Your team of employees look to you to be the most effective leader possible. When you are truly dedicated to them and the responsibility laid before you, you may wonder precisely what you should do to make sure that you uphold their trust in you. Even if you never had a good leader to model yourself after, you can still prove yourself to be more than capable of this job when you utilize a few important strategies in your everyday leadership skills. These simple suggestions can help you engage your team and provide them with the inspiration they need to flourish under your guidance.
1) Be Genuine
Employees can often detect fakery when they encounter it. As they look to you to lead them in sales, productivity and customer service, your team overwhelmingly wants you to be genuine with them. When you try to hide behind a facade or build yourself up to be something that you are not, you ultimately alienate the members of your team and cause a rift that you may be unable to repair. Rather than shun your true identity, you should be genuine in your speech, emotions and motivation when dealing with your workers.
Part of being sincere with yourself and your team involves avoiding the superficiality and attention seeking that comes with most social media today. Websites like Facebook and Twitter invite narcissism and causes more drama than it is worth. In fact, some of the most effective leaders in the business world today shun social media, particularly those that are not business related, simply because they are a waste of time and energy. Rather than get caught up in the countless venues for vanity today, you can retain your genuine self by focusing on your team rather than how you appear to others, both in real life and online.
2) Be Creative and Inspire Creativity
While your counterparts in the corporate world may be toeing the company line, you can claim the advantage by being creative in your leadership. Rather than hosting boring and uninspiring business meetings in the board room, you can liven up your team by taking them to a nice restaurant or to a scenic local park to brainstorm, discuss and come up with innovative solutions to the topics you need to have addressed.
Likewise, you should not fear your workers' creativity, but rather embrace it and harness it to your team's advantage. Many executives fear those employees who prove to be more cunning and creative than those in positions of authority. However, when you allow your workers unlimited access to their own creativity, you end up with a team who respects you and will be more willing to give you the results and then some that you desire.
3) Take Time for Yourself
All work can indeed make you dull if you do not take time for yourself once in a while. Even as you are devoted to your team, you should still remember to put yourself first once in a while. Avoiding the occasional day off could prompt you to create drama in the workplace and cause yourself more angst than you can handle. Taking a day off every once in a while to focus on family or your personal hobbies should be something that you anticipate highly instead of feel guilty about or dread. When you put yourself first once in a while, you end up being a more effective leader who is responsive, empathetic and more effective than those who work for days on end without a break.
Your employees count on you to be a good leader. You can use these strategies to organize and motivate your team while also stoking the creativity that will make you and your company more successful.
