Having social leaders is crucial to building social leaderships. This means that the managers, supervisors, and leaders in your business need to understand the importance and how to practice being a social leader. This can be difficult to develop and easier to hire for, but often requires leveraging existing leadership and retraining them.
Social leaders are key to bringing people together collaboratively to work towards a common goal. A social leader approaches leadership as developing the system as a whole through encouraging individual employees. Social leadership is very often about building individual capabilities while bringing people together to achieve more. This requires specific characteristics and traits, like transparency, authenticity, likability, and a passion for the work, alongside agility, willingness to try and learn new things, a collaborative approach, and the ability to connect with people.
Social leaders facilitate change, help with smooth transitions, and can lobby for performance improvement and process changes without any hidden agendas. This means they need to understand and empower the motivations of their team members, have a high level of altruism, and are able to understand (and explain) exactly how change translates to improvement.
A good social leader can motivate a team while breaking down internal silos, introducing new tools and employees, and driving everyone to succeed together.
About the Author: Jocelyn Pick
