What is Leadership?

Countless experts and researchers have spent years formulating theories on leadership. These theories aim to explain what effective leadership is. Leadership theories refer to explanations of how and why certain people become leaders. These theories focus on the characteristics and behaviours that people can adopt to improve their leadership skills. They can be used to understand what characteristics a person needs to become a good leader. This section will discuss some of the basic universalist leadership theories.

Universalist Theories

Universalist leadership theories focus on the key characteristics held by effective leaders. They argue that if a leader has these characteristics, they can successfully lead a team through any circumstance. These theories are wildly accepted as they were some of the first theories developed in trying to understand leadership.

The Great Man/Woman Theory

This theory proposes that certain people make better and more natural leaders than others. According to this theory, successful leaders such as presidents, conquerors from history, and decorated politicians are great men or women who can replicate that success in different circumstances. It proposes that leadership is intrinsic rather than something that is developed over time.

Trait Theory

The trait theory of leadership was created as a result of several studies on the specific traits of leaders. Those studies have found that there are sets of traits that belong to an effective leader. Those types of traits are:

 

Contingency Theory

This leadership theory focuses on environmental factors that determine what leadership style would best suit the situation. According to this theory, no leadership style is the best for every situation.

Contingency theory suggests that leaders focus on variables related to the environment to determine the best leadership style suited for the situation. Leaders must:

• Identify and examine the needs of their team members.
• Assess the context of their working situation and environment.
• Adjust their behaviour based on their findings.

Situational Theory

Similar to the contingency theory, the situational theory of leadership suggests that no leadership style is the best for every situation. A situational leader can identify what leadership style and strategies are necessary for the task at hand. According to this theory, a leader must be able to adjust their leadership style according to:

• The objectives of the task
• The nature of the group
• The activities necessary for completing the task.
• The resources needed for the task.

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As a leader, you are going to need to undertake planning. Planning occurs whenever something needs to be put into action. Planning processes also mean putting effective means in place to measure overall performance, trying to find ways in which you can be sure that your leadership on a given task is actually working, and you are achieving what needs to be achieved. The following sections will discuss how you can develop performance plans for individuals in your work team and your work team as a whole. These plans must target completing your organisation’s business objectives.

The Individual Performance Plan

Individual Performance Plan Components

An Individual Performance Plan (IPP) is a tool that you use to establish and communicate the performance expectations of each member of your work team. What an IPP is like varies depending on how it was developed. Usually, it includes the following information:

• worker profile – the worker’s name and position in the organisation
• career goals – what the worker intends to achieve for the organisation.
• development objectives – what the worker plans to do to improve their performance.
• training and development opportunities – the area that the worker needs to improve on
• signatures – evidence of approval and acknowledgement from relevant persons

Developing an Individual Performance Plan

Developing an IPP involves clear and open communication between you and the member of your work team that it is for. It also requires a good understanding of your organisation’s objectives. There are five phases:

RE-PLANNING

Both you and your work team member must prepare for a meeting to discuss their performance. During this stage, you should review your key performance indicators, which will be discussed later in the unit, and look over records of previous evaluations that the worker has undergone.

WORKER/SUPERVISOR MEETING

Examine your team member's strengths, weaknesses, objectives, and organisational requirements. During this phase, you must ensure that the discussion is open and that both you and the worker have an equal opportunity to speak. Be sure to assign someone to create meeting minutes so that you can later review what was discussed. This phase is where you ask the worker what they need to better meet their organisational requirements. The discussion should centre around identifying the worker’s areas for improvement in their performance and what you can do to improve it. This meeting will establish the performance plan’s goals or objectives.

PREPARING THE IPP

This is the phase wherein you develop the individual performance plan. The IPP must establish what they need to improve their performance and how to meet those needs. Ensure that this phase is collaborative between you and the worker that the performance plan is for.

Complete all the components, as discussed earlier. The development objectives that the performance plan indicates should be aligned with the organisation’s business objectives. Your organisation should have a template for an IPP, so be sure to follow it. The IPP should contain the objectives, the action steps necessary to complete them, and the dates you expect those action steps to be completed. Below is an example of a template for an IPP.

IMPLEMENTING THE IPP

The member of your work team will undergo the activities in the IPP, with your supervision. These activities will be the worker experiencing the training opportunities that you have decided on in the IPP. The worker must log when they intend to complete the business objectives and when they actually complete them.

