Inspiring Others

Leadership is a difficult concept to 'bottle'.  I have studied leadership theory and even contributed a little to it.  Yet I would have trouble boiling the concept down to a couple of sentences - to go in a dictionary, for example.  

This is partly because there are different kinds of leadership - for different types of organisation, for different situations and for different tasks.  This is why transferring leaders from one sector to another does not always work.

However some of the 'softer' elements of leadership are more transferrable.  Take the notion of inspiring others to better contributions and higher performance.  This is something that most leaders, and many of their followers, think is important.

We need people to share the mission and vision, to understand the priorities, to want to maximise  their contribution. We want them to ask themselves everything morning, "What can I do today to help 'move the needle'?; "How can I best help my team?"  They will only do this if they do share the overall mission and they trust the leaders of the organisation to make decisions on the basis of shared values.  If these factors are in play, they will accept that the organisation sometimes has to take difficult decisions

It is the job of the leadership not only to communicate and espouse these values and the mission and vision but to live them - to act in accordance with them in everything they do and to keep employees informed of what is happening - and why.  This creates unifying factors that 'glue' disparate parts of the organisation together with mutual trust and respect

There is a possibly apocryphal, story of JFK being shown round the NASA Cape Canaveral space facility. He came across a janitor sweeping the floor and asked him, "What do you do here?"  The janitor replied, "I help get our astronauts to the moon".

Now that's the attitude you beed to try and create?