As Millennials have begun filling leadership roles in workplaces, they are faced with some common challenges; situations that test their skills, their mindset but also their patience and consistency. There are leaders who strive to deliver performance and leaders who just enjoy the director’s position and simply destroy their team’s performance. But what separates the first vs the latter? Certainly, the way they handle daily challenges at workplace!
Top four challenges young leaders face:
- Lack of self-awareness
- Impatience
- Leading those who are older
- Limited experience
A lot of what makes a team successful depends on the leadership at the top. As poor leadership can block teams that aim to flourish, we prepared a few valuable points to avoid bad leadership.
Leaders who deliver performance DO
- Acknowledge both success and failure: Good leaders always turn mistakes into catalysts for change. Besides, acknowledgement of failure provides an opportunity and a space for colleagues to encourage and inspire each other.
- Use the power mindfully and vigilantly: Good leaders embody leadership presence by cultivating focus, clarity, creativity and compassion in the service of others.
- Help motivation to flourish: Great leaders boost their team’s motivation by setting goals and keeping personnel abreast of those goals over time. They increase delegation. They praise, encourage and recognize their people.
- Embrace learnability: In today’s disruptive workplaces, leaders should be able to unlearn and relearn, specifically, by adopting the following learnable behaviors:
- Always develop technical or business skills
- Be open-minded and flexible
- Have cultural interest and sensitivity
- Deal with complexity
- Be resilient, resourceful, optimistic
- Embrace integrity
Leaders who deliver performance DON’T
- Use their power thoughtlessly: Leadership, at its core, is all about power and influence. Bad leaders use their power to get things done instead of using them to benefit others.
- Use pressure, hierarchy & fear to motivate: This is the so-called fear-based leadership which destroys the confidence of a team. Tyrannical management styles can lead to low self-esteem and performance as it eats away at team cohesiveness, increases stress and helplessness, and creates a feeling of work alienation, according to “Petty Tyranny in Organizations,” a paper written nearly a quarter century ago by psychologist Blake Ashforth, who is now an Arizona State University professor.
- Differentiate accountability from responsibility: Many people often use these two workplace buzzwords to refer to the same thing, however they have different meanings. Responsibility focuses on defined roles and processes that need to be in place to achieve a goal. While, accountability is task oriented; requires commitment to the successful completion of tasks assigned to one individual and willingness to take responsibility for everything that happens as a result of the actions taken.
- Be frightened by losing their power: These are directors who have not worked with themselves and obviously lack self-awareness and let stress possess them.
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
-Ralph Nader is an American political activist, author, lecturer.