As the activities occur, the worker’s responsibility is to complete the action steps that you have laid out in the IPP to the best of their abilities. You must guide them towards maximising their development opportunities so they can get the most out of it and achieve as much growth as possible. Ultimately, it is their job to tend to their professional growth while receiving the necessary resources and support from you and the organisation.

EVALUATING THE OUTCOMES

You must evaluate the effectiveness of the IPP and determine if your co-worker has grown. The worker must inform you whether the training and development experiences have helped them better perform their tasks. You can do this by having them submit an evaluation form to describe their experience and explain how the training has helped them. Allow the worker to make suggestions or recommendations for improvement to make the training more effective.

As their manager, you must continue observing the worker as they resume their tasks after training and determine if their performance has improved. Did they accomplish all the development objectives that the IPP aimed to complete? Has their productivity increased since undergoing training? Has the quality of their work improved?

If the IPP was a success, you should see an overall improvement in your worker’s performance. Ultimately, the goal is to attain professional growth and use that growth to contribute to the organisation’s business objectives.

The Team Performance Plan

Team Performance Plan Components

Like an IPP, a Team Performance Plan (TPP) determines and communicates a team's performance expectations. It identifies the desired performance levels of a team and how the team can achieve them. A TPP usually contains the following components:

• team development objectives
• performance measures
• actions to take to achieve business objectives.
• a time frame that dictates how long it will take to execute the TPP.

Developing a Team Performance Plan

To develop a performance plan for your work team, you must ensure that it aligns with your organisation’s overall objectives. The process of developing a TPP is as follows:

IDENTIFY TEAM PERFORMANCE NEEDS

Examine your work team's strengths and weaknesses to identify its areas for improvement. Remember that you are assessing a team, so you must identify these in every member. The performance needs are what the team must achieve or be provided with to meet the organisation’s standards and business objectives.

IDENTIFY DESIRED TEAM PERFORMANCE

The team’s performance can be one of the following levels:

Beginner

• This is the level wherein the team's performance is equivalent to that of someone who is new to the line of work.
• It is the minimal level of performance and is just enough for the performance to be satisfactory.

Intermediate

• This is the level wherein the team's performance is at the normal and usual quality for a professional in the organisation.

Expert

• This is the level wherein the team's performance surpasses the organisation's expectations.

Ideally, the team would be functioning at an expert level of performance. The desired performance level may not be the expert level, depending on the circumstance. It is possible that the team is currently working at a beginner level, and aiming for an intermediate performance level would be more realistic.

IDENTIFY METHODS TO MONITOR PERFORMANCE

The next step is to identify and establish how you will monitor and evaluate the performance of your work team. Examples of some methods are surveys, self-evaluation, and observation by team leaders. You must align your monitoring methods with your organisation’s key performance indicators (KPIs) to accurately measure and evaluate the performance of your work team.

Your organisation should have methods in place for monitoring the performance of your work team, so be sure to identify those methods and apply them. It is always the best practice to go by organisational policies and procedures.

CREATE THE TPP

This phase is when you will create a team performance plan. Like the IPP, this should be a collaborative effort between you and the work team. That means that you and everyone in the team should agree upon all the decisions made for the TPP. The TPP should contain all the components mentioned earlier. The TPP should explicitly communicate the time frame in which the team should be able to achieve their goals. Below is an example of a template for a TPP to help you better understand how to create one with your work team.

IMPLEMENT THE TPP

Guide your work team through implementing the TPP that you developed together. As the team goes through the action steps in the TPP, you must be present and involved in their experience. As their manager and leader, it is your responsibility to guide your work team through the development activities.

Developing a TPP may make your team feel more aware of what they lack in terms of performance and discourage them. Be sure to remind your team that participating in activities is for their benefit and will help them grow as professionals in their careers. Encourage your team to make the most of the action steps assigned and achieve the most growth. Allow them the opportunity to ask you questions about the TPP activities and be direct when addressing those questions.

Remember to be supportive but avoid spoon-feeding your work team. The activities in the TPP are meant to challenge them and help them address their weaknesses. Their performance cannot improve unless they work for it.

EVALUATE THE OUTCOMES

Evaluate the effectiveness of the TPP by examining if the team was able to achieve its goals and improve its performance level. Like in evaluating the outcomes of an IPP, you can set up a meeting with the work team to discuss the effectiveness of the TPP.

Allow the work team to share their insights and experiences from undergoing the development activities in the TPP. Ask them if the action steps have helped them do their work more efficiently. Ask them for suggestions or recommendations on what can be done to further help them improve their performance level as a team.

