Being a manager doesn’t automatically make you a leader.
Effective leadership is about helping your team understand and believe in your mission and vision and collaborate with you to meet your goals. This means providing enabling leadership and aligning your team’s perceptions and attitude toward your shared vision of success.
If you are a manager who wants to effectively inspire and lead change in your organisation, then consider putting Kouzes and Pozner’s Leadership Practices into action.
In this article, we explain the model and how this can help you become a transformational leader. Read on to learn more about the effective leadership practices you should follow.
1. Challenge the process
Kouzes and Posner found in their research that leaders are risk-takers who consider failure, adversity, and difficult situations as a useful chance to learn and innovate. They don’t settle to do “business as usual.” Instead, they adopt early, challenge, and desire to improve systems constantly.
To be a successful leader, you need to do the following:
- Look for challenging opportunities that will help you and your organisation to change, grow, innovate, and improve
- Inspire others to experiment and take risks
- Create a culture that encourages your team to learn from mistakes
- Determine the work of your organisation you need to challenge and develop, including those parts that don’t seem to work
2. Empower your team with a shared vision
According to Kouzes and Posner’s research, most people are motivated not by reward or fear, but by ideas that capture their imagination.
Excellent leaders are future-oriented and aim to inspire their organisation with emotion, enthusiasm, and passion. For instance, crafting the perfect words for the vision and mission of your organisation is not enough. As a leader, you should spend time communicating with your team about your shared purpose and bring them on board.
To be a leader, you must do the following:
- Create a vision of an uplifting and dignifying future where you and your team feel motivated by your vision
- Motivate your team to believe in and act upon this shared vision by appealing to their dreams, hopes, interests, and values
3. Influence your team to act
Enabling leadership is essential to having a successful organisation.
Leaders attain goals with team effort. They understand that collaboration and relationship-based work are keys to success. To successfully meet objectives, they must unleash the full potential in their team and inspire them to act by supporting their members to put their ideas into action.
Being a leader means you need to do the following:
- Nurture a collaborative work environment by promoting shared goals and building trust among leaders, team members, and other teams
- Encouraging others by sharing information and power, giving them the freedom to achieve goals their own way, and acknowledging and rewarding their hard work
Conclusion
Every organisation needs transformational leaders who practice enabling leadership and will guide the team toward success. They unleash the potential of their staff to help them achieve incredible things.
If you are interested in learning more about enabling and Executive Leadership in Sydney and Melbourne, get in touch with us today to see how we can help. We work with leaders to achieve greatness for their businesses. We look forward to hearing from you!