Going Beyond Start-Up: The Importance of Personality, Leadership and Culture in Building a Business (Part 2 of 3)
Welcome to the 2nd instalment of this 3-part series. In the 1st post, we discussed how Personality can affect your business. In this post, we’ll look at how Leadership plays a role in building a business.
Defining Leadership
Leadership can be associated with a title e.g., Vice President and CEO. There’s also a common differentiation (discussion) about the differences between leadership and management.
At its core leadership is about three (3) Responsibilities:
1) Influencing individuals to achieve objectives.
2) Motivating people and gaining commitment
3) Enabling others to achieve their full potential.
There are multiple leadership styles ranging from transformational, servant-leadership, participative leadership, and transactional leadership.
However, there are two (2) underlying leadership behaviours: Initiating Structure (task-focused) and Consideration (relationship-focused).
These behaviours explain how a leader defines, organizes, plans, and allocates work, and the extent they are approachable and show concern and respect for others.
The relevance of these points might seem obvious to being a leader, the challenge is knowing the right mix of these behaviours that is needed for a particular scenario.
Understanding the situational factors of the scenario can help determine the right mix of behaviours. Based on House’s Path-Goal Theory, a leader’s behaviour is determined by the characteristics of the employee and the workplace.
- Employees may have different levels of training and experience, as well as comfort to undertake challenging assignments.
- The work environment also needs to be considered i.e., the level of urgency associated with work, the risk of making a mistake or the level of competitiveness.
“a leader’s behaviour is determined by the characteristics of the employee and the work environment.”
With an understanding of the employee and the workplace needs, a leader can then apply the right mix of behaviours from being directive and achievement-oriented to participative and supportive.
When a leader is in tune with these needs, they can be highly effective at influencing, motivating, and enabling employees to achieve their full potential, and consequently achieve the organizational objectives.
How to Develop an Effective Leadership Style?
You may already have an identifiable leadership style. In fact, you may already be an effective leader.
However, ask yourself:
· Do your employees, suppliers, customers, and investors believe you are an effective leader?
· Could you be a more effective (optimal) leader?
While there are hundreds of thousands of resources on Leadership from videos, books, Ted talks, movies, etc., the most accurate and meaningful resource is knowing what others think or perceive of your leadership style.
“A 360-degree assessment is a method that systematically collects feedback about an individual’s performance from peers, direct reports, colleagues, and superiors … it provides a comprehensive, 360-degree view of a leader’s strengths and opportunities for growth” (Centre for Creative Leadership).
Having confidence in your abilities is critical to building a business. But it is vital to ensure you are aware of your blind spots. After all, perception is often reality.
Leadership behaviours, productive or harmful, often ‘translate’ into the unwritten rules for how employees work, act, think, and interact with each other. It also identifies the organization's shared values, norms, and beliefs.
In other words, the behaviours of a leader set the DNA or the culture of the organization.
In the next post, we’ll look at the importance of Culture in building a business. //
