Here at Rencai, we are passionate about creating and inspiring impactful leadership culture across your business. Leadership and management are a part of us. In today’s blog, we will share our knowledge of supporting businesses to build and develop strong leaders.
As the owner of a company, you’re already undeniably a leader as you are at the forefront of everything the business does. However, being a leader by default and being an effective leader is very different. Effective leadership is an important requirement for a more productive, aligned, empowered, and engaged workforce.
Understand Your Team
As a leader, your competence should be assessed on your ability to engage and support your teams to take personal accountability to elevate their performance, individually and as collective teams.
This sounds straightforward, but we have to acknowledge that team members all have different experiences, expertise, and personalities which means their next step in performance improvement differs from their colleagues.
How do we personalise development journeys? So they are meaningful while acknowledging that the time leaders would like to spend in these areas is often used for alternative priorities that shout louder in the growing SMBs with the common scale-up challenges we observe.
Data Led Analysis – The GC Index
A highly effective tool a developing leader can use to understand their employees is The GC Index.
The GC Index measures how people prefer to make an impact in their role, and as part of a team. It measures the natural engagement levels we all have for working in specific ways that are relevant and add value to any business.
Broadly we categorise these in five key and different areas: Transformation Focused, Strategy-Focused, Delivery-Focused, Collaboratively Focused and Improvement Focused.
When you understand someone’s GC Index profile you can partner with them to take a data-led approach to plan their next opportunities to positively impact their performance in their role. Building personalised development plans that play to their strengths, enabling you in taking an informed approach to coaching team members that is personalised and time-efficient.
The GC Index development journey is powerful for individuals, but the positive impact multiplies as you take this understanding to a team and then organisational level, with the power to transform ways of working and entire company cultures.
To learn more or register your interest in our GC Index profiles click here.
The four ways we assess how people will be valued in our teams.
Develop Your Leadership Style
Your approach to leadership is important, the way you lead and deal with your employees makes an undeniable difference. It will have an impact on the productivity, motivation, and engagement of teams. People are more likely to provide higher performance when they feel comfortable, supported and not criticised.
- ASK do not TELL – Be curious, don’t judge.
- Develop your skills around empathy, delivering feedback, and having difficult conversations.
- Create and define a purpose that unites and motivates our team.
Leadership plays an important role in creating positive employee experiences and shaping workplace structure. Leaders are examples for the rest of the business and should embed the core company values in every way.
Haiilo found that positive work culture is linked to higher rates of employment, and 69% of employees say they would work harder if they were better appreciated. Developing your leadership style to be more constructive than criticising is a huge first step to becoming a better leader.
Communication
How is your business supposed to flourish without effective communication within leadership? Productive communication strategies are crucial to ensure that your workplace isn’t riddled with frustration, worry, and lack of understanding.
To be a leader with useful communication, it is critical to come to an understanding of your team’s needs, what they wish to be updated on and how often they would like to be updated.
The Deloitte Millennial Survey found that more than six in ten Millennials (63 per cent) say their “leadership skills are not being fully developed”.
If there was an effective communication strategy in place, this figure would undoubtedly be much less.
Interested to learn more?
If you have been struggling with where to start on your leadership journey, you are not alone.
Remember, the key building blocks to being a great leader of the future are to understand your team, develop your leadership style to be positive and create a communication strategy fitting to your organisation.
Do our reflections above resonate with you? Do you have any specific areas of your leadership development journey that you’d like to talk through with us?
The Rencai team is always available to discuss your coaching, leadership and management needs. Click here to contact us, visit our website or call us in the office at 0161 222 3142.
