How Leaders Increase Self Esteem and Unlock Unlimited Potential

To keep motivating people to perform at their best is to build self esteem, self confidence, and self respect. Each person has unlimited potential that they can contribute to doing the job better and faster.  They have huge reservoirs of creativity that can be unleashed to solve problems, overcome obstacles and achieve business goals.

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Knowledge workers, which describes your team, are motivated more internally than they are externally.  They perform at their best because they want to perform at their best.  You cannot motivate people; you can only create the environment where motivation takes place naturally and spontaneously.

Unlock Your Unlimited Potential As A Leader

The leader is the most important person in any organization.  The leader sets the tone by the way he talks, behaves, responds to others and treats people on a day to day basis.  People tend to “follow the leader” in that they imitate or mimic the behavior of the leader toward others.  When the leader treats other people with courtesy and respect, everyone eventually begins treating their coworkers with the same courtesy and respect. The leader is actually a “multiplication sign” in his organization.  The actions of the leader are multiplied times the number of people who report to him or her.  James Q. Wilson, a leading sociologist and researcher, wrote that “The first law of human organization is hierarchy.”

Solve Problems through Hierarchy and Achieve Business Goals

Each of us needs to know where we stand in the pecking order.  Whenever we meet a new person, we ask a lot of questions, directly and indirectly, to find out where this person is located in both the societal and business hierarchy.  Is he above me or below me?  Does he earn more or less than I do?  Has he achieved greater or lesser success than me?  Just as dogs sniff each other when they first meet, human beings ask questions and look for cues to determine where the other person is located socially and in business relative to them. In the world of work, this principle of hierarchy operates continuously.  Everyone has a boss.  Everyone is above or below someone else.  When these relative positions are clear, people accept that the ones above have more authority and influence and the ones below have less.  This is neither good nor bad.  It is simply human nature.  It is the way things are. Often managers become preoccupied with themselves and their work.  Because of their responsibilities, especially to get measurable results that their superiors are demanding, they often forget that the people who report to them are essential parts of their work world and work life.  They become so busy doing the job that they forget that a key part of their job is people building, continually and on every occasion. There are specific behaviors that you can practice each day, and in each interaction, to make people feel good about themselves, solve problems and unlock their unlimited potential.  When you deliberately take the time and make the effort to build self esteem in other people and simultaneously eliminate the fears that hold people back from putting their whole hearts into their work, a peak performance work environment, like flowers in the spring blooms naturally around you.

The Power of Approval

When you approve of a person’s potential behavior or performance, in advance, you set up a force field of positive energy that motivates that person to do an even better job so that they do not disappoint you. Here is another way to use the power of approval to great effect:  Praise people in front of others.  If a person does a good job, take them to your boss, or the most senior person you can find and “brag on them” to the other person.  As the employee stands there listening, talk to the senior person and tell them what a great job this person just did.  Explain the difficulties of the job, and the intricacies of the performance.  Build it up.  Make a big deal of it.  Let the person stand there and bask in your approval.  They will remember the experience for a long time. Another way to express approval and boost self esteem is to do it at your regular staff meetings.  Before you begin the agenda, single out one or more people who have done something worthwhile since the last meeting.  Itemize and explain in as much detail as possible what they did, how they did it, and how important it was.  Explain the results that they got.  And then lead a hand of applause for the person who has just done a good job. When you praise people in front of others, either individuals or groups, they will remember it for a long time, even years.  More than that, they will strive to repeat the performance so that they can earn more approval in the future.  When you raise people’s self esteem with approval, you make them feel wonderful about themselves, motivate them to perform at even higher levels and unlock their unlimited potential.

Thank you for reading this article on how to unlock unlimited potential and boost self esteem among your workplace. Please share and comment below!

Topics included in this article include

Self Esteem

Unlimited Potential

Solve Problems


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