Leaders must know their people

Leaders must know their people.

It is easy to set goals, but it is far more difficult to get people to?really?want to reach them. In many ways, leadership is ultimately about creating meaning. But the challenge here is every person is different, both in terms of what creates meaning for them and how things are perceived.

Recent leadership research states how important it is to take into account individual differences. Only by having a good relationship, can we understand what people need to optimally perform. From a business perspective, for employees to perform, they must thrive at work, be motivated, engaged and have confidence in their leader. Understanding effective leadership should be the starting point for effective leadership development.

Leaders must know themselves.

It is the people's experience of a leader that ultimately decides whether they succeed in making goals, roles and tasks meaningful. This is why reflecting on how one is perceived by their people and surroundings is crucial. Conscious reflection on one's behaviour will increase a leader's ability to consider other and more effective ways of reacting and acting when building relationships. All effective leadership development should include a training plan based on self-reflection.

For this reflection training to be most beneficial, it should not only include their people but also their own leaders, owners and customers. Only by reflecting on feedback from a complete environment, we build a realistic self-image as a leader. A leader's self-insight is then often also described as a degree of correspondence between how one wants to appear as a leader and how one is experienced by others.

With all this in mind, the starting point for all leadership development programmes should be to understand the importance of building relationships, regular feedback and self-reflection, and try to systematically incorporate these into everyday life. If we can manage to transfer this value and can meet strategic and operational challenges, we have good conditions for effective leadership development.

Good luck!