The Inspirational Leader
Working To Inspire Others
Is there a certain leader you’ve had who you’ve loved working with?
We all have those one or two examples of leaders that easily come to mind. We’ve worked our hardest. We’ve done our best work. We would follow that leader anywhere. But what makes us want to follow certain leaders? What makes us want to work our hardest and best for a particular leader?
Inspiring Others is a leadership competency. Motivating others and building effective teams is so important to success and yet a hard competency to master. The shift from good to great happens with skill in empowerment, awareness of people, flexing to other’s styles and being able to make tough stands while still preserving engagement. Feel like hard work?
Great leadership is hard work every day. I like to describe leadership as a navigation console with many levers. Those levers constantly need adjustments and tuning depending on situation, you, team and person. If you’ve got a strong passion and vision, this effort doesn’t feel like hard work.
Where to start
Like so much of leadership, successful leading and knowing your team starts with a conversation. It is about focusing on understanding and building a trusted relationship. Start and sustain conversations to understand your team members’ motivators and aspirations. Find out and know exactly how you help them do their best work.
Once they’ve helped you understand them, watch them in action and learn their interpersonal style. It’s about knowing both what motivates your team member and how best to communicate with them. We use Pivotal Growth Diagnostics to measure and collect insights on the interaction styles of leaders and teams. We understand team dynamics using a logic/emotion and tell/ask framework.
Leadership is the ability to get extraordinary results from ordinary people — Brian Tracy
Leadership priorities
Inspiration is one component of the Pivotal Leadership model. It’s part of Leadership in Action that encompasses the foundations of being a leader. If you want to look at an overall framework for what you need to get right in leadership, here are the five leadership components we think you should keep working on to move from good to great.
Pivotal Growth’s Leadership in Action
- Build high-performance teams
- Manage deep customer relationships
- Engage with inspirational influence
- Demonstrate leadership presence
- Execute with a system for success
Stop doing vs start doing
What can you stop doing to allow you to start doing something else?
The easy answer to influence is what won’t work. To start to realize change in your influence skills, know that:
- One style doesn’t fit all
- Everyone is not naturally motivated
- Be able to talk to those you don’t like
- Stop judgement
- Motivation is not simple
A first step is to find 1 to 3 priorities to focus on. As always, keep your development plan to a maximum of three themes. This can feel overwhelming when you don’t have enough hours in your day to do what you want. Consider what you can stop doing to allow you to start doing. This is connected to your operating skills competencies and specifically to time management. Refer back to Chasing Time for tips for working on how you invest your time. Also for consideration is how you work. Invest reflection into your comfortable habits and the new habits to be formed to realize your changes.
The power of networks
Your team is a network, or ecosystem. Understanding how ecosystems individually and collectively operate is complex. Relying on your memory is not the ideal process to optimize your team. Consider how you develop, maintain and capture your understanding of the network of your team. Earlier we shared gaining understanding of your team members and in particular knowing who they are, what’s important to them and how they prefer to interact. It’s about having a process to ensure you don’t lose track of this important and valuable information.
Would you follow you?
Leadership development work ties back to knowing who you are, how you show up and how you do your best work. While there’s a strong source of references to practice the skills for influence mastery, always leverage your personality to its fullest potential to connect, build relationships, build trust and engage with your team.
If you are really vested in knowing what your best leadership persona could look like, spend some time on self-assessment, self-awareness and feedback. If you’d like some help on this journey, an executive coach is an excellent partner for you.
