Leadership Course – “What is a Leader”

ACS recently started a new course entitled "Growing Team Leaders" that I feel might compliment my management reading and learning. This post is the first in a series associated with the course.

The first session, "What is a Leader", presented by John Ware of Dale Carnegie Training was on this month. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of skills I was already aware of and am doing as part of my role. There were however a few points that I can continue to work on. One I particularly liked was "Micro manager yourself, macro manage your team". What this essentially means is manage your own time and tasks in detail and provide guidance to your people, trusting them to do their job.

With respect to leadership however, the main point that I took away from the session was that good leaders are focussed on people. This was highlighted by the statement "Managers manage process, leaders lead people". Management is all about managing the processes that achieve results. Leadership however is about vision and hearts & minds.

The bulk of the course then focussed around techniques to balance motivation and accountability within your team and building outstanding communication skills.

So if you really want to lead your team well at all levels, focus on people management along with your other management skills. Understand what motivates your people, give them the opportunities to grow and take them where they might not go themselves.