As December wraps up, we bring you our fourth and final installment of our 2019 blog recap series: Leadership. If you have not already, go back and read our other 2019 recap blog articles:
TIGERS Success Series 2019 Recap Part 3 – Positive Work Culture
TIGERS Success Series 2019 Blog Recap: Part 2 Virtual and Micro Training
TIGERS® Success Series 2019 Year End Blog — Virtual Training, Positive Work Culture, and Leadership
What inspires effective leadership?
Leadership spans many different areas, and our blog posts over the past year have done the same. But today we want to briefly touch on exactly what qualities and characteristics distinguish a good leader from an exceptional one. We chose to focus on this because many times people confuse charisma with true leadership or believe how a leader makes them feel defines whether or not the person truly is a “good” leader.
With that being said, let’s explore this deeper. While having charisma is an important skill to have, it is not the end all be all. Through various studies and research, TIGERS® Success Series has found that leaders that employ the virtues of listening, trust, genuineness, and empathy have a much higher success rate — both with their employees and in the business world.
Why?
First off, employees who are listened to feel valued and seen. This ability to really listen to what your employee has to say also helps build their trust in you. If you are willing to trust their ideas, then they will be more likely to place the same amount of trust in you. However, this must be genuine! If you only pretend to lend a listening ear, then eventually your clients and employees will catch on, and will no longer believe you are a genuine, trustworthy employer.
Rather, they will lose trust in you and believe you care only for yourself and the success of your business. This leads to our last point, which is empathy.
Why empathy is important to effective leadership
While hard skills are important, soft skills are more or equally so. Empathy encourages positive work environment, a culture of trust, and the belief that the team truly is a team. Without it leaders begin to fail…and so does their company. Why? Because employees seek employment elsewhere unless they are heard, seen, and trusted.
However, make no mistake. Empathy is not a woosy-soft-insignificant-bunch-of-fluff. It is difficult to muster the emotional intelligence to remain curious to understand the person if front of you when you disagree with them. It takes guts, a firm commitment in your own self worth and excellent control of your knee-jerk reactions.
Now, a question for you to think about. Have you noticed any of these characteristics in your top managers? How about yourself? As you think back, bring to mind those times when your company flourished and productivity increased. It was probably due to good leadership skills!
2019 Leadership Articles and Insights
Want to increase your understanding of leadership or brush up on some previous articles you read? Check out these articles from 2019 that covered this category. Thanks for reading and we wish you a wonderful holiday season and a strong start to your New Year!
- Should Leaders Look After the Financial Wellbeing of Their Employees?
- How Technology is Impacting Today’s Future Leaders
- Best Leadership Skills Build Small Business Success
- What Did Game of Thrones Teach Us About Leading by Fear?
- How Poor Leadership Behavior Impacts Work Culture
- How Toxic Leaders Stifle Team Development Success
- How Genuine Leaders Inspire Positive Work Culture
- Gen Z and Millennials Want Leader Led Employee Engagement
- How Do You Maintain Communication During Change?
Copyright TIGERS Success Series, Inc. by Izabela Zagorski
About TIGERS Success Series, Inc.
About TIGERS Success Series, Inc.Why guess what is needed for workforce development when it is completely unnecessary?
Our mission is to improve the world of work for millions of employees while their organizations thrive. We accomplish this with a researched and validated comprehensive, robust system for improving both your work environment and profitability.
We specialize in developing high performance work cultures. Scaled to grow with you, our proprietary Team Behavior Profile, consulting and group facilitation services, and online TIGERS micro training packages are based on the six principles we have found to be the right mix to make this happen. Visit us today to learn more.
