Leaders other people want to follow?

Currently, there exists a knowledge gap among leaders who lack a deep understanding of the critical role they play between themselves and the behaviour strengths of their employees. People connect and engage with their leader before they connect and engage with their work. The research is clear on this point: the more positive and supportive this relationship, the more engaged and committed people are in their work. All six dimensions of performance are higher in people who have a positive mental image of their boss than people who have a less positive and even toxic image of their leader. Leader behaviour creates leader image. This connection between behaviour skills and peak performance is critical to your success. Leaders are operators. They make things happen in the organization. Organizations that compete both locally and in the global economy can ill afford the root cause of leadership failure present in most organizations – the failure to positively connect with the people doing the work of the organization. Your challenge and opportunity is to create and implement a systematic and programmatic architecture for leadership development and performance management within your organization that promotes behaviour capacity of leaders as the strategic leverage to maximizing the technical skill capacity of the people doing the work of the organization.

The lynchpin to all of this is individual leadership behaviour – and individual leadership behaviour is in essence the physical manifestation of one’s human energy. Gone are the days when a paycheck, the employee of the month award, and the gold watch at retirement were sufficient motivators for people to perform at their best or to remain loyal and dedicated to the organization. Many of today’s CEOs are still holding onto tradition, the way things have always worked, and they are still exhibiting the behaviours of the hierarchal top down driven management style that can often stifle creativity, vision and growth. What is needed today is the ‘Catalyst’ type leader — an influential leader — that can drive performance change and performance excellence.

Just as technology has increased the borders of our markets, it has also increased competition for the best and brightest employees. Employees today seek to work for a company and leaders with whom they feel proud to be associated and who treat them like active contributors, not passive producers. In a study by the Society for Human Resource Management focusing on employee job satisfaction and engagement, “relationships with immediate supervisor” was ranked more significant to employees, than benefits or the organization’s financial stability. Employees want to work for leaders who appreciate the value they add and rely on their passions and talents to every extent possible.

Leaders must acknowledge that workplace culture is a direct reflection of organizational values and the willingness to live out those values in daily behaviour at every level within the organization. A direct influence on workplace culture is the degree to which leaders choose to engage with others. Leaders must make a purposeful decision to create and sustain highly effective relationships with their employees. Although engagement is a personal matter, influential leaders acquire and practice daily a behaviour skill-set to create a culture that promotes a sense of personal ownership, accountability, and responsibility among their team members.

Changing behaviour is a challenge, even when not doing so means lost business, bankruptcy, the demise of a company, or harming other people. By the same token, changing a workplace culture that is dysfunctional or toxic will only occur by changing behaviour. As arduous as it seems, it is certainly achievable with the proper focus, training, and accountability. When leaders choose to focus on the aspect of individual leader behaviour and commit to a systematic, programmatic methodology of development, employee engagement and commitment will improve and in turn will drive performance excellence.

When you are ready to change, start with the skill of Positive Presence, an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to human energy and provides a systematic, programmatic methodology for equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the behaviour skills needed for influential leadership.