True leadership courses through the kind of company that the right kind of employee wants to work for, as blood courses through the body. Indeed, leadership is the lifeblood of any successful company. Without leadership, the company is not and cannot be successful, regardless of how it may appear.
What does leadership mean to the right kind of employee?
It means he won't be treated like a piece of equipment that the boss expects to do the same things in the same ways, day after week after month after year to produce the same results.
It means he won't be micromanaged. Rather he will be valued for his creativity and abilities. He can use his creativity, his intelligence, his spirit, and his stamina to help create better products or services, improve customer service, improve sales, revenues, and profits, increase productivity and quality. And to improve himself, his job, his department, and the company. That is the culture in a company that the right kind of employee wants to work for. There is an insistence that he contribute his talents daily to making the company better.
It means he knows he will be held accountable for certain results, and for achieving those results within certain time frames. That kind of challenge will turn on the right kind of employee. This is not a company where employees do only bits and pieces of projects and don't really understand or experience how what they do contributes to the project as a whole.
It means he knows he won't be manipulated by people who feel they have it all figured out and don't need his help in thinking about things. The executives of the company that the right kind of employee wants to work for understand that they are not perfect, and everything about the company can be improved. They understand that they and the company must be willing to change anything or even everything to make it work better.
It means she knows that she must not leave her brain at home. She must think all of the time about what she can do to contribute. She knows that trying to contribute will not be in vain. Her ideas and dreams are listened to and carefully considered.
Tom Peters said that virtually everything is invented by the wrong person, in the wrong group, in the wrong company, in the wrong industry, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, with the wrong set of end users. The right kind of employee knows that that is not wrong at all. It is very much right. It is only wrong for non-leaders who don't want to have their tidy little dysfunctional lives and companies disturbed by someone who can really make a positive difference if the company will just let things be changed when necessary.
It means that the company doesn't hire people based only on resume fodder. The company looks at potential employees for their humanness. The company wants to know what makes them tick, what excites them, what brings out their best. The company doesn't try to reduce all jobs to the base level and then try to employ people for the least they can pay them. The company that the right kind of employee wants to work for understands that the more intelligent and able their employees are, the more they can use innovation to geometrically improve revenues, profits, and all other positive ratios and results.
A company gets and retains the right kind of employee by being the right kind of company. If the company is not the right kind of company-i.e. run with true leadership, the right kind of employee will not apply to work there, or if she does, and is hired, she will be miserable to a degree and will want to leave. She is a creative leader, and if she has to damp down those desirable characteristics to comply with a poor company culture, she will not thrive in that environment. People are meant to be free and don't operate well when suppressed.
Why should a company care about having the right kind of employee?
That is like asking why a person should want to drink clean water or eat disease-free food. The right kind of employee helps make and keep a company healthy. Circumstances act on companies. Companies not founded on and operated with true leadership get washed about and often suffer and flounder in adverse circumstances. The right company with the right kind of employees is willing and able to guard against circumstances and to change anything at any time to be able to survive and thrive regardless of what is going on outside the company.
Weldon Smith is the author of the book True Leadership and False Counterfeits, which explains what True Leadership is, and why any other idea of what Leadership is does not work. Furthermore, Leaders are not only those who have followers. Every success in every aspect of life is the result of practicing true Leadership.
Please visit my website at http://www.leadwithtruth.com/ to subscribe to my free newsletter or to read my book.