Effective leaders are essential for an organisation’s success. A great leader is a magical element that turns a collection of skilled people into one unified, synergistic force.
A successful leader is one who believes in their employees’ capacity for growth, who can push team members towards that growth, and who can get everyone invested in the same goals.
Read on to learn more about what makes an effective leader, great leadership tactics, and how to utilise the four leadership styles to guide your team in a hybrid workforce.
What Makes A Good Leader? Top Factors That Define An Excellent Leader
We have identified 10 essential factors that define an excellent leader. All these factors fall under the three core categories of interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, and industry knowledge. These good leadership skills are what should make up your toolbox for driving the growth of your organisation.
Interpersonal Skills
Someone with good interpersonal skills can negotiate effectively, work with others, manage conflict, and establish worthwhile relationships. It’s easy to see why these are some of the most important skills in a leader. But a lot of the time the phrase “interpersonal skills” becomes little more than a buzzword, and there isn’t much exploration into what this actually entails.
- Communication is a core leadership skill. This involves being clear and concise with your team about what you expect from them and why. It also involves being aware of non-verbal communication – if your words are saying one thing but your body language and facial expressions are saying something different, your team is unlikely to feel they can trust you.
- Active listening is about making others feel like you care what they have to say. However, it is also important to demonstrate this by taking on board relevant feedback. If employees feel like they have a say in the company, they are more likely to be engaged and invested in its success.
- Empathy is about putting yourself in another’s shoes and understanding what motivates them. An empathetic leader cultivates mutual respect and a work environment built around understanding and collaboration.
Intrapersonal Skills
You may not have heard this one as much, but intrapersonal skills are an important leadership tactic too. Basic intrapersonal skills involve managing your time, avoiding distractions, and keeping up personal motivation. But to be an excellent leader, you’ll need to go a step further than that.
- Inquisitiveness is not just being curious about ideas and strategies to grow your business. It’s also being curious about yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and how you come across to people. Once you start observing yourself the same way you observe others, you can begin to see how to improve all the interpersonal skills we listed above.
- Flexibility – The COVID19 pandemic has made abundantly clear what was already a reality – the only constant in the work environment of today is change! Great leaders see change as an opportunity rather than something to suppress. Being able to revise plans, try new things, and adapt to changing circumstances may be what sets apart the leaders of tomorrow from those who will get left behind.
- Resilience is about the ability to work well under pressure, bounce back from failures, and not let a setback in one area affect others. As a leader, you are aware of all the different priorities operating at any one time, and when they clash it causes extra pressure. It’s up to you to stay calm in the face of this pressure so that you can juggle competing priorities and restructure if need be.
Industry Knowledge
No matter how highly developed your interpersonal and intrapersonal skills are, if you don’t have thorough, up-to-date industry knowledge, you won’t be an effective leader. This means that keeping up with current trends and the latest news in your industry is part of having good leadership skills.
- Research should involve not only reading industry publications, but also those related to your industry. Keeping up to date with industry activities also requires frequent online research. Also, make use of the knowledge that already exists in your business among employees and documents from clients and suppliers.
- Networking with peers in the same industry is how you will learn about new developments before they are picked up by the media. It is important to apply your networking strategies across a number of avenues, such as professional membership associations, business functions, and trade shows. This is also where interpersonal skills come in once again to help you forge meaningful peer-to-peer relationships.
Embracing The Hybrid Workforce: How Leaders Can Efficiently Guide The Team Using The 4 Leadership Styles
Once again, the pandemic has shown that not only is a hybrid workplace possible, but it can also be more effective than the traditional nine-to-five, in-person system.
But managing a team remotely and across time zones does require shifts in thinking and leadership tactics. Here’s how you can use the four most effective leadership styles to guide a hybrid workforce.
1. Coaching Leadership Style
A coaching leadership style is one that focuses on employees and strives to help them along their long-term professional development paths. They love to watch their team members grow and improve, and they don’t get hung up on short-term failure(s) if it is an opportunity for long-term learning and growth.
If you have employees you don’t see in person, it can be difficult to see who is struggling and who is thriving. This is why it is important to have regular face-to-face check-ins with the whole team and individual employees, even if these are virtual. Although a decentralised workforce can feel somewhat disconnected, there are so many avenues today for staying in touch with team members.
2. Democratic Leadership Style
A leader with a democratic management style is one who gives employees a voice and allows them to participate in the decision-making process. These leaders understand that their employees are the business’s most valuable resource and that listening to a diversity of ideas is how you find the best ones.
With a hybrid workforce, you can still make it clear to your team that you value their input. In fact, involving employees in decision-making is key to maintaining a feeling of connection and a sense of working together to achieve a common goal. This will help alleviate feelings of isolation and create a collaborative atmosphere.
3. Visionary Leadership Style
A visionary leader is one who can motivate team members by communicating a purpose and direction that employees will believe in. This is not just about developing a visionary business strategy, but more about good leadership skills and communicating that strategy to employees in a way that gets them excited and fully behind you.
Maintaining this excitement in your vision for the business is key to keeping up employee morale and performance in a hybrid workforce. To create an engaged, motivated workforce, leaders must engender trust in their employees by selling their vision and then following through. However, this goes both ways – you must show your team members that you trust them enough to allow a level of autonomy.
4. Transformational Leadership Style
A transformational leadership style is one that focuses on growth and innovation. Transformational leaders see opportunity in change and believe that constant adaptation and growth is the only way to stay ahead of the curve. They sometimes push employees beyond their comfort zones and let them discover that they are capable of more than they realised.
This leadership style is not the easiest to pull off, but it will be very helpful in getting employees to embrace a hybrid workplace. Your team members may be unsure of what their work will look like in the future and maybe hesitant about change. Your job is to help them see it as an opportunity for progress and improvement. At the same time, a certain level of consistency is important for maintaining trust in changing times.
FINAL Thoughts
Excellent leaders come in all different shapes and sizes and leadership tactics are not one-size-fits-all.
Some of the best leaders lean more towards a democratic style, and others to a visionary or transformative style. The most important thing is to be a leader that your team members feel they can get behind.
Your main goal is to bring out the best in your team, which involves making each member feel like what they do is important to the success of the organisation. In this way, you can encourage growth in your employees, and subsequently, in your business too.
Author: Daniel Cruz – Editorial Member, Hourly
