Keys to Ignite Your Leadership

Igniting the power within your organization starts with your leadership. Every great leader is focused on a vision, engages others with this vision and communicates it clearly. How charismatic and inspiring you are helps your leadership move your employees and organization forward to your vision and expectations.

The following keys help ignite your leadership to the next level of your success. You may already have these and may need to take advantage of an additional 5-10 percent more of igniting your employees within your leadership.

Creating Your Vision

After writing your vision, you need to walk your talk. Leaders and managers say they want change and continuous improvement but their actions do not match their words. Start to match and do what you say. In order to get your employees more engaged with their work, get to know them and interact with a few of them on a daily basis. Ask them their opinion of their work and what they feel would help improve what they do. Be open about this, and do not get angry by what they may say.

Confidence

Leaders must be confident in themselves. This includes being confident when you give speeches or presentations, make competent decisions and not constantly second guess what you think, and be able to interact well with the confidence and competence to know what you are talking about as well as understand others.

Employee Engagement is Key to Business Results

When employees are engaged in their jobs, they drive innovation, perform at consistently high levels, and many remain loyal to their companies, these same engaged employees are able to make decisions using their critical thinking skills. The result is that employees take personal ownership of their responsibilities and teams work together to produce bottom-line results.

Studies identify engaged employees as more productive and outperform disengaged employees. Educate and empower frontline managers as they need to know what engagement looks like and be able to model it themselves.

Facing Daily Challenges

Everything that happens in an organization is the direct or indirect result of that organization's culture, philosophy and core beliefs. Whether you are faced with minor or major or unexpected situations, the best way to handle them is not to react immediately to them. If you do, the decision you make too hastily may backfire on you. Instead, take a few minutes and either turn the situation into an opportunity or proceed using a proactive approach. Break down each challenge into small pieces and work through each step. Use your critical thinking skills to feel comfortable with the result you have.

Passion

Passion is a competitive advantage that all organizations can leverage. Stimulate others with your vision. This helps you and your employees. Employees need to know the “big picture” – and how their tasks fit in the greater scheme of things. Passionate people have discovered work that excites them. Passionate people are always learning, reinventing themselves, and exploring new things. Risk is an important part of living passionately.

Keep your passion pointed in a precise and positive direction. Activate your imagination everyday: Sometimes it can be easy to become uninspired when we get stuck in the often less-than-glamorous daily routines of living out our vision. Do something every day to keep your creative juices flowing so they don’t get stagnant and you don’t get stale.

People Skills

Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, as a leader one of your responsibilities is that of interacting with other company leaders inside and outside of your organization. During networking events, ask questions of the other person(s) and retain as much about them as you can. This helps in your follow up with them or the next interaction you have with them to ask about the specifics of what you spoke about previously.

Remember: Employees want to be motivated, performance driven, appreciated, recognized and to feel important for what they do.

Make Opportunities Happen

Some People Make Things Happen, Some Watch Things Happen, while Others Sit around and Wonder What Happened.

Everyone heard about the person who is “in the right place at the right time.” Be aware of the opportunities around you. Take advantage of them but first think carefully of how you and your organization will benefit most from them.

If you recognize that you are feeling burned out and no longer find excitement or joy in leading your business, the best thing you can do for yourself is to step away from it.

For many, the name of the game is to stay ahead of their competition, and they do so. Others do not take the action to jump ahead of the crowd, so they get left behind. Active management of employee engagement is a critical aspect of sustaining a competitive advantage. With the help of your employees prepare for the next level – don’t wait for it. Each one of us has the choice and the responsibility to take leadership into our own hands. I hope that these keys will help you wake up and ignite the leadership spirit within you!