Three Leadership Do’s

Leadership soup is chock full of ingredients necessary to make it good and tasty.

When it comes to selecting the key ingredients in the soup that are necessary for great leadership, consider the leadership situation. Different leadership situations require different competencies to fit the situation at hand. For example, some situations require courage, while others might require honesty and integrity.

If one were to ask me to taste the soup and identify the three major leadership ingredients in the recipe that for what leaders should do, I would have to settle on these:

Do be a visionary, Do be a communicator, and Do be a motivator.

In order to be a great leader and lead people in the right direction, one needs to know which direction to take. Consider a person standing at a fork in the road. Flipping a coin to decide whether to take Route A or Route B is not leadership. If this person had established the vision in the first place, the answer would be simple–take the route that has the best chance of making the vision a reality.

Secondly, a leader who can’t communicate effectively is heading for failure. This means having the ability to communicate up the organization with management, down the organization with employees, across the organization with coworkers, and outside the organization with customers. Any leader who can successfully communicate in these four directions is on the road to success.

Finally, a great leader must have the ability to motivate his or her people. This means not only inspiring them to be all they can be but also inspiring them to do all they can do. This is where that second prerequisite, communication, comes back into play. The leader must communicate with employees to find out what their motivations are and then use those motivations to inspire the employees to achieve their best. Any leader who can do these three things stands a great chance of being a superstar.