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The Three Most Important Keys for Effective Leadership

July 2, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Leadership

The Three Most Important Keys for Effective Leadership
By Chandrasekhar

For any project to taste success, it is very important to manage resources, especially the human resources. It is not sufficient just to manage them but you need to lead them. In knowledge intensive projects such as software development projects it is very important to manage the team efficiently and effectively as there are lots of characters, egos, and personalities involved. And it is not you but it is your team who determines if you are a successful leader or not. The question here is how to manage so many different characters and how to gain their confidence and be a successful leader?

Gain Respect as a Person

Unless you are respected by your team, you cannot achieve the compatibility levels that you need to bind the team together. Both, your verbal and non-verbal communication play an important role in gaining respect from your team. Many small things have much larger effect on the people around you than we imagine, like following basic etiquettes, respecting others, showing interest while listening, being a soft spoken, tapping on their shoulders, shaking hands etc.

Gain Respect for Your Knowledge

The next thing is that your team should respect you for your knowledge and wisdom. You may not be an expert in their respective specialized areas as the team consists of varied specialists, but, at least, in your specialized area and in this case, management. And it should not be like you need to prove your knowledge from day one by rubbing your ideas on the team, boasting about your past accomplishments etc. The best approach is to observe, listen and then talk. Being humble always helps and should always balance it with your aggressiveness.

Gain Respect for your Position

Last but not least the team should realize and respect your authority. The boss who forces respect does not create sense of belonging. But, you need to gain their respect by proving you deserve their respect. And this should happen not by talks but by actions.

To gain your team’s confidence and influence the team members, it is important to gain respect for the kind of person you are, for the knowledge you have and for the role you are playing. And it is also very important to follow the order i.e., person, knowledge and position to have a maximum effect. If you fail in the first two areas then you are just a BOSS not a LEADER.

About the Author

Chandrasekhar, PMP is working as a Manager – Product engineering with Symphony Services and has over 10 years of experience in software industry in various roles.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 and is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Very nice tips for every leader to manage the team.

Jyothi.B wrote on July 4, 2008 - 12:16 am | Visit Link

I accept your point but at the same time there are some more skills for ethical leadership(Power, influence, contingency theories, traits).. Tha above skills makes effective leadership

senthil kumar Ragunathan wrote on July 7, 2008 - 4:32 am | Visit Link

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