According to Human Resources Management: Sixth Edition, ‘leadership’ is defined as a process during which one person influences other people to willingly and enthusiastically direct their efforts and abilities towards attaining group or organisational goals. Those who are entrusted with leadership roles focus on vision, strategic development and initiative.
To put this in a simpler fashion, leadership takes place when one person (in other words, the leader) influences other people (usually employees in an organisation) to do all that they can in order to achieve the company’s goals.
Today’s changing world
The world has been changing significantly with every new advancement in technology. (The Fourth Industrial Revolution has been responsible for many of these advancements.) However, in 2020, these technological advancements were really put to the test as companies across the globe were forced to decentralise their workforces as if they didn’t do this their company faced extinction.
This made it vital for leaders to rethink how they approached the idea of leadership as now they still had to inspire employees who weren’t in the same places as themselves. They could not look them in the eye, tell the employees what they were thinking and have a meaningful dialogue with these people.
A rethink of approaches to leadership
A leader is at the help of the ship – and needs a good GPS
The leader of an organisation is the captain of the organisation. They have the responsibility of taking the company where they need to go in order to promote sustainable growth. However, they need to have the necessary foresight to be able to look out onto the horizon and predict in which waters the organisation will be prosperous.
In his course, FORESight John Sanei describes ‘foresight’ like that “moment of blinding clarity that allows you to solve a problem with an elegant solution. Leaders need to know that the problem is in their organisation and require a way to determine how to solve this problem. Their GPS will give them different ways of how to solve the organisational challenge, but they need to know which is the best solution for the business.
A leader is not afraid of rolling up their sleeves
While a leader is the captain of an organisation, he or she must not be afraid of getting stuck into the work that the organisation does and pitching in if necessary. If employees see that their leader is willing to work alongside them – and is not just content to sit in their corner office bemoaning the state of the company’s bottom line. As such, they will be driven to work harder because they know that they’re working doing it for a person and not just a nameless and faceless corporation.
A leader must display humanity
In the end, a leader must display their humanness to their employees. The employees must see that they are reasonable in what they expect of them and that they care about what’s going on in the employees’ lives. So, for example, if an employee’s productivity slips the fact that they first take the opportunity to ask the employee what’s going on – as opposed to just resorting to a disciplinary hearing or something similar – shows that the leaders care about their employees and value what they bring to the business.
Because the leader shows that they care about the employees, the employee will show the leader that they care about them and the business – and will work harder to achieve the targets that they’ve set out to.
Contact Future Self Academy
If you would like to discover how to become a better leader in a changing world, then Graeme Codrington’s author-led course – Leading in a Changing World – is for you. This course is for leaders and those people who want to – and hope to – be leaders in the future. This course will help provide clarity and serve as something of a ‘sense-maker’ for anyone in a leadership role or position.
For more information about this course, as well as other courses in our catalogue, please follow this link.
