The word leadership qualities can bring many meanings to your mind. Like a political leader leads youth for their interest by their strength-based leadership skills or a team leader leads the team for mutual success.
One can achieve their dream and goal by a leading team no matter how evil their plan will be. Leaders not only help themselves but also help their section to achieve mutual goals. Leaders set goals, direction, build a vision and create something new. Leadership is all about figuring out what you want, where you want to go. And last but not least how to win with their team and organisation.
Leaders guide and inspire team members and manage their team by management skills to recommend them to achieve a common goal. This article will learn about strength-based leadership, but before that, we have to know what leadership is.
WHAT’S IN IT
What is Meant by Leadership:
Although there are many definitions of leadership out there, only a few are accepted, according to leadership and performance beyond expectations book by James McGregor Burns in 1981. The ideal leader does the following.
- Set clear goals.
- Know when to stop.
- Know what to say in front of team members.
- Show a big picture of the end goal or show vision to team members.
- Builds a team and teaches them to achieve a common goal with other team members.
- And has high expectations.
What are the Leadership qualities:
Many people still believe an organisation is born to be a leader. No one knows how it can be possible, but there are some qualities that you can practise to become a good leader.
Here are some leadership qualities:
Confidence:
To achieve a common goal, you ensure that you have the confidence to guide your organisation and team. As energy confidence also travels from leaders to team members. If you are not confident enough about your goal and step, you can’t achieve your goal.
Honesty:
When we are small, our teachers and parents taught us early that honesty is the best policy. But how many of you follow this policy? Without honestly, a team can’t achieve a goal, whether it is a football team or an army. Integrity and honesty is the main ingredient that decides the chances of your team success.
Passion:
The only difference between successful and unsuccessful men is passion besides hard work. If your team senses that you are not passionate about a goal, it would be tough for your team and organisation to achieve it. The best way to show your team that you are intense enough is to take the first step towards your goal and work hard then your average team members.
Communication:
While passion and hard work help you to be a successful team leader, at the same time, communication helps to transfer passion and knowledge to your team members. Whether it is business or a relationship, the greater you are in contact, the greater your chances of success.
Purpose and Vision:
Vision and propose is the main ingredient which makes leaders from ordinary people. To visualise a big image to your team members, you must adopt purpose and vision showing skills.
What is Strength-Based Leadership Theory:
Some people called this theory a strengths-Based Organizational Management theory. Strength-based leadership is the method of maximising the efficiency and productivity of your team. With strength-based leadership, you can increase your team’s chances by focusing on the strength of resources. Resources including people, computers etc.
Common Belief of Strength-Based Leadership:
The common belief of strength-based leadership is that team members have more potential for growth building than their weaknesses. A strength is referred to as a person able to do any work to near perfection in a given time. Strength-based leadership ignores weakness and generally focuses on strength.
Rather than a weakness, team leaders in strength-based leadership follow their team members’ strength.
Principle of Strength-Based Leadership:
Don’t Just Ask Them:
According to Forbes, in strength-based leadership, don assigns the specific task of the team member. Instead of this, they just ask them to choose a particular job according to their specification.
Doing this will generate passion in team members toward a specific task. Also, doing this will help your team members to grow more in their dynamic field.
Don’t Concentrate on Gathering People:
Generally, leaders solely focus on gathering people from different field. But in strength-based leadership, you should just focus on gathering people from other races, languages, areas, backgrounds and gender.
Doing this will help you to accumulate ideas from all races, genders and languages. Also, doing this simple activity will help you to be more creative and lead to more ideas.
Allow Your Team to Be Bold:
As a leader, you should give your team members some space. This space will help them to grow more in terms of creative dreams and imagine. I know some leaders see this step as a risk, but this small risk can help you grow your business and help you achieve more.
Don’t Ignore Transparency:
Trust between the team members and leader is one factor that decides the chances of success in an organisation. Trust can be rooted in team members through transparency. Transparency is one of the processes that ensure the developing and embedding of trust. By transparency, your team members will be more passionate and comfortable about their jobs.
What Other Organization Thinks About Strength-Based Leadership:
Not only a small organisation. But also Gallup organisations embrace strength-based leadership as one of the best leadership qualities that one team member should have. In addition to this, strength-based leadership also welcomes other leadership qualities such as organisational psychology, appreciative inquiry and positive psychology.
Big Organizations that Follow Strength-Based Leadership:
Facebook:
Facebook is one of the best examples of a big organisation that has strength-based leadership qualities. This organisation allows its developers and software engineers to pursue a job that they are passionate about.
Also, engineers and developers on Facebook are allowed to rotate and work on any field they are passionate about after 18 months.
This small change brings new perspectives and ideas to Facebook. These small changes also ensure that they don’t force any developer or an engineer to do something they are not passionate about.
Facebook also provides their employers with unlimited food and beer. This small service makes a good environment between employees and employers.
3M:
3M is another organisation that embraces these changes. The matter of fact is that we still don’t know that they embrace this change even before Google and Facebook.
3M gives 15% time to their employees to generate more ideas and creative ways that ensure success to this enormous organisation.
However, we should never forget to mention that some small organisation believes that strength-based leadership is hard to achieve and unreliable.
Some independent research also concludes that strength-based leadership increases an individual team member’s efficiency but decreases the team’s net efficiency. Hence strength-based leadership is not only an option or way to improve your team productivity and leadership qualities.
Conclusion:
Applying leadership qualities and strength-based leadership is the only way to boost the productivity of the team. We should never forget that leadership is a privilege and not a right. And we should treat leadership according to them.
One can achieve everything by improving leadership qualities, and one can lose everything without enhancing their leadership qualities. Leadership is the way to unleash team members’ productivity to the fullest and help them find what they love.
Also, read our blog on How To Help Your Team Feel Good