3 Things Your Followers Need

What I like to do is talk about leadership and how as leaders we can move things forward. I'm a believer that the world's screaming for leadership. Your leadership is needed now more than ever. And so, what I want to talk to you about today is three things your followers need right now to move forward and to get unstuck in the middle of this chaos that is the pandemic. Whatever you want to call it, whatever term you've given it. As a leader, you've got to step forward. My mentor, John Maxwell says, ‘leaders know the way, show the way and go away.’ And so that's what we're talking about. Here are the three things you need to take your team, your followers, your organization with you to move forward.

No matter if you're an entrepreneur or you're a leader, the leader of a small team within another organization, or maybe you're the CEO of an organization, these three things are going to help you. And in the first one is this. You have to have a vision that's bigger than their current problems as a leader.

This is your responsibility to create a vision that's bigger than the current problems that everyone has. As a business owner, entrepreneur, leader of my family, and leader of other people, I have challenges. I have problems as well. But as a leader, I've got to keep that vision. I've got to create a vision that's bigger than those problems in my own life, bigger than those problems in the lives of others that I'm leading and cast that vision for other people. Or they'll just get stuck. If we focus on our problems, that's where our energy is going to go. And you as a leader, when you paint that vision, you create that vision for others and then connect it to something inside of them, connecting it to their core purpose, connected it to their beliefs. Then you can move them. This is what influence is all about.

Leadership is influencing others to move from where they are. I want to give you an example. My son is a golfer. If you watch any golf, golfers stand behind the golf ball before they ever hit it. They don't just put the tee in the ground and walk up there and swing the club. They visualize where they want to land the golf ball. They're not looking at all the trouble on the golf course. There's water, there's sand traps, trees, rough, there's all kinds of problems. They're creating a vision bigger than the problems that they could get into with that shot.

Leadership is seeing something and creating that vision, and then implanting that vision in the hearts and minds of the people that you lead. There are lots of challenges and problems in the world right now, maybe within your own organization, your own community. I don't know what type of organization that you're in, but there are tons of challenges and issues, but your goal and your job, your responsibility as a leader, is to get people focused on the vision. If you're leading corporate leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, leading a business, leaning a team, this is your primary responsibility to connect the hearts, minds, actions, behaviors of the team that you lead to a vision that's bigger than the current problem going on in the world. I know that's sometimes hard to do, and this is why as a leader, you've got to continue to work on this. This is one of those skills they don't teach you in college. This is an essential skill. Many people call this a soft skill. I call it an essential skill. It's an essential skill that you have to learn to develop within yourself so that you can do that for others.

And that vision has to be aligned with solid values. Go back and listen to my recent podcast. I did with Jason Behnam talking about concrete values. I've got lots of episodes on The LeadUp Podcast where I talk about values-driven leadership, but your vision needs to be connected, align with solid values. Let's look at the second thing, a culture that supports the vision. As a leader, one of the things you have to do is you've got to create a culture within your team, within your company, within your organization, wherever you're at.

First, if you are a CEO, this is your number one priority. To create a culture that supports the vision that you've cast for the team. You've got to do everything. Culture is everything. You can have a great vision. You can have great values, but if you don't have a culture that drives that it's going to fall apart.

So, bringing this back to your company, as a CEO, you have to focus on building a culture development every day. Now let me bring it to the leader of a team or department. Don't wait for the CEO to do that. Do it for your team, do it within your team. Maybe the overall organizational culture doesn't fit that, but be a CEO within your own orders.

Culture is everything, but this vision that you have that we talked about in the first thing, it has to be backed by action. You can't, just talk about vision because if you talk about it and then people are watching and you're not doing the things as a leader you need to do to support that to create that, then it's going to begin to fall on deaf ears.

I am going to give you five things that, that you can do to get this culture, to make this culture work, to get it, to stick for yourself. One, you have to make it simple when you're casting that vision. Make it something that is easily repeatable, that can pull this vision forward. So, it has to be simple. It has to be convincing. You can't just have a statement that you write down on the wall and put it out that you've got to prepare to deliver.

And in a way, that's going to get others excited. It has to be repeated daily. It's not something you say one time and put it in a picture frame. It has to be talked about frequently, talked about all the time.

 And then you have to look for small wins. Celebrate those small wins. Oftentimes, as leaders, we only focus on where we're failing or focus on metrics that we're not meeting, but looking for the small wins that move people forward. This is what encourages people to move forward. This is how you create that culture of winning for your team to tie them to that vision.

And then you have to be a carrier. You have to be the primary carrier. Be a vision carrier and infect all of your leaders with that vision so that it permeates itself through the culture of the organization. And if you'll do that, you'll be able to move people forward in a way that's going to get them excited. And they'll start spreading that vision along with you. They'll start creating that culture along with you.

Let's talk about the third thing. Your followers need clarity of goals and expectations. As a leader, you have to create clarity of goals, so they are tied to your vision, tied to your values, that help you create that culture.

You have to reset priorities. Don't just dump a new goal or new expectation on someone without creating priority and creating an expectation for when that may be finished. People don't rise to the level of your expectations. They rise to the level of accountability for those expectations.

And you as a leader, this is where you come in, holding people accountable to those. Let them know that you are available if they need help and that you will check in on them to make sure that things are moving along.

To hear more go listen to The LeadUp Podcast episode 206.