How to LEAD - #1

A Practical Guide to Leadership and Team Management

This is a series of posts that will be up weekly so feel free to pass by regularly, absorb some knowledge and leave your ❤ (you can also send me an email with suggestions, feedback or to discuss this topic).

Who is this for?

From beginners to experts, from leaders to followers - leadership is for everyone, and so is this guide. Understanding team dynamics is important to every individual in the team.

There’s no quick-and-easy method to be a good leader. You might have some natural talent and understand it fast, but it still requires practice. Experience is king here and the best way to learn is through trial and error. I want you to read what I say here, think about it, apply it on your business, organization, life, or in whatever you decide to apply it on, and then be critical about it. Check what worked, what didn’t work and learn along the way. All the knowledge that I’m deploying here came either from my experience as a team leader, as a team member or from my research.

Defining Leadership

You’re probably sick of every definition of leadership that you already saw. Every article or book that you read about this topic has its own definition. I know it’s boring, but it is necessary, otherwise we could be thinking about two very different things.

So, here’s my definition of Leadership:

“Leadership is the skill of providing guidance, motivation and vision to one or more people”

There you go. Now we can align our expectations towards this topic. Now before proceeding, lets dive into that philosophical sentence. To better understand what I meant, I’m going to break that definition by parts:

“Leadership is the skill…”

Yes, it is a skill. That means that it can be developed. It’s not a talent, it’s not in your DNA, it’s not something that you’re just born with or not. You can (and should) learn it.

“Leadership is the skill of providing…”

This means that you’re not imposing anything to anyone. You lead by suggesting your ideas and perspectives to others, by exemplifying, inspiring or showing the way. When you’re demanding something from others, you’re actually removing the ownership that that person would feel if he/she was encouraged to do it and pursued it by his/her own choice. Leadership is a mind game and I’m here to give you all the cheats.

“Leadership is the skill of providing guidance…”

Lead by example. You need to understand what to do and how to do it. Only then you’ll be fully able to teach it to somebody else. As the saying goes: “If you can’t explain it, then you don’t fully understand it”. This will also increase your credibility amidst your team.

“Leadership is the skill of providing guidance, motivation…”

It doesn’t matter how much you know about a certain topic, if you cannot get your people moving. You might be charismatic, inspirational, or simply have some special gift of relating to people. Or you can understand what makes each person click and use it as a remote control for their motivation. The latest is what I would suggest to everyone, since it would also increase the empathy and understanding inside the team. Either ways, motivation is the key to execution.

“Leadership is the skill of providing guidance, motivation and vision..."

Here’s something that most companies fail to provide to their employees. They might be good in providing the right guidance, they might be good at inducing motivation in their workers, but they usually fail to teach the correct process of creating and developing a vision in each person. Vision is the knowledge of where you are, where you want to go and how you’re going to do it. It gives each individual a purpose to fight for and a direction to go to. In the long term, vision is what differs highly successful individuals from others.

“Leadership is the skill of providing guidance, motivation and vision to one or more people.”

If you can provide guidance, motivation and vision to yourself, you are already a leader. I really want to emphasize this point, since everyone identifies leadership as something that depends on the interaction with others. I’m actually going further to say: the journey of becoming a leader starts by leading our own selves.

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This is it for the first part! Thank you very much for your time :) if you liked this post, leave your ❤ and follow me to the next one ;)

#Leadership #Management #Team #Teamwork #TeamManagement #Entrepreneurship