From the course: Inspirational Leadership Skills: Practical Motivational Leadership

You can learn inspirational leadership

From the course: Inspirational Leadership Skills: Practical Motivational Leadership

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You can learn inspirational leadership

- Motivation is vital. And it would ideally be really great motivation, which we could perhaps call inspiration. If you've got people who are just going through the motions, just doing what they're told in order to get paid, they're never going to be great. They're never going to beat the competition and they're never going to really enjoy their work. And I think good motivation is sadly lacking in most organizations. Most bosses that I see and the ones that I've worked for in the past seem to use power and coercion, or they just give out commands. And if you're a boss, why do more than that if you know that people have to do what you tell them? And some bosses are just plain absent most of the time you hardly see them unless you're in trouble. And other bosses seem to think that their job is just to keep you in line or to criticize you when you do things wrong or just to check on you. But these bosses are missing out on so much because their people could do so much more if they cared, if they were fired up, if they were inspired. So inspirational leadership or management is really, really important and you can learn it. So if you look at the history of management theory, originally, there was something called trait theory. It's now been mostly discredited, but the idea was that you would look at the famous leaders of history and the successful leaders in your organization, and you would work out what the best ones do. In fact, this was originally done in the Army. They looked to all their most successful leaders and they looked at what qualities they had. But the problem they found, and this is obvious as soon as you think about famous leaders, Ghandi versus Genghis Khan or whatever, a huge variety of great leaders. And they found that there wasn't really much in common that they had. And even if you could find what these leaders have in common people can't change or they can't change a lot. They can't change their personality raally. So it wouldn't even be useful if you could identify the personal characteristics of great leaders. So trait theory has faded really, and we've realized there were lots of different ways to do a job. I think the good news for us mere mortals is that charisma isn't needed in order to be a great manager, a great boss, a great leader. And that's a relief cause we can't learn charisma. The great thing is there are simple things you can do, which of course I'm going to go through during this course. So trait theory was replaced by something called transactional leadership, which I think is much better. And transactional leadership says, it's what you do that counts. There are simple things that work like communicating with people, giving them clear goals, focusing on the positive, thanking them. And these are all the things we're going to go through during this course. It's all easy stuff that you can do, and yet so few bosses do it. Which is great because there's a real opportunity here to be better than the average, in fact, to be one of the best bosses out there. So if you do what I'm going to cover on this course, you'll be right up there with the best. So let's get started.

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