Over time, you must continue observing and monitoring the performance of your work team. A successful TPP will lead to an increase in the productivity and performance level of a work team. If the TPP has truly helped your work team, they should be able to better contribute to achieving your organisation’s business objectives.

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Key performance indicators (KPIs) are what you use to measure a worker’s performance level. An organisation’s business objectives usually determine KPIs. Your responsibility is to establish KPIs and communicate them to your work team. The KPIs will help you evaluate your work team's performance; they will also guide your work team towards achieving the performance level that the organisation requires. The following sections will discuss how you can establish KPIs and use them to measure your work team’s success.

Establishing KPIs

The first thing to do is to identify the purpose of the position. This is generally easy to accomplish because it is stated separately or included in the position description introduction. An excellent check to use in determining if the KPIs make sense is whether they reflect the purpose of the position itself.

Identifying the Purpose of the Position

The purpose is to provide managers with objectively based information for making decisions. You need to identify the major duties of the position using the position description. Below is an example of a position that has four key tasks. Within the descriptions of each of the duties, keywords can be found that tell what the duties involve.

• studies the structure and/or functions of organisations
• provides program cost analysis, annual and multi-year fiscal planning.
• provides program support, assessment, and consultation services.
• conducts management surveys and research projects.

Note that the first and last duties involve conducting studies, surveys, and other projects that require similar skills. Therefore, they can be combined into a single critical element.

Identifying Critical Elements

During this step, you are again trying to place the position within the context of the organisation. Two questions come to mind:

• What is the organisation attempting to achieve?
• What contribution can this position be expected to make?

This step demands more creativity than simply reviewing a position or job description for keywords. Other questions to ask might include:

• Does the organisation have any special projects to accomplish this year?
• Are there any initiatives that my department/division could work on or support?
• Are there some long-standing problems that could be addressed?

This is, by far, the most difficult step. This step clearly states what you expect the worker to do and how well they are expected to do the work assigned. This takes time and thought.

Note the similarity between the performance standards for critical elements one and two. This often happens when a position has consistency in the duties assigned and skills employed. Could they be combined? Yes, but in this case, it would not be recommendable to do that because there will probably be a great deal of difference between the approaches used in most management studies and the analytical approach needed to assess and recommend a forecasting model.

Reviewing the KPIs

The next step is making sure the KPIs are measurable and understood by everyone in the organisation.

Review what is expected and clarify why accomplishing the standards is important to the organisation's overall success. Remember that this entire process aims to get everyone in your organisation to perform at the highest level possible. Communicating the KPIs to your work team is an important component in this process. Establishing clearly written and mutually agreed upon key performance indicators is not easy, but it is well worth the investment of time.

Getting the Best Performance

In order to lead and get the best possible performance from your team, you need to look for ways to actually measure the level of performance of your staff and determine exactly where and when this is to be done. Without this knowledge, you have no idea if what you are doing is actually working or not.

Such measurement may be undertaken at a range of times, including:

• professional development reviews
• project appraisals
• compensation reviews
• and many more opportunities that are informal

Determining how to monitor performance is an important step in developing performance plans. You may have worked through the previous steps of the process, developed what you thought were great KPIs, and then found that monitoring performance on an element is impossible, too costly, or too time-consuming. If this happens, think through other specific measures that indicate performance that are as specific as possible.

THE PROCESS INVOLVES YOU IN ATTEMPTING TO:

• Establish the type of information that you need to obtain and then look at where you can get it from
• Establish the times for collecting the information that you need and then who will gather it.
• Look at reports that are already available to determine if they will be useful.
• Give feedback to appropriate staff.

KEY POINTS

The performance you give as a leader and the behaviours you exhibit are crucial to how your staff will perceive you.

The three qualities for positive performance management are integrity, industriousness, and the ability to get along with people.

An Individual Performance Plan is used to communicate the performance expectations of each member of a work team. A Team Performance Plan communicates the performance expectations of a work team as a whole.

Ensure that your performance meets the organisation’s requirements.

Performance plans allow you to make sure that your organisation reaches its required goals. Part of this performance plan must be a set of key performance indicators which allow you to measure progress towards goals.

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We have already been introduced to many of the concepts needed for you to demonstrate good leadership in the workplace, including:

• Effective teamwork
• Mentoring, coaching and growing your team.

We will now look at some more ideas important to effective workplace leadership:

Track Progress

Team Performance

You have done the groundwork with your team by now. You have a team, and individual goals that have been communicated well to your team and everyone is clear on what needs to be done. You now need to measure and monitor how your team members are tracking with their plans. It is essential to regularly review goals, objectives and KPIs for individual people and the team as a whole.

