Being an Authentic Leader in 2024

We’re already two months into 2024, would now be a good time to reflect on those leadership skills you want to develop this year?

No leader can sail their ship alone. You need to be able to truly rely on the rest of your team; to trust that they are not only happy in their roles and working to the best of their abilities, but also that they share a genuine bond with you, which enables them to feel inherently connected with your organisational goals.

Likewise, a disjointed team can lead to issues such as results that lack cohesion, a negative working environment and ultimately, reduced performance.

As a leader, it is essential for you to create and maintain genuine connections with your team – but this can sometimes be a stumbling block. Creating meaningful connections does not always come with ease – there can be difficulties along the way. What if there is a lack of common ground, or a clash of personalities with those you’re trying to bond with? What if the size of your team, or remote working arrangements are hindering your ability to form a sincere attachment?

In this blog I’m going to share with you some helpful ways to overcome these issues, to enable you to form genuine working relationships with your team.

Practice Active Listening

It’s an unfortunate reality that in many workplaces there is a distinct lack of ‘active listening’, so what does this mean?

Have you ever been on a remote call with several members of your team and someone asks a question, only for this question to be answered by someone in a way that doesn’t actually answer the original query? Have you ever noticed that sometimes people are only waiting for others to finish speaking so they can then make their own point, whether it’s actually helpful or relevant to the discussion? This is the definition of passive listening, people are listening, but only with the purpose of being able to respond in a way that is important to them.

In every team, individual members of course have their own priorities and concerns, and when whole team meetings occur, it’s understandable that people are concerned about communicating what’s important to them. But when everyone is doing this and no-one is actively listening to each other, there will be a slim chance of any productive outcomes from these communications.

As a leader, you will have different priorities to your team; you will be working on the bigger picture behind the scenes, there may even be projects you are working on that your team aren’t aware of. Despite these bigger issues, it is essential that when talking to any member of your team, be that in a large meeting or in a one-to-one, you are actively listening to them.

Active listening will enable you to respond to what your team actually needs, not what you assume they are looking for. Being a leader who actively listens will enable you to practice effective conflict resolution, give more meaningful help and advice, but most of all will enable your team to see that you are genuine and that you care about helping them in the ways they need, to perform their role to the best of their ability.

Avoid a ‘One Size Fits All’ Leadership Style

It is important that your team trust you are leading with fairness, for them to open themselves up to forming a genuine connection with you. So what does leading with fairness look like?

Some leaders will fail at creating genuineness by treating all team members the same, if this sounds like a paradox, it isn’t! A great leader will have the emotional intelligence to know that each member of their team needs to be treated according to the unique relationship they have with them.

Some of your team will prefer lengthy conversations, others will be happy with brief communications. Some will appreciate more specific help and guidance, other will only ask for help when it is absolutely needed. Mixing up these signals and treating all team members with a blanket approach to your leadership is only going to frustrate any given portion of your team.

Do all of your team really need a one-to-one check-in each week? Or would some prefer less frequent meetings? If one of your team really excelled on a certain project, lean in to giving them similar tasks, don’t feel bound to delegating tasks ‘evenly’ if this doesn’t work for certain colleagues.

Getting to know your team on a level like this will only happen if you dedicate a certain amount of your time to thinking about your team as individuals, and learning what works best with their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Honing your people skills in this way is critical if you want to create genuine relationships, as opposed to surface level connections.

Face-to-face Connections

Remote working is still the preference in many organisations, and there are positives for both organisations and individual team members to this way of working. However, it’s still important to try and spend some in-person time working with your team, in order to maintain interpersonal relationships. It can be all too easy to stay working from home in the age of WFH, but time spent in the office should not be forgotten about when it comes to maintaining connections with your team.

Working from home might work better for you, but you may not realise that subconsciously this could be sending the message to your team that you are ‘distant’ from them, and this can enhance feelings of? isolation, perpetuate the feeling that your team are working in silos, or simply that they don’t matter enough to you to make the trip into the office. It’s not always possible, but carving out time to spend a few days physically together as a team when you can, will really help.

If your team are Hybrid working, encourage your team to come into the office on certain days to maximise the time you see them in-person. What can you do if you have a large, dispersed team that you are aiming to build connections with? Even an office day once a month for those who are not able to come in more regularly will enhance your working relationships, as social creatures, humans are hard wired to seek out connection – make it easy for your team by being physically available for them, where realistically possible.

Finally

I hope these points have highlighted some of the essential leadership skills I know can really enhance genuine connections with your team.

Being a leader is not always easy when you are juggling priorities and worrying about if you are helping your team to perform the best they can.

Authenticity is so important in today’s world of work. Great leaders should be emotionally available for their team, supportive without judgement and genuinely empathetic. If you spend some time developing these key people skills you will experience the benefits of having a team who feel well supported as key members of your organisation.

Until next time,

Julia Carter

About Julia Carter

Julia Carter is the MD of Zestfor?Ltd and specialises in working with leaders and managers of virtual and hybrid teams to improve team effectiveness.

At Zestfor, we help leaders strengthen their teams to improve performance. To find out how we can help, contact me here.