HOW A LEADER CAN INFLUENCE TEAM MEMBERS ?

During my 10 years of consultancy work, I have often been asked by my clients on how they can influence their team members without using their authority. This week, I would like to share with you my learning and experiences.

Leadership involves influencing people, so it follows that many effective leadership attitudes, behavior, and practices deal with interpersonal relationships and are the basis for effective interpersonal skills.

Sometimes leaders focus too much on the task and not on the people in the organization, thus we need to get the right people into the right roles and to empower them.


Aligning and Mobilizing People

Getting people pulling in the same direction and working together smoothly is a major interpersonal challenge. To get people pulling together, it is necessary to speak to many people. The target population can involve many different stakeholders. Among them are managers, team leaders, higher-ups, peers and workers in other parts of the organization, as well as suppliers, government officials, and customers. Anyone who can implement the vision and strategies or who can block implementation must be aligned. Once aligned, organizational members can pull together toward a higher purpose.

Whereas alignment of people takes place at almost a spiritual level, mobilization is more involved with getting the group working together smoothly. Mobilizing the people is getting individuals with different ideas, skills and values to carry out the work of the group. Two mobilizing forms of behavior of the leader are (a) communicating expectations clearly and ( b ) demonstrating care for term members.


Concert Building

The leader’s role of concert building involves both aligning and mobilizing in a manner similar to an orchestra leader. The concert builder’s goal is to produce a system for self evaluating, self correcting, self renewing and ongoing.

Henry Mintzberg believed that the way an orchestra conductor leads may serve as a good model for managers in a wide range of business. The conductor does a lot of hands-on work, while at the same time inspiring the musicians. The musicians, many like highly skilled professionals in organizations, are highly trained and competent yet need to be infused with energy from time to time. Becoming an organizational concert builder requires many of the skills and insights like building team work, and consensus building.



Creating Inspiration and Visibility

To be inspirational is being visible and available because human contact and connections reinforce inspiration. Personally, I believe leadership is involved in taking risks – it is about guiding the direction you want a business to go, acknowledging successes and executing the strategy to get you there.


Satisfying higher level needs

To inspire people, effective leaders motivate people by satisfying higher level needs, such as needs for achievement, a sense of belonging, recognition, self esteem and a feeling of control over one’s life. A strictly managerial – rather leadership – approach would be to push people in the right direction through control mechanisms. An example would be suspending people who did not achieve work quotas. Although this managerial approach might work in the short term, the workers would not be inspired. Many leaders in organizations are aware of the importance of need satisfaction for building good relationships.



Giving emotional support and encouragement

Supportive behavior toward team members usually increases leadership effectiveness. A supportive leader gives frequent encouragement and praise. One of the many work related ways of encouraging people is to allow them to participate in decision making. Emotional support generally improves morale and sometimes improves productivity. In the long term, emotional support and encouragement may bolster a person’s self esteem. Being emotionally supportive comes naturally to the leader who has empathy for people and who is a warm person.


Promoting principles and Values

A major part of a leader’s role is to help promote values and principles that contribute to the welfare of individuals and organizations. The promotion of values and principles can be classified as relationship oriented because it deals directly with the emotions and attitudes of people, and indirectly with the task. Steven Covey who is widely quoted for his uplifting messages, advises that an organization’s mission statement must be for all good causes. Leaders who believe in these good causes will then esponse principles and values that lead people toward good deeds in the work place. Almost every leader or manager – even the most devious – claims to harbor values and principles that promote human values and welfare. Yet not all leade4rs and manager actually implement such values and principles. This is known as the difference between a leader’s espoused theories.

To encourage managers and all other employees to conduct their work affairs at a high moral level, many companies put their values in written form. Value statements are relatively recent addition to the corporate public face of many organizations, and they are made to articulate clearly the fundamental beliefs of the leaders and members of the organization. However, the individual values of employees of organizations are rarely uniformly shared, and congruence with the organizations espoused values of problematic at best.

Conclusion

Leadership involves making connections with the team members. To be effective we need to align and mobilize people with concert building, creating inspiration and visibility, satisfying the needs of the team members while giving emotional support and encouragement and promote principles and values. When we uphold integrity, we will gain respect from our team members, my personal experience is that we need to be always be there for the members and our team member will perform their duty to their best of their ability.