Uplifting your leadership in 2023

One of the critical components of our uplifting service programme is uplifting leadership. Without strong leadership (character), strong conduct to sustain culture and organisational performance will be absent. Therefore, uplifting leadership, a mindset of developing leadership capacity at all levels, is necessary for creating a performance-oriented team and organisation.

At Mentoras Limited, we view personal leadership as an essential component and the basis for delivering on promises to stakeholders. All organisations should be leadership oriented. Everyone is either a leader or on their way to becoming a leader.

As an organisational leadership coach, I recently dismantled a group of four staff referred to as a management team and replaced it with fifteen staff tagged as the leadership team. I intended to develop the fifteen team members at the same pace, irrespective of their grades and positions in the group.

My experience has seen people focusing more on titles or attributes for leadership rather than on the actual execution of the job. It is not the hand or the tool that makes a carpenter a good one but the actual execution of the work. It is not the attribute of the farmer or the farming tool that produces the harvest but the tilling of the land and the planting of the seed.

For organisations to achieve their corporate objectives in 2023 and beyond, the focus must be on uplifting the leadership view, capacity, and influence of all employees at all levels. Everyone in your organisation must think and act like a leader.

Once again, they are either a leader or on their way to becoming a leader. A driver is the leader of the driving process, and a cleaner is the leader of the cleaning process. As a leader, infusing leadership mentality in people at all levels will uplift their service and productivity, impacting all other key performance variables and indicators.

For organisations to achieve their corporate objectives in 2023 and beyond, the focus must be on uplifting the leadership view, capacity, and influence of all employees at all levels

How can a leader infuse a leadership mindset at all levels?

The starting point is a radical departure from the norm. It takes boldness to do things differently and achieve a different outcome. It is like telling a teacher to teach less, for the student to learn more.

In every team, there are team members whom someone must lead. The person leading and the led cannot ever outgrow four human needs. We all need a sense of belonging, without which we would feel insecure. There are needs for worth, purpose and competence.

Suppose you do not attend to these needs. In that case, your team members will feel inferior, illegitimate, and inadequate within the objectives you have set to achieve. Imagine you have increased the targeted turnover by fifty per cent. Yet, your staff are not motivated or trained to take ownership of the new aspiration.

The team will feel inadequate for a lack of motivation. They will not be legitimately connected to your unique ambitions and feel inferior to your competition ahead of your organisation.

I wrote earlier that everyone should be engaged and developed to lead their various processes. I will write about how the uplifting process will transform your team’s operational landscape and service delivery in the next edition.

One key element of implementing uplifting leadership for the superlative performance of your team is the ability to identify personal insecurity in your group. If you have insecure people and leaders, they will ultimately cause your organisation to plateau every time. Personal insecurity will create an atmosphere for sycophancy and mediocrity.

As mentioned earlier, you need a strong character to build a strong team. Insecure leaders will not provide security for others. They will limit the best people in your team and spend more time keeping their jobs rather than advancing your organisation.

One crucial attribute I have discovered of all insecure leaders is what I termed the 20-year syndrome. Insecure leaders rely too much on their raw experience without fine-tuning it with the current realities, thus frustrating the upcoming brilliant leaders around them.

For any organisation to do better than its previous years and competition, it is necessary to renew internal strength and capacity through an uplifting leadership and service programme. It is a renewed inner strength among the team that provides the only hope of finishing well and overcoming the inevitable environmental adversities due to changes in the business and regulatory landscape.

Read also: Nigeria’s failure of leadership: Any hope for the better?

In my article on uplifting service, I encourage my readers not to send a duck to eagle school. You will send your team to the wrong school in 2023, except you create a platform for renewed enthusiasm and motivation to challenge and surpass the existing norms. That way, you will give potency to your business and competitive strategies while developing teams that will create a sustainable performance for the future.

Like the Singaporean Prime Minister, who asks his country’s teachers to teach less for students to learn more, I would charge you to build a leadership-focused and personal development-oriented team to execute your business strategy in 2023. Your motive as an organisation’s leader must be direct, with a decisive message and a deliberate mission to build a leadership team with profound principles and discerning minds to take on the challenges of 2023.

The year 2023 will answer your strategy through and with your people, without which you will make the year another wilderness experience rather than a quantum leap in people and business growth. At Mentoras, we have a framework to unlock the potential in your people, process, product, and client engagement to give you the leading edge required to delight all your stakeholders.

Among all your performance input, your people guarantee the successful output and achievement of your corporate goals in 2023. An uplifting leadership programme is a focus on the capacity of the goose that will produce the golden egg for your organisation.