Everyone wants to be a leader nowadays as it usually comes with POWER. But it's not something you're born with. It's not something you inherit nor pass on.

Being a great leader is a skill that you develop over time, especially when you work on communication, teamwork, awareness, emotional management, patience, motivation, and more. Leaders of an organization focus on the entire well-being of individual contributors which includes both interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships. However, leadership is not only bestowed upon the senior management. This role is exhibited across the entire organization, even by individual contributors.

Now, let’s take a look at how leadership looks in three different roles and how significant every role is.

Leadership as Individual Contributor

More often than not, many individual contributors become strong leaders who must cultivate leadership abilities to manage projects. Such individual contributors can be an e-commerce coordinator who needs to spearhead new sales campaigns or a website designer who is in charge of designing the company webpage. None of these contributors manage teams, but they are required to possess strong leadership skills such as communication, listening, strategizing, and more. To develop those skills, you need to listen to constructive feedback from colleagues and act on opportunities for improvement.

Leadership as a Manager

Leadership is essential when you’re a manager. To develop these skills, you continuously have to request regular feedback from each of your direct reports and your manager to determine areas for improvement. Gallup reports that in studies of employee engagement, employees' perceptions of their managers are the most influential factor, accounting for up to 70 percent of the variance in engagement rates between business units. Since involvement affects everything from productivity to attrition rates, this is a metric that businesses should pay attention to. Therefore, having good leaders in management can contribute to achieving the overall vision and goals of the business.

Leadership as a C-suite Executive

Leading a team of individual contributors is totally different from leading a team of managers. C-suite Executives oversee business divisions or departments in huge corporations. They are usually accountable for one or more functions, including Sales, Marketing, Finance, Operations, Engineering, IT, Legal, or Human Resources.

As an Executive, you must understand how to evolve from a manager of individual contributors. It’s also important to invest time in developing future leaders, coaching your new managers to be effective team leaders, and shaping your team and organization's culture.

Leaders are present not for themselves but their team and the entire organization. When you acquire this role, you also play a vital role in Organizational Learning as this process cannot begin without someone who can manage the team to achieve a common goal.

With Culturefy, it’s much easier to determine how a leader and the entire team are performing because of the resources available in the following features: Culture Check, Culturefy Academy, Culturefy Community, Culturefy Campaigns, and Rewards.