What is effective leadership?
Today, effective leadership is determined by whatever behaviour and attributes your company and culture deem valuable. This is then translated into a vision of how leaders should behave to deliver successfully.
Training is also shaped around these perceptions to build consistent skills amongst leaders, but what happens when standardised training clashes with a leader’s strengths and values?
Executive coaching can help.
Culture & leadership development
The values advocated by your country’s prevailing culture and your company are both essential and may even align with your own. If this is the case, then it is probably comfortable for you to develop and adopt their preferred leadership style. This will be especially true if their expectations align with your strengths.
However, if the values of your company don’t align with yours, or your community’s, then you may feel conflicted in behaving the way the company expects of a leader. If this is the case, it means you are required to utilise your weaknesses in your leadership behaviour, which will feel uncomfortable for you – like a too-small shirt. It will never become a natural behaviour you can integrate into yourself.
This misalignment will be challenging to portray consistently and will be exhausting to maintain. In times of stress, you may revert to your natural behaviours, which will confuse everyone around you.
Effective leaders are expected to be proactive, present, and have high energy. They must oversee the overall organisation’s happenings and their own area of responsibility, all while showing a clear direction in decision-making.
If you lack unity between your values and strengths and the leadership style you are portraying, it will become apparent through inconsistent behaviour.
People around you will notice the inconsistency and begin to question how sincere you are. This has implications for your staff, as they can tell when a leader is sincere/authentic. If they doubt this, then their trust and willingness to believe in you diminishes. At its worst, this is displayed by a team that only does what they are directed, displays no initiative, work only set hours, and show no sense of team cohesion.
No one type of leadership fits everyone
There’s a reason why leadership has a multitude of definitions, and there are many ‘types’ of leadership identified and researched. If you are clear on your values, what you stand for, what you want to portray, and your strengths, you can customise the leadership style valued by your company and society. In this way, you can use your strengths to support the valued style of effective leadership you aim for.
Starting from within brings out the best type of leader you are capable of being. By focusing on strengths you already possess, you will portray your natural leadership. Whether in crisis or tired, in all situations your behaviour will be consistent in all situations because it is driven from a place of sincerity within you.
The challenge of leadership research today, it requires thousands of entries of analysis to be considered valid. This is an excellent way to understand the main themes or categories that are valued in leadership in one or many countries. However, what is lost are the outliers (the genuinely brilliant as well as the terrible) and cultural variations. Results are depersonalised due to the findings being the average results of 2000, 10,000, or a million people reported. It is the standard of the majority – the factory-line version of effective leadership.
To support development of these main areas, training providers deliver standardised training in the core skills identified from the research to maximise profits. With both the research and supporting training being generic, the capability of each individual is not maximised. In this way, leadership training is delivered back-to-front, and the training you receive should come after your values and strengths have been identified.
At Xseed Lead, we help leaders reflect on the skills they’ve learned in training and create an action plan to integrate these skills with their values. With our executive coaching service, we successfully help our clients build off of their strengths to display effective leadership that is sincere and natural.
Curious about our process? Talk to us today to learn more and get started.
Author Bio
Deborah Knight is the founder of Xsead Lead with a background in organisational and individual leadership and executive coaching.
As a coach, Deborah aims to create an inclusive and respectful space where individuals and organisations can do the work necessary for growth and change. She is also passionate about helping women be valued for themselves while also contributing and being successful.
Apart from her company which she is deeply passionate about, Deborah also loves bushwalking, reading, travelling, and learning new things.
For any coaching or organisational support enquiries Deborah can be contacted via email: info@xseedlead.com.au or via her company website which is www.xseedlead.com.au.
