Every business needs a leadership role. Leadership is all about taking a group of people to achieve a common goal. The strength of leadership lies in bringing out the best from the employees.
This is achieved through effective communication of what needs to be done and why does it matter. Effective leadership will attempt to bring the best from an employee and through a host of management practices.
What objectives do a leadership role needs to have? We will cover this up in the following discussion.
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Primary Objectives of Leadership
Looking to enhance your leadership effectiveness?
Set clear, measurable goals for your team. Research by Gallup shows that only 50% of employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work. By clearly defining objectives, you can increase engagement and productivity. (Source: Gallup, “State of the American Workplace,” 2017)
Additionally, investing in employee development boosts retention. According to the 2018 LinkedIn Workforce Learning Report, 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development. (Source: LinkedIn, “Workplace Learning Report,” 2018)
As a business leader, your main goal is to take care of the business and run it successfully. You should convince your employees to succeed – both in their individual capacities and as a team. If you are a good leader, you should be able to convince the employees to put their best towards achieving the common business goals.
The common objectives of good leadership can be outlined through the following pointers –
1) Proper Organisation of Employees
Your employees come from different backgrounds. That would mean they have different viewpoints and agendas even when they are working together as an organization. One of the prime objectives of leadership would be to focus on organizing this diverse group of employees.
The major objective of leadership is to bring the diverse group of people together towards a common goal – at least for the period that they are at work. This involves communicating in clear terms that the larger agenda of the organization is more important than focussing on the individual goals.
2) Working towards a common goal
The business goals will involve meeting multiple objectives. This can involve meeting the bigger goal of growing the business over the next year or short term goals like meeting the sales figures for the next month. Leadership assumes the objective of making the stakeholders understand the importance of each of these goals and how each of these fit into a larger goal.
As a good leader, you should be capable of presenting these goals in a way that can both be acted upon and achievable. Creating realistic and quantifiable goals for achieving the results will make the employees have a sense of accomplishment.
3) Motivating Employees
This is perhaps one of the most crucial and key leadership objectives. As a successful leader, you should strive to understand your employees well enough and try to achieve the best to bring the best in them. This will need strong interpersonal skills of mingling socially with your employees.
A perfect leader will make every attempt to make the employees apply themselves completely out of their own will into the common objective of the organization. You should be focussed on understanding the learning skills and aptitude of each of the employees and fostering their skills in a more positive manner.
4) Achieving a cohesive organizational structure
Achieving a cohesive atmosphere at the workplace is one of the prominent objectives a leadership role will need to focus on. Effective leadership is focussed on the creation of a cohesive group of people striving towards achieving the best both for the short term or long term goals.
A true leadership should focus on sowing this cohesive structure both in letter and spirit. Everything that leadership does – including the payment of bills to the physical signs should reflect a positive and cohesive organizational structure.
Secondary Objectives of Leadership
While the major objectives of leadership explained above remain to be quite effective in bringing the best out of your employees, it should also be taken care of to understand that there are other minor objectives that a leadership role needs to live up to.
Here are a few objectives that would be practically important in addition to the major objectives we already outlined in the above discussion.
5) Vision and Mission
Developing a mission for the perfect growth of an organization. The technique here is to have a clear vision for the best possible results even before they are realized.
6) Strategize
Visualizing and creating a workable strategy for the achievement of the goals. The strategy should be such that it is realistic and achievable.
7) Innovation
Being innovative is the key to perfect functionality of a leadership position. Innovation literally catapults your growth way forward as compared to your competitors. However, it needs a leader to continously focus on innovation, regardless of market scenario or pressure on the leader.
8) Transformation
Be ready to transform. A leadership objective that can help you achieve success is that you should never shy away from discarding the existing processes. This is perhaps in tune with the concept of innovation we just went through.
9) Change Resistance
Leadership can face challenges in the form of resistance to changes. This is exactly what can bring up the most common causes of failure. The objective of true leadership would be to strategize & work on these specific causes of failure.
How should a Leader handle the objectives of Leadership?
Well, those were a few objectives that leadership activities should be ready to achieve. While it is essential to have those objectives, how would the leadership handle the objectives? Here are our views on how to achieve them.
1) Define the objectives
This must be the most difficult tasks. Make sure you are setting realistic objectives. Being a business leader, you would be tempted to go overboard with your expectations, but staying grounded will help you have better chances of success.
The objectives can be monetary or non-monetary. You may also have primary and secondary goals. In any case, create the objectives with an “objective” approach.
2) Communicating the objectives
Once the objectives are defined, communicating the objectives to the employees in the next big thing you need to focus on. A true leader should make it a point to make sure that the objectives are communicated to the team in a positive manner in a frequently scheduled manner.
Once again the objectives should be measurable and realistic. The communication of the objectives should leave nothing in an ambiguous state. Make sure you are leaving nothing to the imagination. Every aspect of the objectives should be communicated including the deadlines.
3) Quantifying and measuring the objectives
Once the objectives are configured and the project starts moving, it should be measured at regular intervals. This will keep your team focused on what needs to be achieved. Regular measurements and analysis will ensure that the team never gets distracted from its projected goals.
You can either display the project progress at a prominent location so that the team is constantly reminded of what needs t achieved. You can even break down the larger goals and objectives into smaller specifics. This can help check out if there are any lagging in a particular area.
4) Implementation of the Objectives of Leadership
A true leader will place himself or herself at the forefront. This will help the leadership role to keep working towards the implementation of the project and through its completion. The leader should focus on being the guide, cheerleader, and trouble-shooter at the same time.
In essence, the enthusiasm you show for the project should motivate the team to strive towards achieving the goals. Make sure you are committed towards the success in what you do, and this is where you would stand out as a leader.
Those were a few objectives that we would expect from a leadership role. Working with those objectives will not come by that easily, especially because you need to deal with a team that constitutes a group of diverse people. Being a perfect shepherd of your team is what is expected off you.
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