No matter how strong your leadership, negotiation, persuasion, and communication skills are, without a clear vision, your team is going nowhere.
Vision makes a leader different from a manager. Leaders know where they are going in the next 3, 5, 10, and even 15 years from now.
Leaders can see the future and plan it today. An effective leader can see what obstacles his team may face tomorrow and he works today to forecast, plan and manage those obstacles, risks and challenges to ensure his team passes that difficult part smoothly.
Leaders feel a strong sense of purpose, have a plan to get there, and most importantly, are able to communicate that to their team.
The practice of programming the vision in the mind of your team is a lengthy process. First, you must have a vision, to begin with, and second, you must be able to clearly and vividly communicate this vision to others in an appealing way that will persuade them to follow you. They have to trust and believe in what you are communicating.
If your team trusts in your instructions and could visualize the change it may bring to their lives, career, and organization by achieving what you want them to do, you are an effective leader.
Start of the leadership journey:
As a leader, you must have extraordinary interpersonal skills, or you might not be able to lead anybody.
Interacting with and persuading is the language of the leader or I can say it’s an art and science of leadership and it includes Selecting the right team members, Understanding, Motivating, and, Empowering them.
Step 1: (Understanding others) – Before you could actually influence and persuade others to follow you, the first step is to understand them.
You need to understand what drives people’s desires, needs, wants, and why they act the way they do in various situations and scenarios. You must be using your emotional intelligence skills to feel yourself in their shoes and could be able to see a situation from their perspectives other than your own.
Step 2: (Motivating others) – The easiest way to get anybody to do anything is to make them love it. The key to motivating anybody to do anything is to speak in terms of the end result for an individual team member, organization, and the whole team with respect to their needs and wants. Communicate how this task will benefit, add value and make a difference. You simply cannot force someone to do things, which they don’t want to.
Step 3: (Empowering others) – This is why people will love to follow their leaders religiously and to the end of the earth.
Encourage your followers to reach for their highest potential and to believe in themselves (by your believing in them first). If you could be the one to show somebody the person whom they were born to become and help them get there, I guarantee that person will be with you for the rest of his life.
In the end, I would like to mention again that “The job of the leader is to grow more leaders, NOT more followers”.
I wish you all a very beautiful, safe, healthy, and blessed life.
