Leadership is a dynamic journey filled with both triumphs and trials. As leaders, we encounter various discrepancies that test our mettle. Let’s explore common leadership discrepancies and effective ways to address them.
Handling Difficult People
Every team has its share of challenging individuals. Leaders must handle such situations with grace, whether it’s a disruptive team member or a resistant colleague. This type of challenge is primarily behavioral or situationally driven. Difficult people, or the disturbers of the peace, are often colleagues who don’t understand the current situation and don’t fit into the model created and followed by others. They are right in their way despite not fitting the larger structure.
Dealing with this type of person is possible by showing empathy. Understanding their perspectives and views, listening actively to what they say and express, and seeking common ground are the basics of good interaction here. Coupled with a positive tone and setting clear ground, expectations, and limitations can help build a productive relationship with the challenging person.
Dealing with Pressure and Stress
The work environment often exerts immense pressure. We are meant to follow deadlines set by someone else, execute targets with the intent to finish them within a shorter period, and give our best to meet higher expectations set by someone else. These responsibilities take a toll on all leaders, often creating enormous pressure and stress for them.
While it isn’t easy to balance in such situations, the first thing that may help is prioritizing oneself in front of others and tasks and targets. Focusing on self-care activities can enormously change the pressure element. Creating a well-being environment and standards for itself is the ground for every person and leader dealing with pressure and stress. Another helpful step is to focus on how to lower the number of tasks associated with you. Here, a simple delegation matrix can help. Including such a matrix lowers pressure and moves functions from the leaders, list to others who are more accustomed to finishing them with higher engagement levels. If you do not have enough knowledge and expertise or feel lost along the way, seeking a trustworthy mentor or peer to share with is an excellent technique to help deal with pressure from the environment and the stress it creates through the task and expectations flows.
Balancing Priorities everywhere
Leaders juggle different priorities daily. Their responsibilities often include not only strategic but also operational workload. Some of them are managing a team, planning the agenda for achieving organizational goals and structuring and leading projects for success. This is why learning how to prioritize is crucial for the leader to ensure a natural balance between all those energy drainers. A good leader knows or is eager to improve skills in areas such as time management, where they must deal with limited time and deliver various results. Another tool that separates good from weak leaders is the ability to delegate. Someone in the leader’s circle is always ready to take on part of or a whole task. Finding these valuable supporters in each area can save a lot of time and create space for more impactful work for the leader. Another crucial skill for the leader who aims to balance environment and results is allocating enough resources wisely to energize every task or project to deliver expected results. Balancing resources around can win or lose the game for the leader.
Decision-Making Dilemmas
Tough decisions are part of the everyday life of the leader. Balancing the short-term agenda, also known as operational, is often challenged by long-term expectations. Finding the right balance is crucial for short-term wins and long-term achievement in such situations. To make better decisions, the leader must give up the gut and the feelings and replace them with data because data-driven decisions bring logic and create ground for long-term solutions and wins.
Like every other person, the leader shows different biases. Learning to deal with all their biases is a reasonable basis for change. The leader’s most important role in such situations is to become a seeker for the right stakeholders and develop critical thinking, allowing them to weigh the pros and cons in different situations and build and tweak a flexible response strategy.
Adapting to Change
A mantra goes through time: “Change is inevitable.” Markets shift from one direction to another, and organizations nowadays are constantly restructuring and reorganizing. Technology has developed at the fastest pace in history. For a leader, to stay true to what has worked years ago may be a turning point in their career. To answer the needs and the demands of the environment, the leader must learn to become agile – flexible to the environmental demands and able to deliver results within the ever-evolving environment. In other words, embracing change as a driver for success in creating or fostering a learning culture is crucial. But together with them, the leader must master one other skill – transparent communication. Gone are the days when leaders were meant to talk politically and say almost nothing to the auditorium. People now want to see an authentic and transparent leader who shares the good and the wrong things, no matter the consequences. And the higher the level of transparency is, the more successful the organization is.
Dealing with Self-Doubting
Everyone has this feeling somewhere, and the leader is no exception. At some point in their development, leaders lose confidence and start doubting themselves – their abilities, knowledge, expertise, etc. This can easily hinder growth and create moments when the leader does not see the future as an opportunity to create something new, but as a failure and move back for themselves and the others they need to care for. Returning to track requires transforming self-talk, switching from damaging to positive talking. A list of achievements reminds the leader that things are not only black and white and that what seems like a failure now may once have been a win for everyone. This creates space for thinking in a positive direction while at the same time helping the leader understand that vulnerability, as showed at that current downtime from them, is not a weakness that may destroy everything but a sign of the strength of the character and the personality.
Dealing with conflict
While vulnerability may create an impression of weakness, the conflict may be a booster for an inconsistent and unwelcoming environment. Conflict becomes inevitable in the business’s and the team’s growth. It may come as a simple disagreement with goals and tasks or turn into personality disruption in a specific situation or as a whole. Many techniques may facilitate conflict situations and turn them from destroyable to buildable. But, while we focus here on the leader, we seek to understand how the leader can deal with conflicts and not allow them to consume their personality. The first thing to do is calm themselves and move away from the conflict to create an objective view. Techniques like meditation and active listening to others can help you build up on what is happening faster. The next to do is address the issue promptly. With that step, the conflict loses part of its power and becomes a discussion of different points of view. By encouraging open dialog and facilitating the search for a balance, leaders do two things – develop themselves and develop others.
Maintaining and supporting Integrity
The saying is, “People do not hear what you say, but look at what you do.” In a dynamic workplace, leaders often have to deal with ethical dilemmas created by someone or a group of people. While many organizations declare values models, usually, what is seen is that values are threatened “flexibly” in line with the current situation and the people involved. That lowers the impact of values and their meaning for the organization. The leadership role is the one to balance this imbalance. Making their best to find a way to balance organizational interests and personal values is tricky and a developmental activity for every leader. Integrity as part of the leader’s behavior must be demonstrated constantly to support fairness in the workplace. Some people call this “lead by example.” Simply, leading by example for the leader means learning to uphold ethical standards, create and deliver transparent communication, and move from short-term fast solutions in favor of sustainable long-term gains. That creates a new level of trust in the organization and moves the leader to a new level of emotional intelligence and personal development.
IN CONCLUSION:
Leadership discrepancies are a topic that is vital for organizational and team success. Looking at them as opportunities for growth shifts the leader’s mindset from sticking to seeking compassion and resilience. Moving away from the overwhelming feeling of failure creates new space for development, progress, and growth.
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