Whether you’re an Aussie looking for executive offices to move your team into, or an American managing a few employees from home, a managerial mindset is key to leadership excellence. This mindset cultivates an atmosphere of empowerment and support, leading you, your employees, and your organization to greater heights of success.
Let’s look at five tips for building such excellence:
Cultivating leadership excellence with strong communication skills
Strong communication skills help you express and explain your ideas, expectations, and feedback. This is the key to building trust and rapport while preventing errors and conflicts.
To improve communication, focus on clear and concise speech. When you speak or write, avoid unnecessary jargon, ambiguity, and filler words. In addition, when you listen, do so actively. Show genuine interest and ask open-ended questions.
Improve your ability to influence others
Influencing others means galvanizing them to support your ideas, goals, and decisions. Influential leaders not only inspire and empower their team, but they also spread that inspiration to customers and stakeholders, creating a positive impact that ripples through the entire organization.
To strengthen your ability to influence others, learn the needs, values, pain points, and goals of those you lead and serve. Then, make team commitments, deliver on promises, and be honest with your mistakes. Furthermore, lead by example, modeling the values and behaviors you’d like to see in others.
Work with a business coach or mentor
Business coaches and mentors offer personalized guidance, feedback, and support to help refine your leadership skills. To find the right one for you, consider what you want from a coach. Is there a specific skill, such as decision-making, that you want to improve? Or are you more focused on building accountability for a specific goal, such as a successful product launch?
With these specifics in mind, research coaches or mentors who have the relevant expertise and style to be of help to you. Once you’ve found a good fit, agree on some expectations for how the sessions should go. Then, implement the advice and review your plan to measure your progress.
Research the art of leadership
Although researching leadership won’t be enough to make you a powerful leader, it can certainly help boost your effectiveness. Whether it’s listening to podcasts, subscribing to newsletters, or reading the best leadership books, knowing the latest trends and best practices will expand your knowledge, skills, and perspectives.
To start, use search engines, libraries, and online platforms to find leadership content tailored to your industry or niche. Then, try out what you learn with your team to see if it works. Monitor the results, and tweak your approach whenever necessary.
Practice your leadership skills
As with any skill, leadership requires practice. The only way to encourage cultivating leadership excellence is to constantly apply your leadership skills to a wide variety of contexts. Not only does this give you first-hand knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, but it also builds your confidence and competence along the way.
Perhaps the easiest way to know if something works is to get quality feedback, so ensure you actively seek it out from your team, customers, stakeholders, and business coach. Then, humble yourself and learn from your mistakes.
View failures as opportunities for growth by analyzing what went wrong and planning what to do differently next time. Finally, challenge yourself to take on new (calculated) risks and challenges.
Excelling as a leader requires the cultivation of a managerial mindset. Apply the five tips above to develop this mindset and become someone who positively influences others.
