Photo Credits: Mikael Blomkvist from Pexels
How is the leadership landscape changing? What are leadership skills that help leaders better influence and inspire collaboration from diverse teams? Leadership expert Ricardo Lopes shares his research and his 5 tips he coined the “Leadership Engagement Process.”
Shifts in Leadership
Command and Control
The commands in control leadership style are dying. Gone are the days where people respond to a team leader with extraordinary effort just because of their title. Today, employees will give the team leader extraordinary performances when that leader can influence and inspire them using strategic leadership skills.
Individual Leadership
The industry is moving to individual leadership; subject matter experts working as peers in collaborating teams. Each of these collaborators are leaders, given their field of expertise, but they are only effective team players if they have the leadership skill to influence and inspire their peers.
Photo Credits: Snapwire from Pexels
Leaping into L.E.P.
The Leadership Engagement Process was formed from Ricardo’s decades of leadership experience research. It highlights the practices of leading organisations and finding space in neuroscience, change management, psychology, and leadership development. It is a step-by-step process and the tactics, strategies, and processes therein will help leaders demonstrate genuine care, acknowledge the uniqueness and diversity of individuals they collaborate with, and help influence and inspire others for extraordinary results.
- Make a Connection
Connections matter: it’s the difference between being taken seriously and being tuned out. Someone who’s made a connection has the green light to go forward and build the relationship and trust but not without making that initial connection. Making a connection is dependent on many different things like interpreting physiology; determining if someone is really listening to you or merely hearing you. Is this person putting in genuine effort? Do they have shared experience or things in common to generate interest in knowing them? Are they really speaking from the heart or is this all for show? Are they brave enough to stand for something and defend their position? Each of these examples support making a connection with someone or a group.
- Build Relationships
Building a relationship is important if you want someone to trust you later. We all build relationships but some of us aren’t good at it. Some people make you feel fantastic when you’re around them and you can’t help but grow font of them which makes you want to be in their presence. These relationship experts are genuinely interested in people. They give genuine smiles and remember your name, they are quick to praise and do it correctly with sincerity, integrity, and specificity.
- Establish Trust
If you trust someone, you feel confident or secure with their character and their commitment or ability to deliver on promises made. You feel better about taking calculated risks to move the business forward because if you don’t knock it out of the park this time, you know the rest of the team will have your back and not throw you under the bus for trying. When there is no trust, especially in a work environment, people don’t share information. They blame others to protect themselves and generate lackluster performances. Trust is earned haphazardly or skillfully by leaders who know the value of building trust by being transparent and having integrity. These leaders give trust to get it; they empower their employees or teammates with important assignments that could come back to haunt them if they’re not done right. They give away their authority and demonstrate it’s OK to show vulnerability and your human side.
- Cast a Vision
A vision should serve as a beacon that guides individuals along an inspired path to a vividly defined aspirational future to ensure that contributions are future focused and proactive, rather than merely reactive to current market conditions. Leaders who know how to create a vision also know that to get people engaged and enthusiastic about meeting shared goals, people need to feel emotionally connected to those goals and hence leaders must speak to the group’s core values and purposes as well as an awe-inspiring goal that’s vividly described.
- Create Buy-In
Create buy-in to do the work today, bringing the vision for tomorrow into fruition. If you can’t help people connect the dots between what they’re working on today and how it contributes to a shared vision for tomorrow, you’re going to have a tough time getting people to give you more effort than the bare minimum that keeps them employed. Leaders who are good at this know how to create a sense of urgency and how to tell a story. These leaders aren’t afraid to ask for help and relate their dependency on those who are pulling their weight. They are incredibly strategic with how they share information, are experts at engaging the right centres of influence, and advocate to ensure that the work gets done.
The beauty of L.E.P. is that the steps can have their orders changed or even completely skipped while still yielding extraordinary results. We do many of these steps but often unconsciously, haphazardly, or inconsistently. Ensure you are strategic, consistent, and aware of these steps to watch you and your team go from ordinary to extraordinary.
Speaker's Specifics
Ricardo is an award-winning author, international speaker, trainer, and coach who is passionate about leadership and employee development. Through personal empowerment and promoting individual accountability, Ricardo contributes to building strong communicating performers who leverage leadership principles to advance personal and organizational objectives. To learn how Ricardo and his team can help you, visit his website!
Ricardo also published his own book called Embracing Leadership which speaks to some changes in the very definition of leadership and the skills around it. Find it online or at your local book store!
