How To Be A Great Leader for Beginners
I've been a leader in many roles throughout my career and you can verify that by reading my recommendations on LinkedIn.
I put together this free guide to share a lot of what I have learned and what scientific research shows us.
This guide breaks down what you need to focus on to be a great leader that companies want to hire and employees want to work for.
You will also be able to gather more recommendations further validating your true value as a leader in any given position.
If you want updates, simply subscribe to my newsletter.
Part 1: 5 things you need to master as a leader
Part 2: The importance of being humble
Part 3: What doesn’t work and why?
I hope you find this helpful.
Don't overcomplicate leading people
Most people suffer from imposter syndrome and create behaviors to cover up the fact that they do not know what to do.
That inflates the ego and creates vulnerable narcissists.
These are a few ways to tell:
They think they are above employees in the social hierarchy
They can't take criticism or feedback
They can't connect and empathize with employees
They don't support employees.
In reality, leadership is much simpler than people think.
Here's how step by step:
1: Explain the tasks needed to get done and why
Task leadership is one of the successful leadership styles that increase workplace safety.
Task leadership is describing to the employee what tasks need to get done and why.
This leadership style is successful because it's a contract of shared understanding of what is required of the employee to fulfill their obligation.
It reduces:
Anxiety
Worrying
Arguments
But most of all it reduces the employee's blood pressure.
Your obligation as the leader
As the leader you need to understand what needs to be done and be able to explain it short to the employee.
You also need to have the ability to be a good listener and understand human behavior. Because people say they understand when they don't. No one will tell the manager that they don't know what they are explaining. Because it might impact their career.
You do need to:
listening well
have an IQ between 107-125
convey the tasks in a simple and positive manner
Leaders listen
You need to be a great listener as a leader.
A lot can be solved simply by showing you understand the employee's perspective.
Listening is doing continuous research on your staff on how they feel and what their worries are.
Great listeners do not need surveys to understand what is wrong.
Speech is located in the left frontal lobe which is manipulative and dogmatic.
The function of understanding how things stick together implicitly is in your right hemisphere. Both hemispheres are never active unless you are mentally ill.
If you want to understand:
Relax
Listen
You don't gain access to your right hemisphere unless you are relaxed.
Have an IQ between 107-125
I know this excludes many from ever having the ability to be a great leader or even performing as a manager.
But hey. Not all people are suited to be fighter pilots or surgeons for good reason.
IQ or g is the ability to conceptually use your working memory to understand things.
If you are too low. People notice because you do not understand and ask too many questions all the time.
People notice that and lose confidence in you as a leader.
Then you truly will have good reason to feel like an imposter.
Honesty and humility
Toxic managers lie and are arrogant also known as dark tetrad personalities.
They are:
Psychopaths
Narcissists
Machiavellians
Sadists
These people do not listen due to limitations in the right hemisphere.
They also treat their employees as products they lie to and manipulate.
About 20% of the global population is dark tetrad in one way or the other since it's a spectrum.
In the heavy group, more than average are men.
In the light-dark tetrad group. More than average are women.
Both men and women are heavy and light-dark tetrad personalities.
Great leaders are honest and humble.
Ability to describe the task simply enough
You need to know the task well enough to describe what needs to get done.
If you lack that higher level of communicative skill you can train to get better before becoming a manager.
You should focus on learning the skill before becoming a manager or trying to be a leader.
2: Build and strengthen your relationships
The managers that fail at building relationships will never be leaders.
Managers and wannabe leaders often want to see themselves as higher up than employees and therefore distance themselves.
That does not mean you can't build genuine and authentic relationships with your staff.
Focus on listening and trying to understand their point of view.
This will force you to use your right hemisphere where the point of view (POV) exists, as well as true empathy, IQ, and Gestalt.
Knowing how your employees feel and experience the workplace or what goes on outside of work will help you understand the temperature of the team and the level of productivity.
If you want to learn more about why and how you should listen then you can read this article Communication 101.
3: Leadership styles that do not work
Three other types of leadership styles do not work for good reason are the following.
Change management
Change management is the worst leadership style you can ever adopt mainly due to human neuropsychological reasons.
All humans have created a mental model of the world in their left conscious hemisphere. It was your right reasoning hemisphere together with gestalt that made sense of how the world functions implicitly.
Even if your mental model is wrong, which it is by default.
It does not require glucose from your blood to work.
But your reasoning right heimspere does require glucose to function and a lot of it.
When you don't eat carbs your liver produces glucose. So that you're left reasoning hemisphere together with your left rational hemisphere creates common sense.
When you constantly change the foundation for employees.
Your staff will be in constant chaos and consume way too much unnecessary glucose that they can use to perform their tasks more efficiently.
They also use glucose to keep up with your change management style instead of focusing on increasing cadence in production or identifying critical failures.
People hate change by default and there is no proof that people can change.
Don't expect them to change.
Passive leadership
As the style explains.
Leaders lead people and can never be passive.
Leadership is an active method.
A passive leadership style is most likely adopted by parasitic individuals.
Parasitic in nature are psychopaths and sociopaths.
Psychopaths are born with brain defects.
Sociopaths are created by the parents through abuse or no parenting.
Usually, no father taught them delayed gratification.
In sociopaths, the brain is rewired to be aggressive and lack impulse control.
None of these pathologies can be fixed as we know of other than looking them up.
Destructive leadership
These are more or less Dark Tetrad personalities.
They are:
Psychopaths
Narcissists
Machiavellians
Sadists
Psychopaths don't get angry and are extremely manipulative.
You know if you are one.
Narcissists don't take criticism or feedback because they delete all information from the right subconscious hemisphere through the connecting corpus callosum at the base of the brain.
Even if their right hemisphere has made the connections. Their left hemisphere refuses to incorporate the new information and instead becomes aggressive.
Machiavlleians seek power over others above all else.
Sadism is thriving on others' pain.
Sadism is 57% correlated with narcissism only 37% with psychopathy and 32% with machiavellian.
About 20% of the global population is dark tetrad in one way or the other since it's a spectrum.
In the heavy group, more than average are men.
In the light-dark tetrad group. More than average are women.
Both men and women are heavy and light-dark tetrad personalities.
Your employees
There's a high probability that you will have employees with Dark Tetrad traits.
Get rid of them as quickly as possible without making a fuss.
Narcissists are the worst and most common in the workplace.
They:
Do not share information.
Do not educate others.
Play victim or take over all meetings.
High social status is their giveaway.
Narcissists work in the shadows until they are promoted and gain power.
Once in power, they eliminate all opposition.
Focus on:
Humility
Honesty
Listening
Communicating well
Empathy
Understanding
Strengthening relationships