LEADERSHIP
Healthy Leadership Produces Healthy Followers
By Dr. Kellen Kiambati
A leader’ s reliability starts with his or her personal success and ends with helping his or her followers achieve personal success. They are expected to conduct themselves like tour guides who have been through the territory terrain earlier and therefore can guide their followers appropriately. They remain connected with their followers so as to reach down and pull them up when there is need to do so.
Poor leaders set themselves above followers largely because of insecurity, pettiness or jealousy. All these issues have made leading organizations effectively a real challenge to many.
Leaders must constantly seek to see they are going somewhere and are able to persuade followers to go with them. Failure to persuade people to go with them, is simply being in a position and not leading. Most important a healthy trust is established when the team knows and is convinced that their leader is fully aware of where he is taking them. To achieve loyalty, leaders should work on building and continuously strengthening trust. Loyalty is earned in form of a reward from followers and not merely sitting down to yearn for it.
Leaders do not progress without making changes. Followers must be willing to change so as to progress towards the predetermined objectives. There is need to have the courage and skills to seize the moment and make necessary changes. What this means is that leaders should cultivate in their followers a willingness to follow them to the unknown based on the promise of great things and banking on their past experience with them. A conducive environment to enable followers make informed decisions to change is very critical and this is possible through inspiring confidence in themselves as opposed to confidence in leaders.
When changes are taking place, managing expectations is also important therefore there is need to bring on board people who are committed to being the very best while eliminating the uncommitted. Those committed to being their very best are empowered and strengthened through delegation and the leader’ s positive presence to help facilitate the process.
“ A leader’ s reliability starts with his or her personal success and ends with helping his or her followers achieve personal success. They are expected to conduct themselves like tour guides who have been through the territory terrain earlier and therefore can guide their followers appropriately.”
Growth and development of followers is the modern day highest calling of any leader. Recruiting good people into the organization is excellent, however, if those people are not intentionally developed, it is a waste of time. Before long, competitors will recruit them and make good use of them. Good leaders enlarge followers, help them in their lives, support them to acquire new relevant skills and not just focusing on making them better transactional workers.
The indices for checking a leader’ s level of developing people is dependent on their ability to strengthen their commitment, integrity, influence and goal setting standard. Leaders should believe in their people so that in turn they believe in themselves.
The bottom line in leadership is results achieved. They, as leaders and their followers producing compelling results. Some leaders are achievement oriented, self-motivated and are used to delivering work with excellence and when the people they led do not behave and perform as they do, they become very frustrated. At this point, they should introspect and find out what is not working and why it is not working so as to come up with a formula that will help them as leaders as well as their followers.
In conclusion, to measure how a leader is doing, look at their followers. They should compare what their followers say and believe to what they are observing. If there is deviation, clearly it is time for coaching so that everybody succeeds. ■
Kellen Kiambati holds an MBA in Strategic Management from the Kenya Methodist University and a PhD in Business Administration. She is a member of the IHRM Kenya. She can be reached via: Kellenkiambati @ gmail. com.
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MAL 46 / 22 ISSUE