Add these tactics to your leadership toolkit
Getting promoted to the corner office is just the first step on the long road of leadership. While new leaders may feel that they are struggling to stay afloat, they may prove to be more effective leaders than seasoned veterans. This is because they are striving to learn how to best perform in their new roles. If this is you, adding important leadership teambuilding tools to your leadership toolkit is a good tactic. Complacency and contentment are killers of progress, and true leaders understand that continual learning and adding tools to their leadership toolkits are essential for success over the long haul.
The following resources offer invaluable teambuilding tools for leaders:
- 5 Leadership Tools That Will Help You Succeed
- 7 Leadership Qualities of a True Champion
- The Importance Of Leadership Development
- How to Be the Kind of Influential Leader That You Would Like to Follow
- 12 Signs You’re A Natural Born Leader Even If You Don’t Feel You Are
- Why the Best Leaders Aren’t Experts
With leadership teambuilding tools, leaders can add valuable tactics to their leadership toolkits to become more effective in their roles.
Know when to ask for help. Everyone needs help now and then, and leaders are no exception, states 5 Leadership Tools That Will Help You Succeed. An important aspect to success is knowing when, who and how to ask for help. Not only does asking for help free up your own workload, but it helps to develop your team members by giving them valuable experience and skills.
Know what’s going on. As a leader, it’s important to understand what’s going on with all of the individuals on your team. This not only translates to what team members are currently working on, but it means knowing their personal goals and aspects of their personal lives as well. To achieve this, leaders should hold regular meetings, both as a group and with individuals as well, to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the teams.
Care about your team members. One of the six TIGERS principles of success is genuineness, and true leaders genuinely care about their team members. Effective leaders are empathetic, and they care about their team members all the time, not just when they are on the clock. Learn about your team members individually, and strive to better the working environment for everyone.
Take ownership. When times are good, it’s easy to be a leader and take all of the credit for success. But when things take a turn for the worse, true leaders understand how to take ownership and responsibility for the bad as well. And when times are good and the team is successful, true leaders understand how to give praise and celebrate their team members’ contributions so that every team member feels valuable.
Learn, and implement, new skills. Continual training is an integral part of the leadership role, but training without implementation is simply a waste of time, says The Importance Of Leadership Development. The important part of training is taking what you have learned and applying it to your daily managerial duties. To combat this disconnect, leaders must implement consistent and deliberate leadership development plans for managers to put their new skills to good use. For an excellent and well documented white paper on how to ensure that your team training transfers click here.
Place importance on others. According to How to Be the Kind of Influential Leader That You Would Like to Follow, leadership is about the other people around you, and not just you. True leaders build trust within their team by serving others, creating positive experiences for others and having genuine and sincere conversations and relationships with your team members.
Show your team members respect. Another principle for success is respect, and true leaders know how to treat everyone with respect, states 12 Signs You’re A Natural Born Leader Even If You Don’t Feel You Are. Regardless of how they are feeling on any given day, true leaders understand that how they treat those around them is important, and it affects not only individuals, but the workplace culture as a whole.
Teach others how to work. Delegation is key to success, and leaders who try and do everything themselves or who micromanage their teams with end up with less than stellar results and a resentful team. Instead, leaders should enable and inspire their team members to do their own work, says Why the Best Leaders Aren’t Experts. Leaders need to be focused on the big picture and empower their team members to complete the day-to-day details.
Learn. Since continual learning is imperative for effective leadership, true leaders understand when it’s time to add some tools to their toolkits. Workshops such as the 6 Principles That Build High Performance Teams workshop allow leaders to learn effective action planning and strategy deployment tactics through hands-on experience. Participants learn how to engage their employees to champion deployment, and they learn how to implement these tactics in their own organizations.
Effective leadership is all about continual learning. And while learning is important, it is just the first step to success. Leaders need to understand how to take what they have learned and apply it to their individual situations in order for anything to change and get better. Some important leadership teambuilding tools that leaders should implement include asking for help, caring for others, taking ownership and empowering their team members to be more effective and productive.
Copyright TIGERS Success Series, Inc. by Dianne Crampton
About TIGERS Success Series, Inc.
TIGERS Success Series is a Bend, Oregon Team Development Consultant that helps leaders build cooperation among employees and collaboration between departments. We have been doing this for over two decades providing diagnostics and customized team interventions for committed leaders and their teams. In October we are crowd funding to take our diagnostics to an all new level. For a preview of the rewards given in this campaign, click the link on the left.
