What leadership skills are needed to be a good leader? How to engage your employees?

What is being a good leader?

Being a good leader doesn’t mean that you are good making money to your company, it is not about the sales and results. What a good leader means is that you have to care about your people, your employees. But caring about your people is not so simple that it can sounds, because all the time we usually think first in ourselves than in the others. But what are the advantages of being a good leader?

Being a great manager can be great, making a lot of profit, being so efficient or creative in what you do, but you are just one in the company. There are a lot of people that also are important for the company and as the popular phrase says “people are your greatest asset” without your employees you are nothing. That’s why you need them, and you need to know how to engage them.

Being a good leader will help you to engage your employees, because you will tell them with actions that they are important to you and to the company and this is something that can be so simply, but in the reality, it really works. When people feel that what they are doing is important, fun or useful, they immediately feel engaged and motivated with what they do. Consequently, they will give an extra mile when doing their job, so they will work better and faster. For example, when people volunteer, they strive without expecting to receive a benefit other than knowing that they are helping to whom need it, and this really motivated them because they feel important and useful.

Second, caring about your employees makes them more loyal, what means that they will be there when it is needed, and they will give their best to reach the company goals and they will not think to do an action that can harm the company. They will think that as they feel comfortable with the company, it is not an annoyed and hard thing to do their job.

Third, if you make them feel comfortable doing their job, they will work happy and motivated, what will improve the work environment. If you have a good work environment, people will like to work there and will be friendly with their coworkers, what improves the way they do their job, because they will share the knowledge in order to help to whom need it, improving the final results. To read about the conclusions of a research of the link between employee loyalty and profitability read “why managers should care about employee loyalty” 

What leadership skills are needed?

So, once we have known the benefits of being a good leader and engage your employees, we need to know what leadership skills are needed to make it possible. These skills are the following:

• Communication: You need to be a communicative person, because this way will know what is happening to your employees, if they are feeling uncomfortable or what they would like to do. You will know if there is some problem and you will create confidence.
• Positive: You need to be positive when you are dealing with your people, because this way you will create an atmosphere of hope in where people will feel motivated and with hope that thing will be going well.
• Trustworthy: You have to fulfill what you promise, because this way people will trust in your word and you will create confidence with them. This way, they will support you when it is needed, and they also will be trustworthy with you.
• Feedback: If you give feedback to your employees in order to how they have done their job, they will know how to improve their way to do the things and will know that if you don’t like how they did their job it is because a reason. Otherwise, if you don’t give a feedback, they will usually think that they were doing it right and you just rated with a bad grade is because you don’t like them. In the other hand, if they are doing a great job reward them, because it will motivate them to continue doing the same way or better than that.

Finally, after knowing some leadership skills to improve the engagement of your employees, here you can find some examples of what you can do improve the engagement and the motivation of your people.

Some activities that can works can be:

• Give them the possibility to make their own decisions giving them responsibilities.
  
• Give them the possibility of studying allowing them to specialize in what they do.
• Give them the possibility of doing things that they would like to do, because this way they can develop interesting things. For example, giving free time to do whatever they want.
• Give them relaxing time to decrease the level of stress. For example, have a gym for your employees.
• Tell them how important are for the company.
• Reward them if they are doing well their job.

Finally, if you want to know more things of how to motivate your employees, read what google do it in the following article: Employee Motivation: The Google Way!