Loyalty and Leadership

Loyalty is very important in every walk of our life, especially in teamwork “loyalty factor” between the team players and leadership decides whether team is going to stay together or fall apart. Great leaders influence & guide their players in the desirable direction and earn their loyalty, even royalty and an huge fan following. At the same time blind loyalty is lethargy or lack of imagination. Ideal leaders must not encourage their players to follow leadership blindly.

In team atmosphere integrity is every ones business, bottom line is to do the right things & things right. This is where the discipline of doing what’s right over what’s easy come into play. Every player must be encouraged to bring in their passion and intensity to the table. If leaders are there to cheer, motivate, help achieve the aligned individual/team goals and build the culture of honestly, transparency & fairness, team will be there with the leadership, willingly offering their support and their contributions and their loyalty. A leader will be restricted by his own limitations if he cannot build a strong network of people with complimentary skills. Leader who wants to “accomplish excellence”[ read WOW ] cannot be a captive of psychological comfort he gets from blind loyalty.

Every team mostly likely to have different kind of players with different levels of energy, class, commitment, attitude and loyalty. It’s the leadership which brings these players and attributes together to channelise, energize and execute, there by increasing the bandwidth to bring in wide spectrum of skill set and energy with minimal noise factor this process can be called as harmonizing energy. We can categorize the team players into 4 different groups based on performance and loyalty. All the 4 categories are listed below along with the leadership opportunities to best use of these categories to get the best for the team/organization.

LOYAL – PERFORMERS
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Cream layer of the team, best thing for leadership.
Opportunity to create WOW & Best in the world.
Appreciate their views and ideas and encourage them to stretch their goals constantly.
Empower them, reward them and offer more goodies.
When it comes to values and work ethics leadership must not award “License to Kill”. Don’t let them bully on others, stars can become monsters only if leadership let them.

LOYAL – NON PERFORMERS
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Responsive, may not be proactive.
Coaching Opportunity here for leaders.
Create a run way(capacity to grow) for these guys.
These guys can be filled into first bucket, if they have potential.
Should not be allowed to use leadership capital, no extra favor for these guys just because they are nice to leadership.
Leaders must not let them be kiss-ups and kick downs, to become parasites using leaders strength, energy and capital, or to be burden on company more importantly on the leadership.
Favorites can become monsters only if leadership let them. good or bad, if leader let them do it, it’s still leader doing it.
Leader must do a favor to these people by not allowing these players to play with an unfair advantage, once they get used to foul play, they will have real difficulty playing the real game in different leagues.

NOT LOYAL – PERFORMERS
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Passion/integrity built in their bones, but disagrees with leadership initiatives.
Opportunity to work with them & influence them.
Bring them into leadership bandwidth, include/involve them.
Increase the leadership bandwidth to accommodate these players, encourage speaking up & appreciate honest communication within the team.
Leverage their brain power and brew them with other loyal performers views/skills.
Increased opportunity to create WOW & Best in the world.
Most often people with good potential are branded as un loyal by some leaders, leaders must use this sub-ordinate potential & energy for the growth of the employee, team, organization and leader him self.
If they continue to be disloyal after exhausting all leadership options to include/involve, they should NOT be given ticket to get into the game.

NOT LOYAL – NON PERFORMERS
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No integrity and passion for nothing
They may need help finding other jobs, if they don’t have the potential or ability to follow the leadership or don’t have an ability to come out with their own initiative for good of the team/organization.