Happy Employees Boost the Bottom Line
Inspirational leadership is crucial in engaging employees in the business transformation and change needed for growth in the new normal. Proving the point, some major companies aren’t just ‘doing hybrid working.’ They’re freeing people to choose how to work more effectively and enjoy it. These firms report happier staff and improved productivity. Their results show increased sales and profits. And the inspiration comes from the top.
This article looks at what inspirational leadership involves, and the values it calls for. We identify ways to develop personal qualities and skills and put them into action. And at the end we suggest six steps to inspirational leadership, to make your mantra. Leading businesses are embracing this and transforming their trading. And every employer has the potential to do the same thing. Including you!
Why Inspirational Leadership Matters
Inspirational leadership is important for businesses because it
- Prompts individuals to take the initiative and think for themselves.
- Stimulates creativity and emboldens innovation.
- Unlocks latent potential by tapping into motivation and values.
- Encourages individuals to follow their passions and explore their ambitions.
Make ‘Inspirational’ Part of Your Situational Leadership Style
Many words have been written over the years about leadership styles. They are essentially variations of authoritative, democratic and laissez-faire, three kinds of leadership American psychologist Kurt Lewin identified in the 1930s.
In real life, leaders and managers dip in and out of each style, in what’s been termed situational leadership. But when you want to lift your team to a higher level, you need an inspirational management style. This involves superb people skills, a big heart, and a commitment to helping employees develop in and out of the workplace. Hard-boiled managers might dismiss such disruptive talk as HR people going soft! But there’s evidence of leading businesses embracing this approach regarding flexi-working, and reaping the rewards.
Inspire Your Team – Lead From the Heart
Here are six symptoms of an inspirational manager:
- Caring equally about your people and the business.
- Pushing for excellence in all members.
- Leading with your head and your heart.
- Looking to learn from the others, and not just teach them.
- Seeking ways to develop the team’s strength.
- Valuing everyone’s input.
What Happens When You Feel Inspired at Work?
Feeling inspired in our work means we’re more open to our potential. It has a positive physical and mental effect. We feel good about ourselves and what we’re doing. For leaders and managers, inspiring their team means getting them to think about what excites them, and exploring the possibilities. Your people still need to get the job done and hit their targets. But you can help them find ways to do it better, and maybe even make it more fun.
Take These 7 Steps to Inspiration
Here are some tested steps to help your people work better:
- Set clear goals: Clear and specific goals lead to greater output and better performance. Measurable targets and deadlines help avoid misunderstandings.
- Empower people: Openness and directly involving team members in decision making is critical. Provide support and lead the discussion, to help them work through problems. Coach and encourage them to solve the problems themselves, rather than bring them to you. As their ability grows, delegate more tasks to them, but still have oversight.
- Provide support: Change often involves teams needing to learn new skills to meet the challenges. Leaders should give teams opportunities to try out new approaches. Provide the training and development they need, and give them time to get it right.
- Communicate the vision: Setting out your vision is the easy part. Inspiring the team to follow it is the real challenge! Better to make an adjustment than continue a path that won’t deliver the required result. And if you do adjust it, you need to take responsibility.
- Show appreciation and value. Every team member needs to feel respected, appreciated and valued. That’s more important than anything else.
- Know your employees: Take time to listen and learn about each team member. And when you spend time with them, be ‘present’ and make the moment matter.
- Encourage growth and development: Employees’ performance flourishes most when leaders help further their career progression. This comes back to providing support. Don’t just give them more responsibilities: give them the additional skills they need to succeed.
Putting Wellbeing First
Inspiring your team also involves putting wellbeing high on the agenda. People have differing opinions about the importance currently attached to this aspect of working life. But sceptical leaders and managers shouldn’t dismiss mental health and wellbeing as yet another tick box, like sustainability or diversity. Think of those businesses where compassion for employees over hybrid working is paying in productivity, sales and profitability.
We’re Programmed From Birth for This
People don’t just come to work for the money. We instinctively look for inspirational leaders. Humans are conditioned from birth to attach themselves to people who are likely to benefit us and make us feel happy. We need security, approval and fulfilment, or in legendary HR theorist Abraham Maslow’s words, self-actualisation.
On the Road to Success – the Journey Starts With You
If you want to bring out the best in your people, you should also develop these inspirational leadership characteristics in yourself:
- Authenticity: Even people who don’t agree with your message will respect you as a person if they see you’re authentic. They will recognise your message is driven by your values and fits with what you stand for.
- Consistency: Remember the emotional dimension in leadership. In uncertain times, people need to feel secure. Leaders don’t inspire by dithering or hesitating. Sometimes you need to compromise, in which case explain why. And be honest about it. Changing your position for sound reasons shows wisdom, not weakness.
- Knowledge: No one expects a leader to know everything, for you to inspire them. But you do need a degree of knowledge to be credible!
- Passion: If you’re trying to inspire people without being passionate, it makes the job harder. Show you believe in what you’re saying.
Inspirational Leadership and Wellbeing
The pandemic has put the spotlight on employees’ mental health and wellbeing, and flagged up these additional requirements for inspirational leaders:
- Engagement: Inspirational leadership doesn’t just happen when you’re passionate about your personal area of expertise. It’s about empathy and engaging with the people you lead. Taking time to listen to their views and understand their concerns. Connect on a personal level – especially if you’re only in contact briefly. That’s true on the phone, in Zoom calls, email exchanges, chats around the office or wherever.
