Seeking The Leadership Essential as a Human Resources Manager

Engaged leaders forge new paths that buck the trends, and go against the standardized norms of the masses; then motivate, believe in themselves, their workers and their company brands are elevated beyond their competition.  Developing what we call a "leadership essential" is an oftentimes overlooked attribute when HR managers seek employees.  It is these employees that seem to possess an innate ability to help drive a company to new heights. The leadership essential is critical for an organization to excel and prosper, even in these difficult and trying times we find ourselves in now. 

Southwest Airlines – Example of Creative Leadership

In the example of a company exclaiming many levels of leadership essentiality is the trendsetter Southwest Airlines.  This company, known for exceeding the standards within the industry, provides unexcelled and groundbreaking customer service.   Here we detail an instance of a company rising above the competition, establishing a significant leadership decision and building lifelong customers as a result.   I believe you will agree that behind the scenes of the following example, you'll find leaders of vision and an understanding of their market significantly beyond the norm.

On what many consider the worst day in modern U.S. history, September 11, 2001, all airlines found their fleet grounded and inactive for several days.  With flight crews and their airplanes stranded in cities throughout the country, Southwest decided to turn lemons into lemonade.  The directive from management was for Southwest employees to fully engage their stranded customers while they were unable to return to their home destinations. The employees did something unprecedented in airline history; they took them to movies, bowling or other activities in order to occupy their dead-time and help get their minds off of America's day of terror tragedy.  This of course instilled in their customers a perspective of the company that would last a lifetime. 

Beyond the above mentioned untraditional move by Southwest, the company did something else that went against every norm the nationwide airline industry downturn would elicit.  Most other airlines were forced to cut their employee numbers by up to 20% as many Americans did not want to return to the skies.  Travel by plane, given the replayed scenes of unthinkable violence the public watched on their television screens each night was in complete remission. 

Bucking the trend and setting a leadership standard in the industry, Southwest decided to take a bold step.  This groundbreaking company decided to retain all of its employees and beyond that, extend a profit sharing distribution to its employees.  The CEO James Parker had faith in his company, building the company image on solid business principles over the past 30 years.   He basically knew that culture of the company and as a result of his leadership and that of his managers, knew the airline was positioned to handle the unprecedented national crisis better than the other airlines.  This is an example of a company with a clear focus on building strong and clear leaders and managers that were able to take a chance based on the well defined strength and culture of their business model. This kind of move by a company caught within an industry in absolute decline and uncertainty, demonstrates what we feel must be leadership essentials throughout their structure.  

Beyond the Box Leaders

Without good leaders (at every level of an organization) few companies' can prosper and even fewer will thrive and actually grow in the midst of an extraordinary downturn environment such as September 11th brought to America's airline industry.  Those managers exhibiting "beyond the box" vision and a willingness to take chances are the ones that will excel even in times of utter devastation economic turmoil.  Decisions such that Southwest made are normally done at the corporate CEO or board level, but we cannot overstate the need for middle management, lower level supervisors and even the employees they supervise to exhibit this quality of leadership. The entire organization from the CEO down to the janitor should become one of self motivation and leadership essentiality.

Don't Sublimate Your Organization

We believe it should be the job of human resource managers to maintain a clearly defined agenda of recruiting, encouraging and developing these leaders throughout their business entity.  Unfortunately, this perspective is often overlooked by many businesses and even large corporations.  Anything less is sublimating your organization to mediocrity or even worse, ultimate doom.  Sublimation is the transitory process of a substance from a solid phase to the gas phase without passing through a liquid state.  Far too many businesses vaporize very quickly due to limited human resource focus on the leadership essential.

Finding Good Leaders – An Overlooked Duty of HR Managers

Given the fact many human resource managers are busy with a multitude of complex and varied duties, maintaining a focus on this critical aspect of company development is difficult.  In today's economic environment of downsizing and reorganization, the average human resource manager at a company is pressured in this respect.  With the additional demands of corporate accusations, mergers, and company policy compliance, it's easy for human resource managers to overlook the leadership essential. 

But the current economic environment is even more reason to assign significant time and effort toward finding and developing managers that have a talent for leadership and creative decision making.   Unfortunately, many managers believe that with all of the compex duties and demands on HR managers, any deviation or focus on the "leadership essential" diverts time away from their other routine tasks.  It is viewed many times by CEO's and board members as a sidelined activity from their core job duties.  Defining and instructing in the importance of the leadership essential to the top level decision makers should become an absolute prioritized imperative of the smart HR manager's job. 

