5 Effective Leadership Principles for Your Organisation
One question that seems to always come to the fore at every leadership discussion is ‘Are leaders born or are they made?“
It’s a question that continuously drives debates, even among many senior leaders in corporate organisations. In day-to-day operations, you’ll often come across employees and other colleagues who appear to stand out and generally take the lead in initiating things. Ideally, you’ll say that such employees exhibit certain effective leadership principles.
Indeed, some employees express these effective leadership principles naturally, as though they were born with them, but the reality of many other employees is quite different. For example, many CEOs and other C-Suites executives in some of the top organisations in the world today were introverts, shy and unassuming at their younger ages.
Having leaders with exemplary effective leadership principles is very critical to the success of your organisation to simply leave it to fate. When your organisation is particular about building its leadership team, you can take solace in the fact that your employees can be groomed into the right kind of leaders through sustained leadership development programmes.
It is also very important your managers and C-suite executives are also exceptional leaders. While being a leader may not necessarily be easy, all managers need to strive to achieve it.
Leadership is constantly evolving to meet fast-changing business needs and demands. For leaders to thrive, they must understand the needs of their team and adapt accordingly. But there are key leadership principles that are essential in all situations.
What are the principles that your leaders should know and have that will make them stand out in the eyes of the general public?
In this article, we will discuss the essential leadership principles that your leaders should have to help ensure success. These principles also apply across most leadership roles in your organisation.
5 Principles for Effective Leadership in Your Organisation
Create a Shared Vision
The need for a clear vision and how it connects to your organisation’s goals is a vital leadership principle.
To realise this vision, it is essential to identify and be clear about the path you want your team to take as well as the steps they need to achieve the end results. It is also your responsibility as a leader to make your vision plain and direct to the team, to ensure that everyone understands and shares it, and the ideas behind it.
You can communicate your vision in a number of ways; a mission statement that you share at business or one-to-one meetings, conventions, or on charts around your offices. Your vision will also need the support of marketing and communication efforts, as well as your organisation’s culture.
When you’re not clear about your vision, it will be challenging for your employees or colleagues to understand what they should be aiming for.
Nurture Collaboration and Ensure Alignment
Having the right people that support your vision is just as important as having the right vision. Alignment of your team comes out of having a shared vision, and teamwork is key to a successful business environment.
Productivity substantially declines when your team members believe they are in competition with each other, that it’s all about them, or that they aren’t safe working with others.
Effective leaders attempt to bring everyone together around a common goal. They are aware that for their team to succeed, everyone has to work towards the vision. They establish opportunities for collaboration within their work after clearly communicating goals, using team building to assist everyone get to know one another and have fun together.
As a leader, you must ensure that every member of your team understands their goals and wants to be a part of them.
Build a Strong Positive Culture
Every organisation should embed leadership principles linked to specific cultures, beliefs and behaviours that make up the work atmosphere. For example, a positive organisational culture is a subject that’s typically valued and discussed, but leaders rarely act on building one.
As a leader, your ability to build a strong positive culture is a vital leadership principle. Your responsibility is to think about the culture you want to create and actively create one that encourages trust, high morale, low turnover and minimal drama.
Having a strong positive culture will ensure purposeful brainstorming and raise the standards for teamwork across board. When there’s a strong and positive culture, it inevitably ensures that employee retention is easy, and it becomes an environment where people want to be.
Communicate
Effective leaders know that open and positive communication is a leadership principle that provides the foundation for any successful organisation. Without this, employees remain unaware of what is expected of them; they feel out of the loop and ultimately become disengaged.
Clear communication ethics prevent uncertainty, indecisions and misunderstandings. It also helps your employees better understand decisions that are made, feel confident to speak to you and encourage relationship building.
Leaders communicate using different patterns; effective leaders create standards and practices for strong and clear communication. They also communicate often and take time to connect with their team.
Just as importantly, leaders use their listening skills to inform what they say to their teams and how best to inspire them. This makes it easier for everyone to align their goals and priorities.
Be Customer-centric (Customer Is Still King)
Unequivocally, this is one of the top leadership principles of all time. As a leader, you must understand the value of providing excellent customer service and establishing a customer-first culture within your organisation. Your customer’s trust not only needs to be gained but also maintained over time because the organisation simply cannot exist without them.
As your team supports your customers and meets their needs, as an effective leader, you understand that the customers, in turn, support your organisation’s bottom line, and you ensure your team treats all things customer-related with honesty and directness.
Your priority should be on setting clear targets and providing the right support for both customers and team members to thrive.
Becoming an effective leader involves:
- Creating clarity and confidence in your team.
- Creating connections and demonstrating loyalty.
- Encouraging daily growth in people around us.
Your leadership style has profound implications for the people around you and how you do business.
It will be difficult to transform your organisation unless you reflect on who you are as a leader and particularly work on developing the effective leadership principles discussed in this article. You can learn them, put them to work and show up with a mindset to serve others.
Olasunkanmi Adenuga
Director, Workforce Learning