Following the Leader

The way you portray leadership qualities and instil confidence directly affects your employee’s performance

During good times and especially in bad, do you portray leadership qualities in your daily interactions with your staff? As leaders, we always have to conduct ourselves in a manner that instils confidence in the eyes of our team. Employees look to management for leadership during turbulent times. And in today’s economy this is more important than ever.

Okay, so you believe that you do instil confidence in the way you conduct yourself. Well, what about those little personality quarks or habits that come out when things aren’t going so well? Do you have a “tell”? That’s the poker term that used for habits of physical ticks that gives away someone’s hand when they’re trying to bluff. You may be wondering, what are some of these tells? Here are some examples:

• Put your hands on your knees: indicates readiness.^[3]
• Put your hands on your hips: indicates impatience.^[3]
• Lock your hands behind your back: indicates self-control.^[3]
• Lock your hands behind your head: states confidence.^[3]
• Sitting putting a leg over the arm of the chair: suggests indifference.^[3]
• Legs and feet pointed to a particular direction: the direction where more interest is felt^[3]
• Crossed arms: indicates submissiveness.^[4]

I recently came across an article by Leigh Buckanan in Inc Magazine entitled “Like a Book”, where she talks about this very thing. It’s a very interesting article and made me think of what my “tell” is.

Do you avoid speaking with someone after you’ve decided to let them go, but before you’ve informed them? Do you act differently or behave unusually when you have a big announcement to make to your team that will negatively affect them? Do you change your routine when you’re dealing with a particular stress in business?

In her article, Buckanan writes that employees are attuned to the behaviours of their superiors. She goes on to say that often time your staff can read you like a book. According to research “Human communication consists of 93% body language and paralinguistic cues, while only 7% of communication consists of words themselves. ^[1]”. Actions clearly speak louder then words.

It’s a great article. I encourage you to take five minutes and read it.

Here is a great post from a fellow Canadian, Ian McKenzie, the voice behind Ian’s Messy Desk:

• Control your body language for effective communication

What are some of your “tells”?