by Kaylee Lenz

Once you’ve been called a leader, you automatically earn the title of manager and once called a manager, you earn the title of a leader. However, this doesn’t mean that being a good manager makes you a good leader, nor does being a good leader make you a good manager.

The sad truth about leadership and management is that one can be good at both in a particular organization or workplace and also be a total mess at it. Leading and managing becomes a difficult task when the individual changes organizations.

This article will help equip you with adequate management tools that can help make people become more effective leaders and managers.

Here are some required skills & practices:

#1 Practice for Effective Leadership: Know Your Audience

The first and most important step is knowing the people you work with, not necessarily their private lives but their general personality in the workplace. You can’t manage what you don’t know, that’s why the first thing is to diagnose the problem before treating it.

The process of getting to know your audience is the stage of diagnoses. This practice is so important that if neglected, every other management practice, and we have many at Management 3.0, will go sour. To make it easy you can create a mini personality report for your colleagues. At Management 3.0 we call it Personal Maps. Each new team member creates one upon arrival and shares it with their new colleagues. It’s a great way to get to know who you’re working with on a more intimate level.

#2 Practice for Effective Leadership: Select a Leadership Style that best suits your audience

After getting to know your audience, what’s next is selecting a suitable style of leadership that can cut across everyone. Let’s shed some light on various leadership styles:

• Authoritative: This is what I call the “I am the boss” leadership style. This involves the leader giving orders and those orders are final, with no suggestions or contributions. As rude as this style may appear, some audiences require this leadership style for some jobs, especially for remote jobs.
• Democratic: This is what I call the “I am for all” leadership style. This style involves the leader being flexible and open to suggestions.
• Laissez-faire: This is the “I don’t care” leadership style. This is applied by a nonchalant leader, who cares less about being authoritative or democratic. He just wants the job done and doesn’t care about anything. As weird as it seems this leadership style can also be useful in handling a particular type of audience. To become a good leader and manager it’s best to combine these styles.

#3 Practice for Effective Leadership: Earn Respect and Win Trust

Try as much as possible to earn respect from your audience by modelling the behaviour you expect to see from them. Correcting them on what you are guilty of is hypocritical and doesn’t lead by example. Trust is not bought it’s gotten by establishing a relationship. So get to know your audience by constantly checking on them.

#4 Practice for Effective Leadership: Be a Motivator

If you want that good work to keep coming in, always motivate your audience. At Management 3.0 we like to play a game called Moving Motivators, which helps us to understand who we work with and what drives them.

Photo: rawpixel (Unsplash)