In Business, Leadership is about inspiring followers to achieve Team or Organizational goals. You may be a Team Leader or Manager in a Business, and you may have built the respect of your Team. Your next challenge is to get them focused in the right direction, the direction that will achieve their organizational goals.
How does a Team Leader persuade the Team to do this – to see the goals and to want to get there? How does a Leader inspire the Team? The ability to be inspirational is a key Leadership competency that can be practiced and learnt. There two critical keys to work on to provide inspirational leadership – selling the vision and persuading the Team that this is worth doing.
People want to know where they are going and why they should bother going there – what is in it for them. A poor Leader will state the targets and the objectives – figures this week, figures this month. An effective Leader can get higher figures and more committed followers by selling a positive outcome in a way that inspires.
Step 1 is to paint a positive picture of what exactly the end goal is. The goal must be positive – rather than negative, or what we should avoid doing. The art of always using positive language rather than negative is essential to leadership. For example we tell a Team Member what to do or ask for them for the right way – we don’t tell them what not to do. The reason is simple, it doesn’t work! If the waiter puts a very hot plate down in front of you and says – ‘Don’t touch that plate, it is very hot’, what will we do? Yes, we touch it!
When we are selling the goal, we paint the picture of the positive outcome – where we are going rather than not going. ‘I want us to be the highest performing Team in the business’ – rather than ‘We can’t be in the middle of the league this year’.
Paint a very clear picture of the end goal – the follower can see it and clearly visualize it. Make it really attractive and relevant for your particular group. ‘We are going to achieve so much that every new hire will want to come on this Team’.
Step 2 is to have a plan. How are we going to get there? You don’t have to have the whole plan – but you need step 1 and step 2 – and both of these must make sense to the Team. Identify quick wins – preferably generated from the Team itself, and present those as the first steps.
Step 3 is to sell it, to persuade them that it is worth doing and gain their buy-in. The language we use in effective leadership is real ‘selling’ language – all positive language and very relevant to your Team members. We state the ‘benefits’ of the end goal and the ‘benefits’ of the effort. First prepare a list of the benefits, then choose 2-3 under each heading, and then work out how to word these in a way that will come across well to your Team.
When identifying benefits, cover 5 areas –
1. The Company – what are the benefits to the Company of us achieving this goal? What is in it for them?
2. The Customer – what are the benefits for the Customer?
3. The Team – if we achieve this goal, in what way will the Team benefit?
4. The Team Leader / Manager – how will I benefit if the Team achieves achieve this goal?
5. The Team Member – what is in it for this Team Member / each Team Member?
Paint the picture of the goal first – what it is. Next comes the benefits, in the order listed above. Then bottom line the success vision and the ‘can do’ element.
Practice this and sell it well – you will definitely be on a path to providing effective leadership and to inspiring your Team.
Kate Tammemagi specializes in designing and running fully customized Training Courses. She has extensive experience designing and delivering customized Leadership Development Training and Supervisor Training Courses.