Successful Leadership
How to maximize team potential through successful leadership
What makes a successful leader?
Our Vice President, Houston Hawley, shares how to be a successful leader to maximize the potential of a team. Read on to discover skills you can use in the office and in the field to not only be an effective leader, but an effective team member as well.
The best quality of a successful leader is not charisma, influence, or power. It is not personality, attractiveness, or innovative genius. The one thing that exceeds all these qualities is being a servant leader that possesses and creates positive relational energy — energy exchanged between people that helps uplift, enthuse, and renew them.
The relationship between a leader and who they lead can make or break a team. It can be the difference between a failed job and a job that exceeds client expectations. A successful leader knows how to bring out the best in everyone around them, drastically increasing performance and happiness on the job.
Leaders must use virtuous actions, including forgiveness, compassion, generosity, integrity, kindness, honesty, trust, gratitude, and recognition toward the team daily. Leaders need to account for the performance and morale of the entire team. Without effective leadership, your team will never reach its full potential.
Great leaders produce substantially high levels of engagement, lower turnover, and enhanced feelings of well-being among employees that help ensure the work team is as mentally and physically healthy as possible. When hormones such as oxytocin and dopamine increase, body inflammation decreases, and disease immunities are enhanced. Leaders who provide a healthy atmosphere for the team can see productivity on any given project go up four times as much.
There is a botanical term for these results known as the Heliotropic Effect, which occurs when plants naturally turn toward and grow in the presence of light. Light is the life-giving force in nature, and photosynthesis occurs only in its presence. Human beings have the same inherent attraction toward life-giving and life-supporting energy. This energy form is what you receive — and give — in relationships with others.
There’s more to this than the need for employees to feel valued, respected, and engaged; we already know the importance of these things. When they get recognition, support, and encouragement, absenteeism is low, productivity and profitability are high, with improvements in quality and safety. Every good leader must know how to catalyze all of this.
Positive relational energy then becomes reciprocal. An energizing and empathetic approach to others acts as a continual energy-boosting mechanism, which, in turn, produces an abundance of energy and productivity within the team.
Energizers reproduce themselves and build networks of positive energizers around them. The Heliotropic Effect expands to attract even more.
That heliotropic energy will renew time and time again. Be the effective leader who continues to inspire focus and trust. Show total investment to your entire team, and employees will turn toward the sun.
Written by Emma Seppälä & Kim Cameron
Revised by Houston Hawley, Vice President of Operations