Question

How do leaders leverage individual talents to accomplish organizational goals?

Answer 1

Leaders have to be successful in achieving goals. Integrity, authenticity and honesty are effective leadership qualities and every leader should pertain these qualities in order to accomplish organisational goals.

Leaders should be able to persuade, encourage and motivate others in order to leverage their talents. You can’t achieve your goals without the support and contribution of your team. It may be a challenging task to harness your team’s talent but the most successful leaders work in tandem with their teams to produce the best results.

The leaders have to maintain their momentum, willing to take risks and should be pro-active in their decision making to achieve long term goals of the organisation. Some of the things which leaders can do to create a culture of talent development includes:

1. Act as a role model: Be transparent about your own need to learn and develop and share how you're able to do it. Embrace vulnerability: leaders are never more powerful than when they are shown to be learning. To be an effective leader, you need to manage expectations, do your research and ask the right questions. Seasoned and self-aware leaders inspire confidence, set directions and hold others more accountable rather than just relying on themselves for results.

2. Empower Your Team to Take Ownership of Goals: Leaders should empower their team to take decisions on their own rather than exercising control or supervising for every small thing. To be a good leader, you need to encourage innovative thinking, delegate control, and provide flexibility to make corrections etc.

3. Problem solving and conflict resolution: One of the skills leaders looks for while recruiting is a person’s ability to understand and solve complex problems. It is important to ensure that the goals set by your seniors are achieved, while getting the most out of yourself and your team. This makes it easier to climb up the ranks while achieving organisational goals.

4. Rally around shared values: Leaders should make employees link their everyday tasks and responsibilities to the values in the organization. You need to make them understand why & what they do is important for themselves and for the organisation as a whole i.e. how their contributions are adding up in making the organisation successful in the long run.

5. Leverage problems as opportunities for learning and development: Individuals should be given freedom to handle their work and they should not be under the impression that failure might lead to jeopardise their job. What's an acceptable failure needs to be clarified and that way, by incorporating stretch assignments, employees can seek out challenges where they can develop without feeling like mistakes will set them back in their career. Learning organizations see problems as opportunities.

6. Align individual goals with organisational goals: One of the best plan to leverage one's talent is to link individual goals with the organisation goals. Goal alignment is a powerful management tool that not only clarifies job roles for individual employees, but also demonstrates ongoing value of your employees to the organization. Once you align the goals, employees become more committed to the organisation and achieve higher levels of job performance.