The secret in leadership: in the basics?
It is interesting how newspapers are filled with judgements on different leaders’ performance or lack of performance. Trust is put in individual leaders to create miracles with companies or organizations. Shareholders or other stakeholders are very quick to either totally blame a failure on one single leader or credit a single leader for a success.
Inside organizations, the millennials are getting more and more frustrated over poor leadership. 7 out of 10 would rather have a new boss than a salary raise according to McKinsey (2014).
On top of that, L&D people are scratching their heads to create better and more effective leadership development programs. It is on the top of any company’s priority list to develop leaders who can coach, develop, motivate and engage the employees. But staff turnover, especially the Hipo’s, is harder and harder to keep under control.
We have done a very simple research, asking people how many managers they remember as great and why they were great. Believe it or not, great managers were not necessary good at budgeting or strategic planning, but rather on people management. Leaders who have understood that their main job is to lead the team, regardless if it is the management team of a global public company or a customer service team at the local software company.
This is confirmed in Google’s Project Oxygen showing that core leadership skills are the most critical for successful leaders. In short, this means the ability to communicate, give feedback, delegate, set clear targets with the foundation of psychological safety in the team.
Any leader with great core skills will increase the chance of being successful dramatically. That’s why we strongly believe in helping leaders practice core leadership skills in their daily environment.
We call it Small Actions — Big Impact
Yomento — Your own Personal Leadership Trainer
