61 Developing Your Leadership Skills
Learning Objectives
- Develop your charismatic leadership.
- Learn how to be a servant leader.
- Follow a process to develop your own authentic leadership.
In this section, we will give you tips to help you develop your charismatic, servant, and authentic leadership skills. Each of these contemporary approaches to leadership is believed to be related to employee attitudes and a healthy work environment.
Develop Your Charismatic Leadership Skills
Charismatic individuals have a “magnetic” personality that is appealing to followers. While many people assume that charisma is inborn, it is possible to improve your charisma by following these suggestions:
Have a vision around which people can gather. When framing requests or addressing to others, instead of emphasizing short-term goals, stress the importance of the long-term vision. When giving a message, think about the overarching purpose. What is the ultimate goal? Why should people care? What are you trying to achieve?
Tie the vision to history. In addition to stressing the ideal future, charismatic leaders bring up the history and how the shared history ties to the future.
Watch your body language. Charismatic leaders are energetic and passionate about their ideas. This involves truly believing in your own ideas. When talking to others, you may want to look confident, look them in the eye, and express your belief in your ideas.
Make sure that employees have confidence in themselves. You can achieve this by showing that you believe in them and trust their abilities. If they have real reason to doubt their abilities, make sure that you help them address the underlying issue, such as through training and mentoring.
Challenge the status quo. Charismatic leaders solve current problems by radically rethinking the way things are done and suggesting alternatives that are risky, novel, and unconventional.
Develop Your Servant Leadership Skills
One of the influential leadership paradigms involves leaders putting others first. This could be a hard transition for an achievement-oriented and success-driven manager who rises to high levels. Here are some tips to achieve servant leadership.
Don’t ask what your employees can do for you. Think of what you can do for them. Your job as a leader is to be of service to them. How can you relieve their stress? Protect them from undue pressure? Pitch in to help them? Think about creative ways of helping ease their lives.
One of your key priorities should be to help employees reach their goals. This involves getting to know them. Learn about who they are and what their values and priorities are.
Be humble. You are not supposed to have all the answers and dictate to others. One way of achieving this humbleness may be to do volunteer work.
Be open with your employees. Ask them questions. Give them information so that they understand what is going on in the company.
Find ways of helping the external community. Giving employees opportuniti