Effective Leadership

effective leadership in small business - Coaching and Consultancy Services UK

POSTED ON: Monday, May 11th, 2015

CATEGORIES: Leadership and Management

As a boss, it is your responsibility to oversee the running of your business in all aspects from coming up with new products and services, dealing with clients, as well as handling personnel. However, being a boss is completely different from being a leader.

A boss is someone who sees the job as something he has to do as part of his job description while a leader is someone who loves what he does and because of this, encourages others to follow him on their own through effective leadership. How can you transition from being a boss to a leader? Here are a few steps to follow.

Effective Leadership Steps

The first step to achieve effective leadership is to guide your team. Being a leader isn’t about controlling your team but showing their people ways on how to achieve results and let them take care of it.

Delegating tasks is also another step to become a truly effective leader. Bosses do delegate tasks but not all of them. A leader is someone who assigns tasks but checks up on their team every now and then to ensure that their work is going smoothly.

Effective leadership is also about accepting risks. Bosses fear to take risks. A leader is someone who trusts his people regardless of the risks because it is only through making mistakes that people learn how to improve themselves.

To become a leader, you need to practice motivation and not through fear but knowing your people’s strengths and weaknesses and using them to bolster their team’s confidence in performing well in their duties.

Bosses have a tendency to accept the accolades when a project is successful but point fingers when things don’t go too well. Practicing effective leadership is all about knowing who to congratulate on the success of a project and accepting blame when there is some.

Adaptability is also essential if you want to become a leader instead of just being a boss because the latter tends to have strict rules on how to work while a leader learns how to adapt based on the personality and skills of his or her team.

And finally, to become a really great leader, you need to love people. No one becomes a truly effective leader without loving people and working with them. An effective leadership won’t be truly effective unless the person knows that a team is made up of various personalities, quirks, skills, and knowledge and how to use each other’s strengths in order to achieve a single goal.

With these steps in mind, transitioning from being a boss to a leader can be achieved which will be beneficial for you and your team.

About the Author: 

Business Improvement Specialist Scott Whitehead serves Braintree and the surrounding areas to help you effectively lead your business to greatness. For a free chat about what Scott can do for you and your business, including business leadership tips, contact us today.