Many of us find ourselves in leadership positions with little training or experience in the role. Fortunately, there are some actions you can take to be a better leader almost immediately. Read on to find out what they are.
Know thyself
To be an effective leader in the workplace, it is crucial that you know and understand yourself. In fact, it is this understanding that creates the foundations for successful working relationships and cooperation.
Of course, it’s often easier to assess the personality of the people that we work with than our own strengths, weaknesses, and innate skills. That is why exploring our personality type can be a very worthwhile activity for workplace leaders.
Happily, you can find your specific personality type with this test online. You can then use this information to better understand how you behave. Not to mention how this relates to the others in your team. Thus allowing you to interact in a much more effective way.
Keep things professional
It’s always nice if we connect on a personal level to the people with which we work. However, it’s important to remember that as a leader, you aren’t really in the work environment to make friends.
Instead, your priority is to lead the team effectively, something that you can often do so much better if you keep things as professional as possible.
What that means is socializing with the team as a whole rather than with just a few favored people. The reason being that this can help to demonstrate your even-handedness and inspire more cooperation from those with which you work.
Learn to delegate not micromanage
Another way that you can be a better leader in the workplace is to steer clear of micromanagement. After all, few people do best when their superior is breathing down their neck. Instead, you must trust those that you are working with to complete tasks in the right way.
One way of enabling this to get good at delegating. That is assigning work to others. In fact, there are two main benefits to delegation. The first is that it means you can focus on higher-level tasks such as directing your team. While the second is that by giving those under you tasks to complete, you will demonstrate that you have faith in their skills and work ethic.
Clarity is king
Clarity of speech and thinking does not always come easily. Especially if we are working in a high dress situation. However, as an effective leader, the skill of being clear is absolutely something that you need to work on.
In fact, if you can think and communicate clearly, you will be able to direct your team in a much more effective manner. Of course, if you are struggling with clarity, there are some tactics you can use to help you in this area.
These include mindfulness or even tables like the Eisenhower matrix. The latter being something that can help you sort your priorities and bring clarity to even the most complex of situations in the workplace.
