Inspirational leadership is one of the key leadership styles for supporting motivation and performance in others, allowing leaders to inspire others, feel confident setting direction, create clarity of expectations, hold people to account, remove roadblocks and have courageous conversations to achieve great outcomes across the business. It addresses leadership capabilities such as charisma, managerial courage and intellectual stimulation.
The Inspirational Leadership style is one of three which comprise the Transformational Leadership approach - one of the most highly researched and regarded approaches to leadership – recognised across countries, industries and organisations and showing correlations with positive organisational performance as leaders move away from destructive styles which can counteract wellness and psychological safety and towards these democratic and charismatic styles which foster SCARF:
Status
Certainty
Autonomy
Relatedness
Fairness.
Take a look at 360 Feedback for more information on the CLS360 - a robust measure of Transformational Leadership capability.
According to Wang’s 2011 meta-analysis of 113 studies spanning over 25 years:
“Overall, our results support that transformational leaders lead not only their individual followers but also their teams and organisations to achieve higher levels of performance.”
Inspirational Leadership is a powerful part of this. For decades people have ranked having a sense of purpose in their work as more important than promotions, income, job security, or even flexible hours. When teams and organisations have a shared sense of purpose, studies have found that it generates positive energy and intrinsically motivates people.
Purpose must, however, filter to role level to create role clarity. We know that employee’s understanding of their role in the organisation is important. This is backed by research conducted by Effectory (1) who found that employees with high role clarity reported higher levels of effectiveness, intention to stay, productivity and satisfaction with leadership. And yet nearly 50% of employees across all sectors surveyed reported a lack of role clarity in the workplace.
According to Interpersonal Solutions (2), leaders embracing the Inspirational style “inspire and stimulate others by self-assured action, courage, and clear messages.”
Bringing this leadership approach to your organisation means equipping leaders to cater to underlying innate needs we all share (SCARF) and directly starts to address some of the core issues that currently impact wellness:
Communicating a clear vision and setting direction creates Certainty and addresses the core issue of Role
Clarity of instructions caters to people’s need for Autonomy and feeling supported in Promotion and Influence
Acting decisively when performance or organisational problems arise contributes to positive interpretation of Status, Certainty and Fairness, addressing the core issue of Change
Leading people and conversations fosters wellness through Relationships
Challenging the status quo aligns with Fairness and Influence.
Call To Action
As a social species, we are happiest when we are surrounded by other people in healthy relationships. On the flip side of this, we are at our worst when our relationships fail. This is true both in and outside of the workplace.
The ability to foster these much-needed healthy relationships and establish a sense of relational wellness comes down to interpersonal behaviour and awareness of how it impacts others. The more you develop this personally and in all leaders across the organisation, the more equipped the business becomes to nurture an environment where people can thrive.
Providing Transformational Leadership development for leaders with a key focus on building Inspirational Leadership capability is a key element of The Integrated Approach and gives you the confidence to step into the range of situations to set direction, address concerns and build a safer, more secure environment for people at work.
Visit the Competency Framework page for more on why you should ground feedback in evidence-based competencies
Taking it Further
“Leadership is about vision and responsibility, not power.”
Being able to set vision and direction, both at the organisational level and more closely with teams and individuals, can have a positive impact of employee wellness, job satisfaction and performance if done well.
Based on their research findings, Effectory outlined six guidelines for creating role clarity in the workplace. Use the questions below as a guide to assess where you currently sit in this space and how you could further build awareness in your organisation:
Do your people have a clear understanding of the expectations and behaviours that align with the goals of their jobs?
Where does ambiguity exist for people and how can you increase certainty around what tasks to prioritise and where to focus effort?
How much does each individual in your team know about what their teammates do?
Looking more broadly than people’s job description, how can you improve knowledge transfer from experienced employees to newer ones and is there opportunity for peer-to-peer coaching?
What feedback processes do you have in place, both formal (quarterly reviews etc) and informal (real-time feedback etc) at an individual and team level?
Do your people know how their role is measured and what they are accountable for?
Do your people know how their role aligns with the big picture? (organisational purpose)
Although there may be structures and processes in place, it is essentially up to leaders to work with their team members to define and explain roles in terms of purpose and deliverables and to identify and manage challenges that impact each role.
Inspirational Leadership shows us how to bring managerial courage to remove roadblocks and charisma to inspire to purpose at the organisational and team level. At the individual level, however, a great way of doing this is for leaders to set up individual coaching sessions with their people to explore role clarity together look for opportunities to inspire and motivate them around this. See the Coaching Leadership page for more.
Where to Now?
Sources
HR analytics: role clarity impacts performance. Effectory - Listen. Learn. Lead. https://www.effectory.com/knowledge/hr-analytics-role-clarity-impacts-performance/
CLS360 - The New Edge in Leadership. https://interpersonalsolutionsgroup.com/