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Hey there, Maurechiana here, founder of the MindSight Academy, neuro coach to executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insight from brain science to help you flourish and exceed your expectations. Welcome back to another episode of Lead to Excel podcast. I'm so pleased to be with you today because guess what? Today, looking at the strategies to help you remain a high-performing leader. Your role as a leader or a manager is to get things done in your organization. Delivering results requires competence. It requires that you have industry knowledge and a rigorous discipline of management. Someone has described management as being the present while a leader is looking at the future. This is a topic I'm going to look at very soon. What a leader is and who a leader is, and the difference between being a leader and a manager, and if you need to have both qualities. But for today, how then do you, as a leader or a manager, go about bringing harmony to these potentially conflicting demands that you have in the workplace today? How do you remain relevant as your role as a leader? And most importantly, how do you remain and maintain high performance as a leader for your team or your organization or for your business? So grab a cup of coffee, put your feet up and listen in. What are you doing to develop your leadership ability? You should be doing something at least weekly to ensure you're growing and developing. When I talk to leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners, there are two main challenges they always cite as the problem. Being too busy, juggling too many balls, or simply unsure where to start to find high-quality leadership development. This ends up resulting in many not doing anything at all while some undertake one or two activities over the year to meet their CPD requirements without much thought put into its relevance or quality to their goal or achievement. Your role as a leader is too important for you not to be intentional about your actions, and you will not achieve the high results you desire with that kind of approach. The truth is that leadership development does not need to be overly time-consuming nor expensive either. The question though is how do you go about it and what should you do to achieve that high performance leadership you want? The first thing is developing yourself, and to enable you do that, you need to first and foremost understand you. Understand who you are. Who are you? How are you perceived by your peers, colleagues, and customers? Leadership starts with you. Your understanding of yourself, the way you behave, the way you feel, act, and react to different situations determines who you are. Start by doing a 360 feedback. The results of this and the coaching that go with it will help you focus in on your own strengths and the areas that you need to develop. Ultimately, they will help you develop your own game plan and ensure that you make the most of your time and your efforts. The second tip is to be humble. Humility. C.S. Lewis said humility is not thinking less of yourself, is thinking of yourself less. Leaders that have emotional intelligence and self-awareness are able to recognize the importance of celebrating the achievements of everyone whilst also keeping the focus on performance and continuous improvement. Demonstrating the willingness to carry out any role also enables your team build trust in you, particularly when taking the time to join with others in what might seem as menial tasks, such as putting out chairs for a meeting, covering for staff when they need to do things. It could also be covering for a colleague who just needs some time alone for a moment. The loyalty that simple act buys will inevitably be multiplied 10 times over. Do you acknowledge others for the success of your team? Or do you take the credit for yourself? Are you emotionally self-aware? If you answer yes to that question, how do you know? Are you prepared to lead by example in any role in order to portray yourself as not being too important to do certain types of work? Or are you always keen to learn more and keep improving? These questions will enable you to determine how self-aware you are. I've got a course coming out soon on emotional intelligence in leadership, and one of the key things is looking into self-awareness. So if this is something that interests you, I'll keep a link in the description for you to have a look. Another important strategy to enable you to achieve high performance leadership is building and sustaining positive relationships. So building and sustaining relationships is one of the most important elements of your leadership role. Peter Drucker says culture eats strategy for breakfast. The point here is that you can have the greatest strategy in the world, but if you do not form positive relationships with your team or enable your team to form personal relationships with each other, then delivery and results won't be what you want them to be. Another important skill you need as a leader is to be a good listener. When I discovered the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership, and I started reflecting on my own practice, on my own behavior. And I noticed a lot of times I found myself interrupting people. So people will start talking, and I wasn't actually actively listening, even though I was looking at them. Instead, what I was doing was preparing my own answer, and I found myself actually interrupting people quite a lot. And it really threw me because I've always considered myself to be a good listener. Understanding people precedes leading them because leadership finds its source in understanding, as quoted by John Maxwell. So to be able to achieve high performance in leadership, you must have insight into the human heart. You need to learn how to care about people, and you need to be able to go beyond the results people are bringing and really care about their lives. Sensitivity towards the hopes and dreams of the people in your team is essential to enable you to connect with them and motivate them. And the best way to do this is to develop your listening skills. And it's no accident that we have one mouth and two ears. When you fail to listen, what you're doing in essence is shutting off much of your learning potential because what you're doing is just focusing on what is in your own brain and what you're giving out, as opposed to listening to what other people are saying and being able to learn from them. To be a high-performing leader, you need to be attentive to small issues. Pay attention to your intuition and also pay close attention to what people are not actually saying. And this requires a special type of skill to do that. It requires having a good understanding of people, and it also means being secure enough in yourself to ask for people's honest opinion about situations and not getting defensive when they give it to you. So to be an effective, high-performing leader, you need to let others tell you what you need to hear, not necessarily what you want to hear. And another strategy is to be reflective. You need time to process information. In this climate, as a leader, you're facing a lot of demands on your time. And if you don't take the time to stop, reflect, and re-energize yourself, you run the risk of burnout. The last podcast I did on true work-life balance that goes into a lot more detail about things that you need to do to avoid burnout, anxiety, and stress. So if you want to be a high-performing leader, you need to be self-driven, self-reflective. Take out time to pause and listen to what people are telling you. Listen to the feedback that you're being given and don't get defensive. And in your daily routine, build in formal structured time to switch off, stop, and use that time to reflect and re-energize. And as you're reflecting, think about what has worked well and what hasn't and what you need to do to improve it. Do this personally for yourself, but also do this as a team. Leading requires constant learning and a balance of specialized and broad knowledge. Keep updating yourself, keep updating your skills. But it's so important that you keep taking the right actions. Improve your knowledge, improve your relationship with the people you're working with, and most importantly, understand who you are. Thank you for tuning in and remember that one of the biggest challenges facing organizations and facing leaders today is the ability for you as a leader to maintain effectiveness. If you want to learn more, please visit my website at morinchiana.com and I'll keep the link below in the description. Today I've talked about the importance of leadership development, and one of the main areas where you can develop yourself is finding the right courses to equip yourself, to equip you as a person and equip you as a leader. So please visit my online academy where you will find courses that would truly help and equip you to achieve that high performance and maintain it. In the academy, you have an opportunity to take the courses at your own pace, but also have my ongoing support through our live sessions where you can post in questions. But do visit the mindsiteacademy.com. My passion, my desire is to return you to the soul of your leadership role, providing you with the concrete skills to get you to the top and keep you there. Okay, three things now before we finish today. Remember to subscribe to this podcast. If you haven't, make sure you click on that subscribe button wherever you listen to this podcast. This will ensure that you don't miss out on any episode. Leave a review, and also if there are any topics that you would like me to talk about, put it inside the comment section as well. Finally, next week, we're going to look at skills of an emotional intelligent leader. Why is it important? Emotional intelligence is something that has been coming up a lot lately. Why do you need to be an emotional intelligent leader? Is it something you should keep ignoring, or is it something you really need to look into? And I can assure you, you will not want to miss this next week's episode. So look forward to seeing you next week. Have an amazing week.