What Is Leadership?
Leadership is a powerful skill developed and nurtured through opportunity and challenges. It is a particular ability improved and refined over time. Leadership is having a sharp vision of the goal and ushering and accompanying your team to that end. Good leadership is necessary to form a high performing team and is a basic resource for team growth and effectiveness. We often wonder, what makes a good leader? How does one grow and enhance those skills so that they benefit oneself as well as others?
Components of Good Leadership
Being able to operate well under pressure and motivate yourself are important leadership skills. An ability to connect with others and discover their priorities and what they value can make a leader more effective. Understanding what will shift a person from their current state, to making a positive change and improving skills adds to a leader’s ability to grow a team. Communicating the benefits and advantages of embracing the change, while clearly articulating the consequences for not making the change can motivate an employee to improve. Good leaders engage others and harness their own energy to deliver the best performance overall.
Motivating Employees
As a Customer Service Leader and Human Resources Professional, I recall learning that Professor Douglas McGregor (once Professor of Management at MIT) offers two schools of thought on employee motivation. In his book “The Human Side of Enterprise” published in 1960, he proposes:
- Theory X as the belief that employees are motivated by pay and they need continued supervision to do their jobs properly.
- Theory Y on the other hand, expresses employees are motivated by the work that allows them to feel empowered while gaining a sense of accomplishment.
Research on this theory found that employee perceptions are influenced by their manager’s belief in either theory. Those that worked for a Theory X leader required more supervision, while those working for a Theory Y leader were motivated by the work and their love of the job. Though McGregor urges managers to reflect on their own assumptions and come to their own conclusion.
In my customer service leadership roles over the years, I have often submitted that my team would perform as expected – according to the methods I used in delivering my expectations and my coaching toward the desired performance. Of course, there will always be outliers, who will require a more focused and individual coaching process.
Engagement is Important
The level of an employee’s (or team’s) engagement matters because it indicates potential success or failure. Think of how one performs duties that interest them and offers reward, honor, or benefits – they usually will go all in and bring their best self to the situation. Consider the same with your employees – the ‘reward’ may or may not be monetary, but if there is an opportunity for growth, recognition, promotion or even pride, they will usually be more engaged and deliver a better product.
This is especially true in the Customer Service arena. Happy employees deliver a more positive and helpful experience. I have often felt that when your customer-facing team is empowered, trusted, trained, and prepared – most likely your customer will receive a level of service in line with that positive disposition. I happen to think most employees want to do a respectable job. If leaders provide the necessary tools, employees will return the desired performance. This is particularly important where customer service teams only interact with customers over the phone and body language, or facial expressions are not visible. If an employee is happy and engaged, that smile can be heard.
Engaged employees will often think, move, and perform in a way that represents commitment to the organization. They have advanced toward ‘buy-in’ and will contribute their knowledge, skills, and abilities to the success of the team and the company.
Impact of Leaders
A leader’s behavior has influence on the team’s performance and engagement. Particularly in the customer service world, leaders must foster an agile and open culture, maintain a positive, can-do attitude, and be available and ready to help, all while inspecting what they expect. A leader’s values can determine the team culture and how employees relate to that leader and each other. Favoritism, inconsistency and even being too flexible at times can create a culture of separatism. Performance requirements must be clearly delivered and consistently applied. Any discipline or coaching must be appropriate, befitting, and suitable – particularly in unionized organizations where the Working Agreement is the authority on such. Any deviations from the established processes could cause discord and feelings of disparity, causing a break in team collaboration – which is damaging to a high-performing team.
Good leaders must learn how to find leverage and start breaking negative beliefs of the managerial overseer, and replace old patterns with new, empowering ones.
Are your leaders aspiring to increase their impact and develop a successful team? Would you like to improve team performance and exceed organizational goals?
Our team at Beverly Hathorn Consulting can deliver flexible, affordable tools and training to help your leaders develop personalized insights, leverage their strengths, and overcome challenges.
