Category: Personal

Personal Category

The 9 Traits of Highly-Effective Leaders

I found this at https://dzone.com/articles/the-9-traits-of-highly-effective-leaders. I think Deming said it better: The aim of management is to help people and machines do a better job.

A New Style of Leadership

According to the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, “It is a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations, and ultimately creates a more just and caring world.”

The founding principles include nine behaviors: serve first, add value to others, build trust, listen to understand, think about your thinking, increase your influence, demonstrate courage, live your values, and live your transformation. What do these behaviors look like in practice?

1. Serve First

Serving first is about approaching work with a collaborative mindset. Instead of thinking, “How can I win?” leaders with a serve-first mentality look to make situations a win-win for all participants. These leaders go beyond simply giving a job description to an employee and sending them off to tackle the day. Instead, they care about the whole individual, including personal and professional growth of each person.

2. Add Value to Others

This differs from “serve first” because it’s about what you as a leader can add to help others grow. What are your strengths? What are the unique skills that you can use to help improve other people’s projects, ideas, and careers?

3. Build Trust

When trust is high, cost is low and speed goes up. To achieve these benefits, high-trust leaders choose to delegate and not micromanage, meet deadlines and give actionable feedback, and they’re accountable for decisions and outcomes.

4. Listen to Understand

It’s not about listening to decide when to chime in with your own opinion, it’s about listening to ACTUALLY understand. Leaders should practice active listening, and make sure they’re not interrupting people during meetings or 1:1s. Try these two questions to listen to understand: “Tell me more” and “Help me understand.” These questions open the door for others to share their perspective, without feeling like they’re being undermined or doubted.

5. Think About Your Thinking

Servant leaders evaluate how they think about messages, situations, behaviors that they experience. Is input or feedback received in a negative way or as a positive opportunity for improvement? The trick is to differentiate between useful thoughts and non-useful thoughts, and re-frame negative beliefs. For example, don’t use absolutes like “always” and “never” when describing situations or behaviors.

6. Increase Your Influence

Typical leaders think about grabbing more power when they look to increase their influence, but the servant-leader aspires to share what they know and what they’ve learned over the years to enable other people to learn from and utilize that knowledge. It means more people possess the information and ability to make decisions and innovate, and ensures the leader is not a bottleneck to progress.

7. Demonstrate Courage

People often mistake servant leadership as being “nice,” but sometimes the kindest thing you can do is to have the hard conversations with people, deal with conflict, make the tough decisions, and hold people accountable. Demonstrating courage is about encouraging people to move forward and get results.

8. Live Your Values

As many tasks become automated and competition for talent increases, employees look for more alignment between their personal values and company values. Leaders who live company values aligned with the principles of servant leadership foster a more inclusive and productive environment for their teams.

9. Live Your Transformation

Becoming a servant-leader is not a one-time action or seminar, it’s a lifelong pursuit. The principles become part of the leader. They live them day in and day out, and take them into the business and their community.

Impact of Servant Leadership

In addition to boosting team morale and professional growth, servant leadership yields strong business results. For example, a 2015 study conducted by KRW International found that CEOs whose employees gave them high marks for character delivered an average return on assets of 9.35% over a two-year period. That’s five times as much as CEOs with lower marks for character, with an average return on assets of only 1.93%.

Results have been measured for years, including a comparison of “Good to Great” companies and “servant leadership” companies. In their book, Seven Pillars of Servant Leadership: Practicing the Wisdom of Leading by Serving, James Sipe and Don Frick share that during the 10-year period they studied, stocks from the 500 largest public companies (S&P 500) averaged a 10.8% pre-tax portfolio return. Companies featured in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great averaged a 17.5% return. However, the servant-led companies’ returns averaged 24.2%.

And researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago saw measurable increases in key business metrics, including a 6% increase in job performance, 8% increase in customer service, and 50% increase in employee retention.

The results are clear: servant leadership is not only good for the soul, it’s good for the spreadsheet.

It’s tempting to hoard information, approach colleagues as competitors, and attempt to win at all costs as the world moves faster and faster. But it turns out that collaboration and a servant mindset increase your chances of success, not only as a leader, but as a business.