Impactful leadership is honed with intention, practiced mindfully, and improved continuously. The most effective leaders are students of leadership. The more they learn about the true nature of leadership, the better they are at guiding and directing others.
The most effective leadership honors people and performance. Leaders earn followers and play an essential part in influencing their performance.
To be successful, leaders need to create the conditions for people to do their best. A critical part of that is letting people know just how much you care. As the well-known idiom goes, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
This kind of care calls for empathy and compassion to understand another person’s situation, goals, and needs.
Listening is at the heart of highly effective leadership. Listening positions a leader to gain a solid understanding of any given issue, assess the need, and connect people with the right resources to increase their ability to contribute.
Highly effective leadership is a process of perpetually becoming. You don’t have to be perfect. Start where you are with what you have, and do what you can. Learn from others and practice these four tendencies of highly effective leaders.
Bring Your Whole Self to Work
Highly effective leaders have an examined inner life. They wrestle with tough questions that help them understand who they are in relation to their work and other responsibilities. Equipped with this inner awareness, they can bring their whole self to work and make choices from a place of authenticity and wholeness.
Use Your Head and Your Heart
Wisdom is a blending of the head and the heart. Highly effective leaders know who they are and whose they are and operate from the baseline of their values. They align with what they believe, and their wisdom is what unmistakably brings their leadership alive.
Never Stop Learning
Highly effective leaders have an insatiable appetite for growth. Growth necessitates learning. Highly effective leaders are always learning, improving, and pushing themselves out of their comfort zone. They harvest lessons from other leaders and recognize their network as a ripe area to learn about leadership.
Choose an Attitude of Abundance
Scarcity breeds scarcity, and abundance breeds abundance. The scarcity mentality invites fear and anxiety. Highly effective leaders reject the limiting beliefs of the “scarcity mentality” and choose an attitude of abundance. No matter the struggle, we always have a choice about our mindset. We don’t have to default to a position of scarcity.
Focus on being a little better every day, and the rest will come. Something as seemingly minor as a single step forward might be just the means to elevating your leadership impact.