decision. There can be no commitment without debate. People will not buy into something when their opinions and thoughts on the matter were not included and discussed. “If they don’t weigh in, then they won’t buy in.” This is not as much about seeking consensus as it is about making sure that everyone is heard.

“The point here is that most reasonable people don’t have to get their way in a discussion. They just need to be heard, and to know that their input was considered and responded to.”

At the end of the day everyone needs to get to the point where they can say, “I may not agree with your ideas but I understand them and can support them.”

“When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.”

Leaders can help to facilitate commitment by reviewing all key decisions made at the end of team meetings, making responsibility and deadlines clear.

Dysfunction 4: Avoidance of Accountability

Without team commitment you cannot have accountability. If the team is to be accountable, everyone must have a clear understanding of what is expected of them.

“People aren’t going to hold each other accountable if they haven’t clearly bought in to the same plan.”

At the end of the day it’s about each team member being accountable to the team. This means that a team member never lets the team down when is comes to meeting commitments. The team needs to hold their peers responsible for achieving results and working to high standards. It’s the responsibility of each team member to hold one another accountable and accept it when others hold them accountable.

It’s often the case, that when teams are not holding one another accountable it’s usually because they’re not measuring their progress. It’s important to make clear what the team’s standards are, what needs to get done, by who and by when. Ambiguity is the enemy of accountability.

Dysfunction 5: Inattention to Results

When teams are not held accountable the team members tend to look out for their own interests, rather than the interests of the team. A healthy team places team results as the most important goal. When all team members place the team’s results first the team becomes results orientated.

“Our job is to make the results that we need to achieve so clear to everyone in this room that no one would even consider doing something purely to enhance his or her individual status or ego. Because that would diminish our ability to achieve our collective goals. We would all lose.”

Leaders need to make the teams results clear for all to see, rewarding the behaviours that contribute to the team’s results. It’s the responsibility of the leader to keep the teams focus on results.

Cohesive Teams

By addressing these dysfunctions, what results is a cohesive team….

“…and imagine how members of truly cohesive teams behave:

1. They trust one another. 
2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas. 
3. They commit to decisions and plans of action. 
4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans 
5. They focus on the achievement of collective results.”

Reference: Patrick Lencioni

What I liked most about this book is that the leadership insights are practical and can be used daily to improve our leadership ability. I feel that this book should be the required reading for all of us who are striving to improve their leadership. I found the book to be easy to read and the examples provided were good.

The book creates a great foundation from which to build your leadership knowledge and begin your personal leadership journey. 

The book provides insight and a detailed description of the following:

The Law of the Lid – Leadership ability determines a person’s level of effectiveness. Leadership ability is always the lid on personal and organisational effectiveness. Whatever you want to accomplish is restricted by your leadership ability.

The Law of Influence – The true measure of leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less. If you don’t have influence you will never lead others. To change organisations you need influence. Leadership is not based upon holding position, leadership is about your ability to influence.

The Law of Process – Leadership develops daily, not in a day. Leadership is learnt over time, it’s the capability to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from their followers. Successful leaders are learners.

The Law of Navigation – Anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course. Leaders have a vision for their destination, they understand what it will take to get there, they know who they’ll need on the team to be successful, and they recognise the obstacles long before they appear on the horizon.

The Law of E.F. Hutton – When the real leader speaks, people listen. Don’t listen to the claims of the person professing to be the leader. Instead, watch the reactions of the people around him. The proof of leadership is found in the followers. “Being in power is like being a lady – if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” – Margaret Thatcher

The Law of Solid Ground – Trust is the foundation of leadership. To build trust, a leader must exemplify these qualities: competence, connection, and character. Character makes trust possible. And trust makes leadership possible.

The Law of Respect – People naturally follow leaders stronger than themselves. People don’t follow other by accident. They follow individuals whose leadership they respect. Followers are attracted to people who are better leaders than themselves.

The Law of Intuition – Leaders evaluate everything with a leadership bias. Leadership depends on more than just the facts. Leaders see trends, resources and problems, and can read people. The law of intuition is based on facts plus instinct and other intangible factors. A leader has to read the situation and know instinctively what play to call. Leadership is more art than science.

The Law of Magnetism – Who you are is who you attract. Leaders are always on the look out for good people. In most situations you draw people to you who possess the same qualities you do. The better leader you are, the better leaders you will attract.

The Law of Connection – Leaders touch a heart before they ask for a hand. Effective leaders know that you first have to touch people’s hearts before you ask them for a hand. The heart comes before the hand. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. To connect with people in a group relate to them as individuals. It’s the leader’s job to initiate connection with the people.

The Law of the Inner Circle – A leader’s potential is determined by those closest to him. A leader’s potential is determined by those closest to him. All great leaders have surrounded themselves with a strong inner circle.

