Besides emotional intelligence, leadership lies in authentic values and purpose.
Leadership is about getting others to believe in you and your ideas. To do that, you need three things:
- Emotional intelligence: understanding what you and others feel and why those feelings arise helps you respond in ways that improve outcomes.
- Authentic values: build trust, navigate conflicts in ways that gain broad acceptance, and manage ambiguity and change.
- Purpose: serving a higher purpose motivates and inspires people to go above and beyond in ways that result in high performance.
Coaching for leadership always begins with emotional intelligence and then moves forward to authentic leadership values and purpose.
Leaders Have Authentic Values
Being good at a technical skill or a process no longer qualifies employees for leadership, because technology and processes become obsolete too quickly. Making the transition from being a high performer to leading a high performing team requires a shift in thinking and priorities from doing to managing.
Identifying your leadership values will help you make that shift. Effective leaders identify and adhere to authentic values, the rules that help them navigate the unknown, the conflicts, and the ambiguity that characterizes the environment every company operates in today.
It’s easy to manage a team when everything is going well, but inevitably, something will go wrong. New leaders are routinely faced with what may seem like impossible situations:
- What do you do when your former peers create conflict?
- What do you do when your boss tells you to protect someone who is underperforming or causing disruptions? Or to abandon or overlook a valuable team member?
- What do you do when a promising employee makes a huge mistake?
- How do you help your team succeed when, due to external reasons, everyone needs to take on new roles or change their processes?
If you know your leadership values, you can remain steady and find solutions no matter what happens. Every company needs leaders who can resolve conflicts, balance competing interests, and remove obstacles that impede personal and team growth. It is a key part of developing an effective leadership style.
Leadership Is Rooted in Purpose
Serving a purpose is not about altruism but about finding meaning in work that helps you push through the hardest decisions and reach the highest goals.
In the day-to-day management of teams and results, a true purpose gives effective leaders the energy and clarity they need to serve their team: to continually solve problems, identify and remove obstacles, build resilience, and empower and grow team performance.
Purpose is the key to leadership behaviors that lead to top quartile performance, including:
- Decisiveness: taking a strong stand when others are hesitating or waffling
- Courage: compromising current cash or balance sheet positions to improve strategic positions against competitors
- Strategy: investing in long term solutions and innovation
Multiple studies have shown that financial rewards have a limited effect on performance. As long as employees’ basic needs are met, recognition, a sense of belonging, team cohesion, and an opportunity for personal growth drive effort and engagement more than monetary rewards. When employees understand their purpose, studies have shown that turnover goes down and profits go up.
Leaders who know and are dedicated to serving a higher purpose create value for the long term. They will have the results and the rewards to show for it.
You Can Be a High Performing Leader
With leadership coaching, you can become a high performing leader in your organization. Leaders appear at every level in an organization, and they always rise up because people want to work for them.
When you have emotional intelligence, leadership values, and purpose, you’ll be able to bring people together in a team to achieve surprisingly ambitious goals. When that happens, others will see you as a leader and want to be part of your winning team.
Contact me to find out how.