“Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others’ success, and then standing back and letting them shine”
Chris Hadfield. Astronaut
Having spent the last number of weeks working with high-impact leadership teams, I am drawn again to the quote above from Chris Hadfield. While we spend lots of time and energy on ‘TEAM’; team bonding, team development, team collaborating, we want to keep our focus on the leadership of the TEAM.
Great Leadership is about inviting enough light to shine on each individual in the team to enable them grow and thrive. There is still the old traditional style of management and leadership in play that doesn’t do this.
What can we do to help strengthen leadership so it strengthens individuals, teams and businesses?
This is what I specialize in as an Executive Coach so I have lots of experience of meeting teams and their leaders. Discovering where they are at and facilitating their thinking and experiences to show them where they can, and need to be.
My starting point is always the leader themselves.
Looking as far ahead as 2030 , we are being told by the Hay Group that we need to equip leaders for seismic changes on the horizon
It’s crucial that we are actively coaching leaders and managers today for what’s coming up in the future.
We also need to be re-defining what a TEAM is and how best it works. I believe in order to more this forward we need to shine the light on ‘relationships’.
How the power is dispersed in a TEAM is often unbalanced to to the nature of hierarchy and in some cases where you may have a couple of toxic individuals, it may be disempowering.
We want to shine light on developing strengths in our Leaders that will in turn shine light on the strengths of each of their team members.
This will mean re-establishing the power within some of the relationships. Really looking at who you have, not just the function that they do, the human behind the function, then you start to shine light on the core strength that each human has to offer.
The outcome is that you build long lasting authentic relationships that will keep powering you towards your results.
It may be necessary for the team lead to shine the light on an individual’s strength that will result with them being in the shadow.
This is where the power for dealing with forthcoming mega-trends will surge from.
Once each member of a team has their true strength and potential clearly visible and available to the rest of the team, then you have a fully charged team.
The question is –
As a leader, are you willing to allow other members of your team to outshine you?
If the answer is NO, step away and allow someone else in to the spot light of Leadership.
If the answer is YES, continue to LIFT your TEAM from the SHADOWS
Start by enjoying the Lighthouse Family…
Pictures from FreeDigitalPhotos.net: Samurblue, Chanipipat
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