Unlocking Your Leadership Potential

The best way to lead is to lead from who you are. One of the reasons we admire great leaders is because they inspire us. Furthermore, their ability to inspire us results from them knowing who they are and having a sense of security in their way of being. The term leadership refers to the process of influencing others toward achieving set goals. It is vital to the success of an organization, a company's fiscal health, and the ability to create and inspire high-performance teams within the organization. Hence, unlocking your leadership potential so that you may be a more effective leader requires you to know how to lead yourself, lead others, and lead a system.

Lead yourself

Because you can't lead others without you first leading yourself, self-leadership is critical to improve your leadership skills, build confidence, improving your influence, and stay relevant in today's ever-changing marketplace. The practice of self-leadership is about consistently working on the "inner game" (mindset) and the "outer game" (goals). The inner game focuses on internal obstacles to achievement and can be developed through self-awareness, self-confidence, and emotional control. On the other hand, the outer game consists of influence and impact and focuses on overcoming external obstacles to achieving external goals. 

Lead others

As a leader, it is essential to love your craft, but it is more important to love your people. To lead others effectively, you have to show them that you love them, or they will not follow you, at least not for an extended period. People want to feel valued. This desire is an innate human condition, and when people feel seen, heard, and understood, trust and connection develop, making people more apt to follow a leader who helps to develop the trust and connection they feel. Therefore, as a leader, you have the power and the ability to let people know they're valued. Hence find ways to let them know that their work is meaningful. Acknowledge their work at the moment, one-on-one, rather than waiting six months to do so during the performance appraisal. Executing this strategy will profoundly impact you as a leader, creating a better organizational culture and a more driven and productive workforce.

Lead the system

A system leader is an individual who brings groups of people together to collaboratively tackle, solve and make progress on common challenges. Also, a system leader can guide people to leverage their knowledge by bringing everyone together for a common cause. Furthermore, systems leaders set the tone for individuals and groups within the organization to work more collaboratively and encourage the workforce to embed systems approaches in their day-to-day work. Hence, a system leader will influence other leaders to shift the collective focus in the appropriate direction to develop and maintain cross-departmental relationships that will create a shared understanding of goals, sustained performance, and improved productivity.

Bringing it all together

The future brings challenges and opportunities for today's leaders, who seek to pursue and achieve the organization's short-term and long-term goals. Consequently, leaders who will make an impact must unlock their leadership potential by knowing how to lead themselves, lead others, and lead a system. In addition, leaders who desire to get things done with sustainable results must become adaptable, curious, mentally tough, people-focused, self-aware, and purposeful.