Director, Chief Executive Officer, Marketing Manager —you can call yourself whatever you want but leadership has nothing to do with your title. There may be no single answer on how to be a great leader but it starts with supporting your team members.
Leadership is an essential part of any successful endeavor. Whatever your job title is, supporting team members means being responsible for others’ successes. The quest for Extreme Leadership begins in the hearts and minds of you and your team.
As a supportive leader, showing the energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to inspire strong emotions are the best way to influence your employees to do the same. Inviting an exciting corporate motivational keynote speaker who specializes in training will help to set their motivation on fire.
Extreme Leaders Leverage The Power of Love to Achieve Company Goals
If you’re not empowering your team, who else will? This responsibility is above all others. Every day we bring our heads and hearts into work expecting nothing less than excellence while also giving back what we receive: love and respect. Giving people the opportunity to grow together is the ultimate form of respect.
Understanding and Nurturing Your Team
As leaders, we know that external customer interactions are essential for keeping your business alive and well. But what about internal interactions? Every employee has a stake in the company, but when your employees don’t feel valued, they won’t care—and this will be reflected in your products and services.
Understanding your employees’ strengths and weaknesses is an essential aspect of an Extreme Leadership development strategy. For example, if an employee has a strong memory but isn’t as good with numbers, you as a leader need to help them realize the value of their skillset and help them learn to work with their coworkers successfully.
It is even more important for you to support those in junior roles and take time together to assess how they can contribute positively toward group success. Helping them understand their individual job responsibilities better than anyone else will give them the self-confidence they need to be ready when change happens.
Pushing the Limits
There is no other way around it. If someone wants to achieve something, they need to be living proof of their values. Each of us has a unique style that defines our personality, but how we manage ourselves and interact with others will make or break the people around us.
Seeing is believing. Roger Bannister ran what’s considered the first 4-minute mile in 1954. For nearly 10 years no one was able to break the previous record of just over 4 minutes. 46 days later the record was broken again. Since then 1,400 athletes have achieved this feat and it’s considered the standard for professional runners.
While you don’t need to be a superstar to lead, when you set high standards and meet your goals, you become a symbol of achievement. In other words, courage, capability, and audacity are what Extreme Leaders are made of. This attitude enables us to preserve and perform despite setbacks or obstacles.
My LEAP framework has helped dozens of successful companies take their businesses to the next level. LEAP is about Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof. Taken together, these four areas of focus represent the most valuable collection of key success factors that you will find anywhere. They are the four signature qualities of any supportive leader who strengthens others around them. At the end of the day, the proof is in the people around you and the profitability of your influence.
Supporting Team Members Through Successful Communication and Clear Expectations
Ambiguous expectations create gray zones. One of the biggest problems is that it creates an unspoken, assumed agreement between all parties involved, which leads to little commitment and a lack of responsibility. Ultimately it makes people feel as if they can’t be held accountable for their actions or performance because there aren’t any clearly stated expectations.
Clear expectations can drastically reduce this issue. Additionally, you can make an action plan to improve leadership by addressing employee core performance and inviting a leadership keynote speaker. After setting standards, benchmarks and measurements can be taken to determine whether employee performance is falling short or exceeding expectations. This strategy will help you decide on the action plan to improve leadership skills among your team members.
Tell Powerful Stories
Collective identity empowers individuals so everyone feels comfortable identifying their own unique contributions to the destiny of your organization. Any good leadership development strategy starts with a dream, and ideally, everyone in the organization is living the dream as intensely as you are.
A compelling vision provides people with the confidence to take on any challenge because they know exactly what their end goal looks like. To be a great leader means that you need to be a great storyteller. Their stories create a narrative that genuinely expresses their passions and represents who they are. More importantly, a great story helps your employees understand how they fit into the bigger picture.
By integrating your team to create a collective identity, you make each team member a role in the big picture. For example, Netflix made it to number 7 on Fast Company’s recent World’s Most Innovative Companies list and dominated Nielson’s top 10 list for streaming services in 2020 and 2021.
What helped them do so well? According to a PowerPoint presentation shared by Netflix executives, it was the reinvention of the company culture. Values like Innovation, Courage, Passion, Honesty, and Selflessness are at the core of Netflix’s ethos of universal leadership.
They laid out a crystal clear vision of where the company is going, who they are, what isn’t tolerated, and what they expect from every team member.
Harness the Creative Power of Your Personnel
We all know how important creativity and innovation are. Companies that don’t change procedures and policies that have been in place for decades struggle with creativity. This happened to brands that failed to innovate like Blockbuster, BlackBerry, and Hummer.
Innovative businesses make waves with their ideas and products by encouraging certain behaviors. Here are a few ways to do this:
- Provide an inspiring space. When managers provide comfortable, thought-provoking work environments for their employees, it increases creativity. “Creativity rooms” are not only affordable, they also allow companies of any size an opportunity to let people express themselves.
- Embrace diversity. Different perspectives can help organizations avoid “cookie-cutter” ideas. Diverse perspectives from people with a wide range of cultures, training, experiences, and education make a strong foundation for creativity and innovation.
- Encourage critical thinking. Brainstorming, coined in the 1950s, can discourage criticism or debate because they can make some people uncomfortable. Today we can use digital technology and ideas like gamification to make brainstorming more efficient and encourage more people to participate.
- Continue to innovate. Some great ideas simply won’t get the support you expected due to budget, time, or staffing constraints. Don’t lose hope, just keep generating new ideas!
Strengthen Your Company with a Corporate Training Program
Every person you bring into your organization adds something special to the mix. Some may be more difficult than others to motivate, but everybody contributes to the organization’s success.
Recognizing small achievements and milestones gives people a sense of purpose. Giving people clear standards and offering support in implementing new concepts helps you avoid communication breakdowns and unnecessary frustrations between coworkers.
By doing this, everyone will feel heard when there are disagreements instead of just avoiding those they disagree with. Whether it pertains to production numbers or something more abstract like “company culture,” an engaging corporate motivational keynote speaker who specializes in training will help.
Create a Healthy Working Environment
Healthy environments provide resources that promote intrinsic motivation. Let’s take a look at the leadership traits of the people who make up the backbone of a healthy work environment.
- They perform well in any environment
- They have high emotional intelligence
- They are comfortable taking risks
- They are mindful about how their actions affect their coworkers
- They are personally invested in company goals
- They build meaningful personal relationships with their coworkers
Extreme Leaders not only motivate and inspire, but they also encourage universal leadership to achieve healthy work environment and support team members to achieve company goals. Effective team-building activities such as creative brainstorming sessions are some of the best ways to increase employee engagement and leadership skills.
Great Leaders Invest in Their Team
What are you doing for your employees that makes them want to follow your lead? Asking someone to follow you when they don’t feel like it, simply won’t work unless you invest in them. Good things happen when people have autonomy and a supportive leader. People succeed together as one unit of individuals when they have empathy and respect for each other.
Just as your self-confidence has an impact on your success as a leader, so does the self-confidence of the people who work in and around your business. A great way to maintain employees productivity is, for example, inviting a leadership development speaker. Show them you care by providing a corporate training program for staff through various means such as online learning, seminars & cross-training opportunities within the workplace, and opportunities for self-learning.
Invest in a Corporate Motivational Speaker to Amplify Employee Engagement
Everyone agrees that a high-performance culture is essential to the life and growth of your company, but putting it into practice is becoming increasingly difficult. My corporate leadership training programs lay out a step-by-step blueprint on how to increase employee engagement, performance, and satisfaction.
What kind of leader do you want your team to be? Contact us to start an action plan and improve your employee leadership skills across the board.
