Anthony Iannarino
Change Leadership and its Role in Success
No matter what field you are in – sales, manufacturing, medicine – you need a dependable team to fuel your company to success. How do you create a dependable team? By being a champion of change leadership.
Being a leader during changing times is tough, tougher especially for those who are used to the traditional type of leadership – the formal, strict, and severe boss that rarely smiles and never knows the first name of his employee who has been in the company for ten years.
Today there is more demand and respect for leaders who can command authority without having to yell, threaten, or coerce his team into following him. Being a champion of change also dictates that the style of leadership changes into a moral authority– authority that is based on mutual respect, trust, and shared vision. Dedicated employees only come from a system that inspires them to become more engaged and eventually more successful in their tasks. A system like this can be borne by having leaders that have the right ethical professional values.
However, it takes a lot of courage to become this kind of leader who puts the needs of others before his own needs. Such a leader not only has to be intelligent and experienced; this leader should be credible, should be trustworthy, should be transparent, and should have the ability to let his people into his own life. After all, taking care of business also means taking care of the people who work there.
You might be thinking that this would only encourage leniency in leaders and therefore laziness and abuse in the team. If done in the wrong manner, change leadership may be misconstrued as leniency, but if done correctly and sincerely, it will foster trust and confidence between the team and its leaders.
Trust and confidence are important in the success of your company because these characteristics will give way to more risk-takers. When you have confident leaders who share their goals and visions with their teams, this encourages the members of the team to be confident in their judgements too. This is because they can sound off their boss, and vice versa, giving them better perspectives of what is going on around them and what is needed from them. Having this type of relationship breeds trust; this trust is your catalyst for your whole team to embrace changes (risks).
Most of us grew up in the trust-and-prove tradition of running things. Aristotle, however, said that the whole virtue of trust is in the act of giving it away. Through this act, you empower another person to either do things right or to let you down.
As a self-professed “manager from hell,” Steve Caldwell learned through the hard knocks of making mistakes while building a career. Today he serves as a leadership coach, mentor and role model guiding high achieving managers to become the strong leaders their companies, employees and the world needs. He is also author of the book Manager Mojo – Be the Leader that Others Want to Follow (available on Amazon).
“In all arenas, we suffer from a lack of leadership talent,” Steve observes. “Every day employees are promoted into management with no training or support to guide their development into leadership positions. You don’t have to be born to lead. You can learn to lead.” He can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at (415) 670*9543.
