Good Leadership Skills Gain Commitment from Followers
Good leadership skills encourage people to follow your vision. Who are the inspiring leaders in your life? Who have you wanted to follow at work or play? Which leaders make you want to part of the group? Have you ever left a group that was run poorly?
Leading happens in sport, and the running of the local church or the family. How do we encourage people to do what we want? How do we get ourselves to exercise, lose weight or stop procrastinating?
Ultimately, we all lead someone at sometime. Developing good leadership skills can improve our lives, relationships and health.
We all have ideas about what a typical leader looks like or does. We have unconscious thoughts about how old they are and what sex they are. Our leadership stereotypes begin with parents and guardians.
We rarely update our leadership ideas. For some, the biggest obstacle to developing good leadership skills is their negative view of what it would take to be a leader. It is a decision about identity.
Self management
Research in a large accounting firm suggests that self-management skills can add about 78% in incremental profit. (1)
An effective leader needs control of their emotional states. Leaders without self-control find it hard to gain long-term co-operation. When a group has little power (such as children), it is usually easy to gain their compliance. Followers have little choice but to suffer a leader's lack of restraint.
Optimistic, open leaders with a healthy relationship to power influence others more easily. Being effective requires commitment from followers rather than compliance.
What is commitment? Do you remember a time when you were committed to making something happen? There is energy and desire, you become one with the goal, and there are no excuses. If obstacles arise, you find other ways.
Many NLP techniques improve state and emotional management. Anchoring, Meta states, reframing, time line therapy and core transformations can rapidly enhance good leadership skills through self-management.
Another indicator of poor leadership skills is defensiveness. Outstanding leaders are not just open to feedback, but actively seek negative feedback. The NLP criticism strategy is an essential tool to learn to interpret criticism as empowering feedback.
Self Awareness
Of course, if you are not aware of your moods, values, strengths and motives, it is impossible to use and manage them. Self-awareness requires building a relationship with your unconscious mind.
Many NLP techniques enhance self-awareness.
- Understand self and others with the Meta Model.
- Uncover what is important with values work.
- Resolve inner conflicts with parts work and integration, including the Visual Squash.
- Discover inner strengths with Time line therapy and the Milton Model.
- Accessing uptime and downtime states can make you aware of your states and moods.
- Use Core Transformations to know your real intentions.
- Use the Meta States Model to uncover the meanings that affect the way you act.
Political and Social Awareness
One of the challenges I had was about "being political". I saw working through networks as a time wasting and frustrating necessity. I saw going through "proper channels" as bureaucracy gone mad.
I didn't appreciate the power of networks. I didn't recognize the real value of diversity of viewpoints. I didn't understand that the shortest route between two points is not necessarily a straight line.
Some trainers and students still take the linear view that Neuro Linguistic Programming is a set of techniques, procedures and tools. They want to use NLP like screw drivers and spanners to fix a broken machine.
A systems approach to NLP and good leadership skills connects the political, social and physical environment to the person doing the leading. Responding to all these things makes you more influential.
Relationship management
Would you believe that social skills could add 110% to a business profit? (1) What do I mean by social skills?
- Inspiring, persuading and influencing others
- Getting on with others - Rapport is a vital skill set
- Resolving misunderstandings and conflicts
- Soothing ruffled feathers
Getting on with others requires behavioral flexibility. You also need openness to be influenced in return. Others must know you will listen with an open mind or they won't bother.
Persuasion, inspiration and influence doesn't mean overt power. Do you remember a time when someone persuaded you to do or buy something? Intimidation probably had nothing to do with it.
(1) Quoted in Daniel Goleman's The New Leaders (p326)
