You can’t begin to transform a team or an organisation until you’ve transformed yourself.
With that in mind, there are 7 critical Leadership principles that support great Leaders, great Careers and create great Teams.
1) Personal Power
2) Conviction
3) Charisma
4) Courage
5) People Skills
6) Ethics
7) Expertise
Truly transformational Leadership starts with you, then radiates outwards.
Let’s take a look at those 7 principles.
Personal Power
A Leader needs to be someone who has demonstrated Personal Power.
How you define success is a very individual thing. What I consider to be success will be very different to your view.
But, if you expect to be followed, you must have achieved some measure of success in which others want to achieve success.
Their hope is that you can lead them to similar successes.
What is your record of success?
What abilities or special skills made that success possible?
Are you ready to share those abilities and skills with others?
Conviction
Conviction is your ability to communicate in a positive way about what you think and feel.
Your unshakeable belief!
It’s what happens when you believe something so deeply that it actually forms a part of you.
Are you willing and able to communicate the deepest parts of you?
Are you eager to do so before others?
Are you ready to have others embrace and follow those same beliefs?
Charisma
Those who can affect, deep connections with others quickly are said to have Charisma. Charismatic people are confident in a positive way.
They are neither boastful, nor egotistical. They have the ability to forge quick bonds with others.
Are you easy to like?
Or, are you a ‘tough nut to crack’?
Are you ready to develop Charisma?
Courage
How confident you are as an individual does not immediately equate to how courageous you will be.
Courage that only causes those around you to be fearful is not the kind of courage we are talking about here.
It has more to do with how secure you make others feel.
You must be willing to step first, where others fear to tread.
Courage is, after all, “doing it scared”.
Do you have courage?
Do you display courage?
Would your people agree?
People Skills
The ability to ‘read’ people and have influence with them is People Skills.
It includes the ability to read subtle changes in peoples body language, language, and intonation.
It includes the ability to learn how to connect with somebody without overlooking the context in which you are communicating.
Having people skills means being tuned in to all the ‘cues’ and ‘clues’ that people are sending your way when they are attempting to communicate with you.
Did you know that people don’t need words to communicate?
Is your communication combative or collaborative?
Are you communicating or simply trying to get the other person to submit?
Ethics
To be ethical means to act in accordance with a clear, consistent, set of principles that connect to a sense of what is right and what is wrong.
Your people should be able to predict what you are going to do; within the boundaries you have set.
Those boundaries will have been clearly communicated. These are the principles and values that guide your life.
Do your people know what is considered to be the right thing to do?
…and the wrong?
When was the last time you checked your ‘Ethics’?
Expertise
Expertise is different from what you do.
Expertise are what you know.
The wisdom and insights you have developed over the years as a result of your personal and professional experiences.
Expertise is the practical, practice-able, wisdom that causes others to see things a different way.
Do you know your ‘hourly wage’?
Are you investing your time where your expertise count?
Are you allowing others to apply their expertise where they count?
These are the 7 essential qualities of a Leader.
Each essential quality supports the other. No truly great Leader missed any of these qualities.
Each quality is integral to the other 6. If you mentally remove any of the points you instantly understand how that missing element would diminish a Leaders strength.
If you would like to have a free 30 minute consultation with Dave to discuss the 7 qualities further please email us at david.davies@sandler.com and we will be in touch.
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