The Fortune 500 companies generate billions of dollars in revenue every year and accommodate millions of employees worldwide. Yet, each of these companies has just one CEO and a board of directives calling the shots. Makes you wonder how these mammoth organizations get things done with such a huge hierarchy and workforce. The short answer is – these companies have leaders at all levels.

When we think of leadership, we rarely look beyond top-level titles and forget that employees can choose to act instead of being acted upon, thus, allowing them to take charge at different levels and succeed.

Leadership has become an essential skill in the market, whether you’re working on an operational or strategic level. Therefore, in this post, we’ll share five ways to lead and get the best out of people so you can enhance productivity and overall workplace efficiency.

Why Leadership Matters Now More than Ever Before?

For a long time, leadership has been understood as a fancy term for being in charge, having an important title, or working with authority and autonomy. While all of this fits the job description of a typical leader, it’s not their most important role. The essence of business leadership is ‘influence,’ which allows an individual to guide, inspire, control, motivate, sway, and alter other peoples’ behavior and attitudes at the workplace. You don’t have to be the boss or C-level executive to possess leadership qualities, as anyone can leverage influence to improve the workplace by increasing engagement, minimizing conflict, and ensuring teams stay the course at all times.

Leaders at every level are involved in different organizational processes and responsible for bringing the best out of their teams and help maximize revenue while minimizing expenditures. Leadership is the key to success in the modern age, s as anyo as every organization’s national achievement has someone in the background calling the shots, sailing the ship, and making sure no one gets complacent in the process. The workplace has evolved since the pandemic, with technologies and processes becoming more complex and sophisticated. To accommodate these changes, companies have evolved from a hierarchical model to a matrix model in which several people need to take on a leadership role to get things done.

Secondly, the workforce has changed in the last two decades, with Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Gen- Xers working together while having different capabilities, preferences, and expectations. Therefore, this multigenerational workforce needs authentic leaders to help them face seemingly insurmountable odds, especially in the new normal with increasing uncertainty. Good leadership will help them thrive in the fast-changing world and meet evolving customer needs.

5 Leadership Approaches to Get the Best Out of People

Before we move on, remember one thing – lead is about cultivating leadership within others, not just getting them to follow your lead. So, if you’re in it to tell people what to do, you’re missing the whole point. So, without further ado, here are five ways to lead and get the best out of people:

1. Be Open and Vulnerable

For decades, being a top-level player was about dominance and supremacy. However, COVID-19 brought everyone back to the ground and humanized leaders, forcing them to embrace vulnerability. No matter how powerful you are, you’re not invincible so, it’s okay to share with your team what you’re struggling with, ask for help, and be more open in your communication. Do that, and they will follow suit and collaborate to work more effectively and efficiently.

The modern workforce wants open-door policies with a fully accessible human sitting inside. The pandemic also highlighted the importance of emotional intelligence and empathy, creating a crash course on modern leadership styles and forcing leaders to change how they navigate their operations. Self-disclosure, compassion, and consideration were terms almost unheard of in the corporate world. However, now, they’re the guiding principles of this emerging leadership trend.

2. Foster an Environment of Leadership

Being a leader is not necessarily about controlling everything. It’s also about delegating and assigning control, autonomy, or authority to others. To be successful, you’ll need the services and loyalty of others. Therefore, you’ll need to recruit members from your team to ensure you get where your organization needs to go. Every organization has front-line soldiers ready to fight for them, and as an authentic leader, you need to scout, train, and nourish them in light of your culture. So, they have the attitude to do the same in the future. Elite teams have leaders at every organizational level whose job is not to serve as authoritative figures but to influence and inspire people into improving their productivity.

3. Be Open to Feedback

Just because you’re in charge doesn’t mean you know everything. Therefore, you need to be open to feedback and accept the fact that your team can offer valuable insight and solve complex problems. A great leader will never be afraid to ask their team to evaluate their performance so they can grow further.

4. Be a Renaissance Man for Your Team

Great leaders are servants whose job is to facilitate their teams with everything they need to carry out their tasks, innovate, and transform. As a renaissance man, your job is to possess surface intelligence in different subject matters and steer the ship while your team focuses on their specific roles.

5. Get Your Hands Dirty

The best way to lead is to lead from the front and not just give directions from the sidelines. For example, instead of sending your marketing team to local outlets for product promotion, you can accompany them and lead from the ground. Not only does this boost the overall team morale, but it also improves your brand reputation as your target audience sees a grounded individual, not a boss calling the shots from the 30th floor.

Conclusion

Leadership is influence, and hopefully, our five ways to lead and get the best out of people can make a difference in your organization and serve as an unspoken standard of what is appropriate and what is not.

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