When you are highly self aware AND you have the capability to quickly recognize scenarios where one of the ideal leadership roles fits, your behaviors produce far more effective results… There are several critical roles. These are not totally mutually exclusive but the seven assist you in situationally shifting appropriately to best manage the scenario for the long term.
- Keeper of the Success Vision
- Feedback facilitator
- Dictator
- Goal Enforcer
- Counselor
- Basics Referee- time, who, how, what
Quite often part of the solution is reminding people what success is all about and what it will look like when they get there so they can almost feel the tangible benefits.
A role that is productive in many situations is to be the questioner and listener- getting feedback, expertise and beliefs that people have so you can help create progress towards the best solution.
There are times when you have to manage by decree- to avert a short term crisis or to hold people accountable for bad behavior always being away that this can if misapplied have negative repercussions.
At points in time, you need hold people accountable for what they signed up to achieve and did not or push them towards their acknowledged goals and objectives.
Other times, especially after some of the roles above are used, you may need to play the need of counselor, focused on attitudes, stress levels and feelings.
Finally, we've found it useful to use a role, we term, basics referee, to get people to ask the basic questions, often of themselves but also of the others. By Basic questions we mean, the questions of when (is this important now, Does something else need to be dealt with first?, Does it make sense to deal with this at some other time?..., why?(why are we doing this?, What is the purpose?), What?(Is this really what we need to be doing?...), How? (is this the right process, what are the best steps, if this is not a one time thing, can we learn from this?....)
In the coming weeks, we'll explore each of these and the key elements of self awareness necessary to function effectively in that role.
One of the most difficult challenges managers face is choosing the right people and understanding how to get them to perform at their best. During the last 12 years of our experience, we have found no other tool except the Harrison Assessment that enables this kind of capability with incredible accuracy and insight.
