According to Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, coauthors of Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, it's easy for leaders to misunderstand what followers need. The confusion is exacerbated because what leaders get paid to do often is not what their followers need them to do. To run an organization effectively, leaders must be able to strategize, set visions and priorities, build relationships, influence others, and make things happen. But if you ask followers what they need from leaders, the clear answer is trust, compassion, stability, and hope. These four basic needs are the result of Rath, Conchie, and a Gallup research team asking more than 10,000 followers what the most influential leaders contribute to their lives.

What Every Leader Needs to Know About Followers. They may praise a leader on one day and. What every leader needs to know about followers. These distinctions have critical implications for the way leaders should. What Every Leader Needs To Know About Followers Pdf. 4/17/2017 0 Comments Why the Best Leaders Are Great Followers. What every leader needs to know about followers. THE WEB OF LEADERS & FOLLOWERS 7 HeroicLeaders.com Leaders and. View article entitled “What Every Leader Needs to Know About Followers,” provides a useful.

In this interview, the first of two parts, Rath and Conchie discuss followers' four basic needs and why it is important for leaders to understand and meet those needs -- and the challenges leaders face in meeting them. They explain how leaders' emotional reactions can skew how they respond to challenges and why it's riskier to avoid forming personal relationships with subordinates than not to. GMJ: Your book says that followers have four basic needs, one of which is trust. How do leaders build trust, and why is it so important? Tom Rath: I think trust is primarily built through relationships, and it's important because it's the foundational currency that a leader has with his team or his followers.

Barry Conchie: A baseline level of trust exists at the transactional level when people see leaders doing what they say they will do. But real trust is actually much more complicated than that. Trust also speaks to behavioral predictability.

It's hard to trust a volatile leader in times of change. GMJ: Then how do leaders provide stability -- another of the four things followers need -- especially in volatile economic times like these? Rath: If there was ever a time when stability was important, it's right now. At a very basic level, people need to know that there is constancy in their jobs and, more broadly, in where the organization is headed. They need to believe that they'll have a job several months down the road and that their company will be better off a year from now than it is right now. It's just hard to get your work done on a day-to-day basis if you have real insecurity about where your organization is headed. Leaders need to be thinking constantly about what they're doing to create a basic sense of security and stability throughout an organization.

The minute that starts to erode, the organization can go downhill pretty quickly, as you see in many cases right now. GMJ: It seems that stability and hope are linked. What's the effect of hope on followers?

Rath: That's one of the things that poses a real challenge for leaders. They've got to find the right balance of providing stability in the moment while giving followers hope and inspiration for the future. Followers need to see how things will get better and what that future might look like. Leaders need to build that foundation of stability, and hope sits on top of that. I'm not sure if it's possible to create hope without starting with stability at the base. Conchie: Hope creates an aspirational factor among all the things that you're trying to do in your organization, and it gives people a reason to commit.

Hope suggests that the future will be better than the present, and that what we're doing as an organization now will contribute toward creating that future. Now, you can't build hope without trust. You can't build hope without stability. But trust and stability aren't enough.

You do need hope to draw people toward a better future and give them aspirations. And it's a critical aspect of leadership right now. GMJ: Hope requires initiative, but you write in Strengths Based Leadership that leaders are far more likely to react than to initiate. Conchie: This is a very interesting concept. It's important because if all you do is react, you're not in control of your organization. Reacting requires some force or challenge, and by definition, it's being caused by something else.

For example, just ten days ago I spoke at an organization, and their very best, most aspirant, most talented leaders were in the room. I gave them five scenarios that were drawn from their own business, each representing a significant challenge that the organization faced. Four of them were fires to put out, but one scenario was proactive; it was about an opportunity the company had identified that might or might not yield significant advantages. Url Helper 3 45 Serial Number more.