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What defines the "Face of Leadership"?
By: Michael McCormick
With 35 years of management experience, the Project Management movement during the past 5 years has improved the processes by mastering the mechanics of project life cycle framework but all the certifications in the world does not mean you're a good leader.
Leaders are followers too. If you're a leader without following, you're a dictator. And as fun as that sounds, being a leader-follower means finding value in your team, getting inspired by your team, encouraging your team to communicate, brainstorm and be open. A good leader shares the power by empowering team members to take control of something demonstrates the leader's ability to let someone else on the team to be in the driver seat.
I offer this perspective:
Leadership is the process of influencing the activities of an individual or a group in efforts toward goal advancement in a given situation. Thus the leadership process is a function of the leader, the follower, the goals, and the situation at the time. It is active, exerts influence, requires effort, confronts conflict and is related to goals.
As a "leader " you are one of your project's principal team leaders - the magnetic center of a group of people who look to you for leadership and vision. You are expected to create excitement and team spirit.
For this, you must not only inspire people, but motivate them to achieve beyond their own expectations. You must develop power-team.
First, you must have an intuitive understanding of how teams work. Mature managers know that teams have a collective energy greater than that of any of the individuals on the team or even its leader. The challenge for managers is to harvest the synergies of the team to their entrepreneurial spirit and produce results.
Team members share responsibility for achieving these goals - successes will be impossible without team cohesion. For this to happen, much must be done to ensure that the members coordinate their activities and communicate well. Their mission will need to be clearly stated and communicated. They will have to learn how to solve problems together and follow clear norms and rules.
Everyone, including the leader, will have to keep their ego under control. Then, when the team has succeeded, everybody can share the praise and public recognition.
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