There are several ways that you can track progress with your team. Some of the ways you can track team progress are through:

• Weekly team meetings where team members update you on their progress.
• Regular one-on-one sessions with team members individually
• KPI reviews to discuss whether the team is on track to meet their KPIs and, if not, what can be done to adjust the course.
• Project management software that the team member uses to track progress.

Providing Feedback

Feedback is an essential tool in any workplace, and it is important to differentiate feedback from performance reviews. Feedback should be given (and received) on an on-going basis so that team members know how they are performing and understand what is expected of them. It is also an important aspect of growing your team’s potential and development.

Constructive feedback focuses on behaviour and performance, not on people or their personalities, and is given in a friendly tone that shows respect. By providing constructive feedback in this manner, team members are more likely to recognise their mistakes and avoid them in the future rather than dwell on what they may perceive as personal insults. Remember to provide positive feedback as well as constructive feedback. People do not always know when they are performing well, and positive reinforcement can help them to continue with their good efforts.

Some suggestions to provide effective feedback to your team members include:

• Be problem-focused and specific — Remember to tell your team member why something needs to change rather than just asking them to improve.
• Talk about the situation, not the individual — Use objective facts, so the employee does not feel like they are being insulted or put down personally.
• Give praise where it is due — Make sure your team members know when they are doing a great job when they are. If you have constructive feedback for one aspect of their career, but positive feedback for another, begin with the positive feedback.
• Be direct but informal — Speak in person so no miscommunication can occur over email or other technological options. A short informal meeting is a good idea and get to the point quickly.
• Be sincere — Make sure your tone or body language and manner match.
• Be timely — Positive feedback should be given while the work is still fresh in the employee’s mind, so act quickly. It can be helpful to give constructive feedback quickly too unless you are feeling angry or upset by the employee’s actions or performance. In this case, it may be best to wait until you have calmed down so you can keep the feedback as objective as possible.
• Listen — Feedback is a two-way conversation, so make sure your team members have a chance to respond to constructive feedback. This may present an opportunity to become a part of the solution.

Watch this YouTube video explaining why workplace feedback is so important.

Watch

Constructive Feedback for Managers: Giving Feedback Effectively

This YouTube video explains further why feedback is so important in the workplace:

Duration: 2.19

Developing Your Team Skills

A large part of your job as a leader is to grow the potential and capabilities of your team. During your goal-setting sessions, talk to them about their personal and professional goals, and make sure you understand their strengths and weaknesses, so you are able to develop them as effectively as possible.

You can provide your team members with clear direction on how to progress in their careers by helping them develop their skills and capabilities. Five steps to developing your team skills:

1. Consider the organisation’s goals — Before you begin a plan to develop a team member, consider your organisation's short- and long-term goals. Is there a role that will need filling shortly? Perhaps your organisation needs additional managers due to a growth spurt in business.
2. Talk to your team members — Understand your team member’s aspirations and goals before assuming they want specific development. If they could benefit from additional training or responsibilities, this would be a good time to have a GROW conversation.
3. Recognise potential and readiness — Consider if your team member is ready to progress in their career, even if they have the potential to do so. Not every salesperson wants or should develop into a store manager, or perhaps someone is caring for young children or elderly parents and cannot commit to extra driving or working time to achieve this.
4. Consider all types of training and development — Additional learning does not always need to be formal or part of a course or classroom. It can occur by working with an expert in the area, local networking groups, a stretch assignment or special project, one-on-one mentoring or a secondment into another department.
5. Create a plan for before, during and after — Create a plan consisting of SMART goals for the development opportunity. Be prepared by determining who will be involved and what preparation work will be involved. Do you need a contingency plan for if the team member is away from work unexpectedly? After the training is finished, it is important to ensure the team members can demonstrate their new skills while they are fresh in their minds. Putting knowledge into action is the best way to remember skills and get used to them.

Summary:

• Create opportunities for regular check in’s to track team progress.
• Use project management software where applicable to track team updates.
• Provide constructive feedback to the team members during a project lifecycle.
• Make sure your team understands that feedback is a shared leadership responsibility.
• Focus on empowering your team through the feedback provided.
• Provide opportunities for building team skills and capabilities.

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You’ve come to the end of this topic, well done! Before moving on to the next section be sure to complete all the exercises and go back over any linked videos and articles if you need to.