Never underestimate your role as a leader. Have you ever heard the saying,” Employees don’t leave jobs, they leave bad managers?”
This might sound familiar to a lot of managers/business owners having an exit interview with their employees, or maybe it doesn’t sound familiar at all. Depending on if the exiting employee is honest with their previous HR or company, they could express ways in which they felt things could have been improved and would have ultimately led to them staying at the organisation. How can you, as the business owner/manager of an organisation, build a strong team that loves going to work? The answer is simple. Listen to what your employees are saying.
It’s no secret that Sir Richard Branson – an English business magnate, investor, and philanthropist – is a great boss and leader. He founded the Virgin Group and has also built a profitable empire by putting employees first. His reasoning is simple – treat your employees badly and they, in turn, will treat customers badly, tarnishing the brand and ruining a potential sale or even damaging your organisation completely. He ‘walks the walk’ and in turn offers his employees a very lucrative compensation package, generous amounts of leave, employee benefits and a positive working environment with plenty of channels that offers them emotional and mental support.
With your role as a leader, you chose to be a leader. With that choice, you, as their manager or supervisor, signed up for a huge responsibility and that is to ensure that your company succeeds in all areas. The quickest path to that goal is to re-engage your most valuable asset: your employees. Engaged employees give you blood, sweat and tears. Disengaged employees give you scraps. For this reason, disengaged employees offer the greatest untapped potential for you to improve productivity, profitability and performance. When leaders display positive emotions, others take note — and take action. Positive leaders don’t sit back and wait for things to get better on their own. They make a concerted effort to look into their employees’ work products, speaking to their clients or suppliers and gaining an outside perspective into their work. They are always trying to catch excellence in action. When they spot a job well done, they call attention to what is right, to motivate the other employees and also to give credit where credit is due.
With a common denominator on the priority of encouraging and maintaining optimal levels on followers’ performance, through the promotion of virtuous and eudemonic behaviours, Avolio B. J. and Gardner, W. L. have also identified five common components to all these forms:
Pessimists don’t change the world. Throughout history, we see that it’s the optimists, the believers, the dreamers, the doers, and the positive leaders who changed the world. The good news is, even if you’re the biggest pessimist you know, you can learn to change your outlook and that will change your life and make you a much stronger business leader. NOW more than EVER we to be great leaders for our employees and within our organisation.
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