- Resilience: Being a leader isn’t easy! Some people are going to defy you or dislike you. Who knows, maybe something about you triggers them? We’re all different. You have to meet people wherever they are and work together. Here’s another thing. Plans go wrong and conditions change. You have to make tough decisions, and bring people along with you. As a leader, you have to overcome these challenges and crack on. But afterwards, you need to review, learn and grow, and use the insights to help and support others.
- Self-awareness: Inspirational leaders work on developing their self-awareness. Think about how you come across. Don’t let being the boss blind you to how you appear to others.
Who is the Most Inspirational Leader of all Time?
We can’t expect inspirational leadership 24/7. It’s asking a lot, on top of the day job of running the business! But when you see it in action, it’s affecting. The history books are full of heroes like Florence Nightingale, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Dr Martin Luther King, while recent business heroes include Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Sheryl Sandberg, the current Facebook COO. Work on your inspirational leadership skills, and you might get a shout out in an article like this one day!
Inspirational Leadership in Action
Become a hero in your business with these practical techniques:
- Acknowledge accountability: Inspirational leaders are prepared to hold themselves accountable for mistakes. Even when it’s not directly their fault, since they lead the team, they recognise they’re accountable to an extent. They don’t let pride get in the way, or scapegoat subordinates.
- Admit vulnerability: The strongest people aren’t afraid to show their vulnerable side, they know it shows they’re human. Vulnerability helps leaders develop connections with others, by being willing to request help. Leaders expressing vulnerability strengthens team members to do the same, and work on their weaknesses together.
- Communicate well: Great leaders are good communicators. They brief properly and give feedback well, so work doesn’t have to be redone. Their communication is clear, understood and appropriate.
- Deliver on promises: Influential leaders focus on actions more than words. When they say they’ll do something, they follow it through. Seeing leaders keep their word inspires everyone.
- Don’t stop believing: Your belief in what you’re doing keeps you going forward as a leader. You know where you want to end up, and see everything you do as helping towards it. Influential leaders don’t give up. They persevere.
- Express gratitude: People doing the same job day in day out, or in a minor role, can feel unappreciated. But inspirational leaders don’t let them go unnoticed. They show appreciation, acknowledge even small successes, and take time out to give personal feedback. And people develop stronger bonds to them, and stay longer.
Transform your Business by Treating Your People as Humans
Sometimes managers and leaders’ positions can distract them from recognising employees as people. Inspirational leadership is about getting back to basics:
Grow Your People
Personal achievement isn’t everything for great leaders. It’s more about doing the right thing by the business. Focus on your team members’ professional and personal growth, so they can become great leaders too.
Keep Your Integrity
Your people trust you because they know you’re honest and reliable. You won’t let them down. It’s as simple as that.
Listen Actively
Leaders aren’t just there to give instructions. From company meetings to team Zoom calls, listening is often more important than speaking. Inspirational leaders make people aware they are open to questions, suggestions and feedback. And that makes everyone on the team feel they matter.
Look After Your Personal Wellbeing
Recognise your feelings and emotions, and learn to manage them. Inspirational leaders learn from working through difficulties, and their experiences help others to do so as well. If events in your home life are distracting, be authentic and share it with colleagues. Let others lift the burden until you’re back, focused on work again. Your confidence in their ability will inspire them, and make them feel valued.
Stay Humble
Inspirational leaders are modest enough to value their team members, and welcome people with different skills. And it makes team members appreciate each other, too.
Respect and Include
Good leaders don’t treat some better than others, or show favouritism. You have to give respect to gain it. And respect doesn’t simply mean being tolerant. It means letting people be themselves, and appreciating they have personal lives and may sometimes need support.
Show Foresight
People look to leaders for guidance when things don’t go to plan. Foresight helps leaders stop problems from happening. Or if the problems turn out to be unavoidable, foresight can prevent them from becoming a disaster.
Spread Positivity
When times get tough, provide the team with optimism. See mistakes and failures as chances to learn. Share your positivity with your colleagues, and stay committed when things get difficult.
Stay Focused
No one finds it easy to avoid being distracted at times. But when leaders frequently appear preoccupied, it’s hard for teams to feel motivated.
Take Courage
You’re not afraid at the start of a project, because you’ve got the plan and the resources in place. And once you’re up and running, you know you can overcome your fears and sort out the problem. Communicate that courage to your team.
And Finally: What Works in the Army: Wise Words From the President: and a Mantra for Every Moment
If you want some in-depth reading on inspirational leadership, you can download various learned articles as PDFs. Try this ‘white paper’ by Lucy Finney, MBE – Inspirational Leadership: six must-haves to develop inspirational talent within your organisation. Lucy received the MBE for modernising the British Army’s training, so she knows the drill! Read her words, and parade your authority.
Another recognised expert is legendary writer Stephen R. Covey. He wrote many inspirational books on leadership, probably the greatest being The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey’s first habit is ‘Be Proactive.’ Controlling the things you can control, and your response to the things you can’t, is the essence of inspirational leadership.
Showing inspirational leadership helps employees shift their mind set from apathy to possibility, and transform how they see their potential. But don’t lose sight of the fact that as the boss, it’s still your responsibility to produce results. There’s a zillion leadership quotes online. But when it comes to being inspirational, President Eisenhower’s words get our vote:
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because HE wants to do it.”
Here’s a parting thought. It’s quite straightforward to keep inspirational leadership front of mind, even when you’re under pressure at work. Memorise these steps and reflect on them, and you’ll get back in the room again:
6 Steps to Inspirational Leadership
- Get to know your team.
- Develop your core values.
- Build trust.
- Offer support.
- Take responsibility.
- Praise success.
Make this your mantra, and you won’t go far wrong.
