THE PEOPLE LEADER IMPERATIVES

Leadership is different now. Economic instability, dwindling and increasingly diverse workforce, and shareholder pressure are creating demands and challenges inconceivable just a few years ago. To meet those challenges, leaders are being asked to execute business strategy while simultaneously engaging higher levels of commitment and effort from all employees.

1. Coach and mentor for Results

Leaders get work done through others. The ability to effectively coach for success and for improvement is critical to getting work group results and ultimately executing the organisation’s strategy. Developing others through training and targeted experiences is one of a leader’s most important tools for engaging workers.

“What do good leaders do?” We ask this question a lot. No surprise, the most common answer we hear is this: “Good leaders coach.” And that’s true. After all, a successful coach prepares his team to accomplish a goal and moves them along the road to success.

2. People Leaders Drive Performance

As pressure to perform strengthens, we have been hearing a frequent cry from senior leaders; “We need accountability. We need to drive performance.” Often what they really mean is, “We need our people to work harder to make the numbers!”

Though “making the numbers” is important, it represents an extremely limited view of a powerful leadership imperative. In today’s organisations, roles have become more complex, more ambiguous, and more stressful. Accordingly, performance in those roles has become more multifaceted, harder to gauge, and demanding. But whatever it is, leaders need to drive it.

3. Encourage Loyalty and Trust

While the war for talent will burst and vanish with each economic cycle, the root cause of turnover employee dissatisfaction shows its effects in more insidious ways through low loyalty and trust. At a time when organisations are counting on their people to do more with less, in less time, with less supervision, and often (and this hurts most of all) for less money, they need workers who are fully engaged, not just going through the motions.

Good leaders look beyond retention and aim for loyalty because loyal employees are more committed to the organisation and will go the extra mile to satisfy a customer, optimise quality, or save money. The biggest constraint on growth and the success of an organisation is not markets, is not technology, is not opportunity, is not the stock market. It is your ability to select, develop, and retain the right people.”

4 Accomplish Work

By now, most leaders understand the differences between leading and managing. Most also know that a good manager is not necessarily a good leader, and vice versa. And if they don’t know this, the people who report to them do. Leaders who effectively manage work, both their own and their group’s, can keep people focused on priorities and give them a chance to grow and develop.

How leaders need to manage work has changed. The sources and flow of information have changed dramatically. Pressure to reduce cycle time on everything from production, to product development, to customer service, has increased as well. And more leaders are “managing” people who have more expertise than they do in key areas. These factors challenge the best managers of work.

5 People Leaders Partner Within and Across Teams

Team leadership used to be a lot simpler. Teams had clear, clean boundaries, processes, and outputs, and your team usually fit pretty neatly into the larger scheme of things. So long as the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, you were a successful team leader.

Teams and teamwork are more important than ever, but team leadership has changed dramatically. A “team” used to be a stable, intact work group, but has now morphed and multiplied (some might say mutated) into a wide variety of groups with a purpose.

6. Impact Through Personal Power

You cannot force anyone to do anything these days. They have to want to do it. Welcome to the new age of influence, where effective leaders at all organisational levels don’t, or can’t, throw their weight around to make things happen. Call it the position power paradox, where the rungs of the organisational ladder run horizontally. In today’s sweet-talk, ever evolving organisations, leaders need to get things done through people who work outside their line of reporting and in some cases even “outrank” them.

Today, getting people to willingly “sign on” is crucial. The leader who builds working relationships and generates commitment and engagement to ideas and actions will dramatically increase opportunities for success. But gaining that commitment poses a crucial challenge, especially when everyone is too busy and everything is urgent.

7. Choose Talent

The initial step in building an exceptional workforce is choosing talented, motivated and engaged people. Unfortunately, most organisations have not invested in the right processes to ensure that they hire the right people for the right jobs. The impact is far greater than the cost of finding replacements. Poor hiring decisions cause untold losses in the forms of lower productivity, higher turnover, and poor customer service.

8) Leadership positional role

Leaders must assume a major role in the success of an organisation by becoming an advocate for both talent acquisition and advancement. One way to measure the success of a leader is to check his or her talent management record. High turnover rates, poor employee performance, few promotions, and dissatisfied team members all indicate a losing approach that can affect every aspect of the leader’s and the organisation’s performance.