Leader is like a Thread ©
In the corporate world, leaders are very important. “People leave managers not companies” is a common averment heard when discussing corporate leadership. Why is this the case? One’s manager is the first person from the management that one interacts with. A manager plays a very important part in well being of his direct reports. It is the manager who talks about the vision of the company and translates it into one’s career growth and also the personal growth.
A manager becomes a leader when he leads people. For the success of any leader, people are very important. One cannot be a leader without people.
So who is a good leader? What are the characteristics of a good leader?
A good leader is one who understands that his growth is dependent on the team. It does not matter whether one is a project manager or a people manager. It is a leaders job to keep the team together and instill good qualities in the team.
A leader is responsible for the growth of the team and all its individual team members — be it career growth, soft skills growth or technical growth. A leader is not a trainer, he is a coach i.e. a leader should not hold hand of the team member every step of the day but should give directions of path to take and track the progress. It is the responsibility of individual to walk on the path provided he trusts the leader.
Each member of team is kind-of a flower. It is a leader who takes care of each of his team member and makes sure they grow — they bloom. Whole of the team is like a garland. It is the leader who hold all of them together — a leader is like a thread. Based on the situation, a leader should mold himself from a silk thread to a thick coir rope to even a metal wire. Like a thread, a leader is always in the background ensuring the team has a specific shape and goal and steers them to success.
Being in background — being a thread — is difficult. One may be tempted to provide immediate solutions and take charge of things.
A leader is successful not because of his personal achievements but by how well the team performs. At the same time, the success or failure of team depends a lot on the leader — his vision, management style and execution. A leader has to ensure that each member of the team is improving over a period of time and getting better in technical as well as soft skills like communication (in all 3 aspects of written, verbal and non-verbal). He also has to make sure that the team grows in diverse areas so that the garland has as many different types of flowers as possible.
It is the leader who ties everything together. He is the one with future vision and knows the direction the team should take to be successful. Leader is the one who understands strengths and weakness of each individual team member. He is the one who assigns tasks to various team members as per their capabilities so that the team is successful.
So a good leader knows about the strength and weakness of each team member and assigns each of them tasks so that the team as a whole is successful. What does this require?
- A good leader should have a vision of his own that aligns with the vision of the company, therefore a leader should have ability to understand the vision of management and translate the same at his level. He should also define the vision for his team based on the role they play in large scheme of things.
- In order to understand the capabilities of team members, a good leader should give them diverse tasks.
- Last but surely not the least — a good leader must have regular connect with his team (both as a group and as individuals) to talk about the vision, the goal to achieve and make them aware of how the task performed by each of them fits into larger scheme.
Being a leader is full of responsibilities — one is responsible to translate the company vision to team’s vision and goal, ensure that team understands the larger vision, ensure that team has clear goals and direction, for well being of the team, ensure that team as a whole is successful and ensure that each team member get better over a period of time & their career aspirations are met. This requires a lot of consistent hard work (consistency is the key). Every individual, every vision, every goal has to be held together by the leader like a thread to make motivated and outstanding team.
If one does not do these, they will be a manager and not leader. Focused goals, data-driven collaboration and accountable leadership drive transformative success.
Note — Leader (& Manager) is not specific to a gender. Wherever I have used pronoun to a specific gender, I meant all the genders.