Leadership – A Valuable Trait for the Entire Organization

The leadership essential can be and should be upheld at not only the manager and supervisor level positions, but throughout the organization all the way down to the corporate ladder.  When we look at good leaders, we look for those who consistently exude motivational characteristics, are results-oriented – within a framework of integrity – using only ethical and legal means.  A good leader is not necessarily only in a supervisory position but should apply to all employees. 

Leadership essential employees are employees who are motivated and take control of his or her unique work situation and are able to make command decisions even within their own little world of unique duties.  They tend to show a pride and ownership of their position and have a self-fulfilling ability to visualize the potential and reward of working hard.  

Historically, the standard definition of a leader is someone who can order others to get the job done.  But in today's world of globalization and increased fast-changing growth and competition, today's leaders should be able to not simply give orders but instead to motivate subordinates to become leaders in such as way as leading themselves to new heights to get the job done themselves without direction.  This is an entirely new age concept and has roots in good psychology of self-actualization, training subordinates to lead others and then to lead themselves into new territories of growth, development and ultimately personal satisfaction and reward for a job well done. This is teaching others the perspective of leading for results and growth, not only for the common tasks of routine job duties.  Once again, the HR manager's first-line duty should be in instilling recruiting for, teaching and promoting these perspectives to the entire employee base.  Corporations and every level of business entity today must be made up of employees who are all leaders in some way, shape or form. Every employee must be challenged to lead for results and to accept nothing less from them than this perspective.

Leadership – More Than Telling Someone What to Do

It's important to see leadership as something more than telling someone what to do.  It is time to elevate ourselves to the ability of active and effective persuasion techniques that are not hostile but diplomatic in nature.  When we persuade someone of something, as we become diplomats, able to pose our point, we become a leader.  The person we end up persuading may even be our direct supervisor, boss, line manager or even the division manager. 

It's important for human resource managers to maintain a perspective that the consistent forming-up of leaders – throughout an organization – is a necessity and not an option as it is tied directly to the company's bottom-line and eventual success or failure. 

Things a HR Manager Can Do to Build the Leadership Essential

As a HR manager, in order to be an effective leadership essential promoter, your employee development classes/meetings should be developed and focused around leadership principles and directed towards all individuals in your organization. Your success or failure to develop effective leaders on a company-wide scope can be influenced by something as simple as naming a course you develop and present to the company workforce.

There is a big distance simply between calling a meeting a simple presentation or a leadership seminar.  There is a countless barrage of what are called "presentations" in the corporate world; the company employees tend to develop a negative perspective and a deep yawn as they walk towards the meeting room when a meeting is called something such as "an employee development presentation."  Would it not be more inspiring to call the meeting a "leadership seminar" or a "leadership development program?"  You will more likely be setting the tone for a much more positive and excited group whom actually look forward to and want to learn the secrets and methods of becoming an effective leader.

This has a transformative nature in that rather than the participants considering the meeting a boring presentation where the they will be suffering countless computer slides, monotonous speeches and the memorization of concepts and acronyms, the participants will be more inspired.  If you name your meeting properly, then develop a long-term pattern of engaging, creative and exciting leadership content, they will experience significantly more excitement and actually develop a anticipation of learning something useful towards growth that can assist them in career development and future salary increases.   

Linking Motivation with Performance

While holding your leadership meetings, during the employee activity periods, a method grading of participants giving speeches in front of the group should be radically changed from the methods previous used where a good speech was considered one that conformed to a set pattern of details, forms and functions.  

The new measure of a good speech is going to be the actual results. There is no better time than now to get inspiration and results pushing forward.  Inspire your pupils to get other employees to motivate their peers right then and there in the training session.   Their speech – at that moment –will be used as a basis for determining measurable results or gains in sales, productivity or whatever the goal may be on down the road.  It's important to somehow link the specific motivational speech somehow and the individual giving it to the results that transpire as a result of it.  Exciting things can occur when an individual is actually given the opportunity – in the presence of their peers – to make a marked difference; to be the one that dramatically increased sales that quarter or was able to inspire others to perform their best. 

You want to maintain that results are what's important and uphold the linking of motivational leadership development to real results.  Proper speaking dynamics or the appearance of structured communications skills while giving a speech is not the issue here but rather the linking of the employee and the motivational speech and tactics to the hard results.  Real results become the grading system of the speech or motivational technique employed.  This linking to real results becomes more than just a training exercise; it becomes a real time experiment in productivity and leadership growth.

Develop further your own ways to get the organization working together as a team of leaders, but remember to emphasize the perspective of passionate motivational dynamics rather than form and function and then link the methods and techniques with the results. Now go out there and build a company of leaders.

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