How can you foster transparency and authenticity in your leadership role?

Your vision and values are the cornerstone of your brand. As a leader, it's crucial to foster trust, commitment, and inclusion within your team. Transparency is key - when your vision and values are clearly defined and your team feels safe to question them, you build trust. This trust helps you identify the team members who are aligned with your vision and values and have what it takes to contribute to their success.

Is fundamental that the communication of Vision generates a certain behaviour among all team members and they can leverage it into practices, such as goals settings, feedbacks sessions and coaching. Also, it is easier for every new comer to understand that what is mentioned reflects on the daily routine and impacts customers.

Sharing information and feedback in real time is key to avoiding unwanted work or results. It's important to be honest, share suggestions for improvement, and deliver constructive feedback compassionately and respectfully. Letting someone know how their actions are off course from the vision or values can be challenging, but it's a learning experience for everyone involved. And remember, being open to feedback should go both ways for a leader.

Active listening is also a critical element of being an authentic leader. Asking about topics or themes that your team may know that you don't can provide additional insight & perspective. As leaders, we're expected to know the answers and provide direction to our team, but let's face it, we only capture some of the data & opinions (usually that align with our own). Being open to others' thoughts & ideas is a great way to communicate to our team that we are vulnerable humans who are still learning & growing also.

If a leader shares something about themselves (their history/family/a fear they have etc…) which makes you feel like you can relate to them it’s a very powerful way to build engagement. I honestly think the best thing a new leader can do in their first internal Townhall is to tell people a story about them selves which is real and human. Not a boast/humble brag, but something that makes people feel like you’re a real person, just like them.

We all experience Authority Bias. When faced with someone senior we think they know more than we do, and we add extra weight to their opinions and perspectives as a result. A leader that recognise this will offer their opinion only after everyone else in the room has voiced theirs. This helps ideas to flow from people without the anchoring effect of the leader giving their input first.

To engage your team members into decision making is a growth process. They will need time to learn how to decide and also absorb the information and context to feel safe while they practice. My suggestion is to never throw any issue in an emergency and expect a decision in two seconds, specially if the team mate is not prepared for it.

Be accountable, say what you plan to do and execute what you said. You're pulling the team not pushing them. If they fail, it also means that as a leader we failed too and there is no need to sugarcoat it or finding excuses. Be accessible, don't be the know it all boss that is never wrong. Bc guess what?People won't trust you, won't go to you. If you don't know what's going on behind close door, you're missing the most important. If you're true to your values, your beliefs and act accordingly, they'll follow the lead naturally and they will be no stone left unturns. This will transpire not only to your team but to your whole organization and the way people interacts with you and your teams. Once you achieve that, good thing will happen.

By simply walking the talk as everything starts with the congruency of doing what we say. Also, transparency and authenticity are values that come with the talent equation. So when promoting or recruiting, consider those attributes in the candidate pool. Last but not least, if you really want to foster those behaviours, one needs to recognise and reward them whenever they occur. That will constitute an automatic invitation to other to replicate them.