The Law of Empowerment – Only secure leaders give power to others. The people’s capacity to achieve is determined by their leader’s ability to empower. “The best executive is the one who has the sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and the self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it” – Theodore Roosevelt.

The Law of Reproduction – It takes a leader to raise up a leader. More than four out of every five of all leaders that you ever meet will have emerged as leaders because of the impact made on them by established leaders who mentored them. People cannot give to others what they themselves do no possess. The potential of an organisation depends on the growth of its leadership.

The Law of Buy-In – People buy into the leader, then the vision. The leader finds the dream and then the people. The people find the leader, and then the dream. People don’t first follow worthy causes. They follow worthy leaders who promote worthwhile causes.

The Law of Victory – Leaders find a way for the team to win. Leaders believe that anything less than success is unacceptable. And they have no Plan B. That keeps them fighting.

The Law of the Big Mo – Momentum is a leader’s best friend. You can’t steer a ship that isn’t moving forward. It takes a leader to create momentum. Followers catch it. And managers are able to continue once it has began. But creating it requires someone who can motivate others, not who needs to be motivated. Getting started is a struggle, but once you’re moving forward, you can really start to do some amazing things.

The Law of Priorities – Leaders understand that activity is not necessarily accomplishment. Apply the Pareto Principle, If you focus your attention on the activities that rank in the top 20 percent in terms of importance, you will have as 80 percent return on your effort. As a leader, you should spend most of your time working in your areas of greatest strength.

The Law of Sacrifice – A leader must give up to go up. Sacrifice is a constant in leadership. “When you become a leader, you lose the right to think about yourself.” – Gerald Brooks

The Law of Timing – When to lead is as important as what to do and where to go. Only the right action at the right time will bring success. If a leader repeatedly shows poor judgement, even in little things, people start to think that having him as the leader is the real mistake.

The Law of Explosive Growth – To add growth, lead followers – to multiply, lead leaders. The key to growth is leadership. “It is my job to build the people who are going to build the company.” – John Schnatter. To go to the highest level, you have to develop leaders of leaders.

The Law of Legacy – A leader’s lasting value is measured by succession. Just as in sports a coach needs a team of good players to win, an organisation needs a team of good leaders to succeed. A legacy is created only when a person puts his organisation into the position to do great things without him.
Recommendation

The John Maxwell Company
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0785270345/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=thepracticeof-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=0785270345&adid=03RB223DRVZXJWRXPFPX

I recently was involved in a seminar where the core of the discussion was building trust with customers.

This has made me think about the impact of trust, or lack of, and who is our customers.

For a leadership group within an organisation their customers are their internal staff. We all have customers weather they are internal or external, we focus on building great relationships and harbouring trust with these external customers but sometime forget about the more important customers to a organisation, our internal customers.

Trust is not automatically given when a person becomes a manager, trust from his/her pears and directs must be earned, it must be exhibited everyday with trust worthy behaviours and actions. This means removing bad habits like checking on everything people do, questioning their motives and looking to catch people out. I once hear a manager say “inspect what you expect” this comment in itself is saying “I don’t trust my staff and I need to check everything they do”

One of the greatest organisations I know whose complete business is based on trust is EBay. EBay have over one million transactions everyday go through their system. The model behind EBay allows a consumer to purchase goods from a total stranger from around the world, hand over their money and hope that the seller will post the goods and that they are as described.

If I was to describe this model to someone today that had no idea who EBay are they would call this madness, they would say that it could never happen, it would open the flood gates form fraudulent transactions, yet EBay has less that 28 fraud transactions per day on average. This is an astonishing figure when you look at how many transactions take place everyday. This tryst is based on a “feedback system” that’s in place within EBay.

If the feedback model can be so successful at preventing fraudulent activities with EBay, could we use this same model within Business for our direct reports?

Distrusting people this is called self deception, we see people as objects and no longer as people. We then look to be right and look for confirmation of the deception, we no longer see the good in people we are always looking to "catch them" and confirm our own self deception. This is called self betrayal.

Self betrayal is an act contrary to what we feel is right and what we should do for another person. When we betray ourselves we begin to see the world in a way that justifies our self betrayal. When we see the world in a self justifying way, our view of reality is distorted. Over time these self betrayal's become characteristics of me, and I carry them around with me, this then provokes others to do the same, an the cycle starts again.

Break the cycle. We need to start to trust our people, we need to start to believe that the majority of our staff want an do the right things by the customer and the organisation, giving people the freedom and empowering them with the trust needed to do their role will intern get a better result. To weed out the fraudulent activities we need to give regular feedback everyday about their performance to our direct reports.

If you as a manager are not able to give feedback everyday because “it’s too hard” and you feel that “inspect what you expect” is the right methodology, then don’t be surprised when your start to loose staff and moral drops overall. This distrust that you are passing onto your directs is then reflected onto your customers though your directs.

Referance: HuTrust and The Arbinger Institute.