Here’s how you can lead without being the boss

Being a leader doesn’t just mean that you have to stick to formal authority. Leaders are effective when others acknowledge their ideas and value their suggestions. Having said that, opportunities to lead aren’t limited to times when you have a formal designation for it. It’s when you step forward and demonstrate leadership that you strengthen your skills and make for a good leader, despite not being the boss. Here’s how you do the same.

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You must know that you can accomplish the most when you have a clear set of objectives. The person who can discuss and draft the team’s goals is automatically taking a leadership role, no matter what his or her position is.

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Effective leadership is when you learn to gather and lay out necessary data, analyze the causes of the situation and propose actions that are based on this analysis. Leadership can help participants to focus by asking appropriate questions about having enough information to make an analysis and if you can focus on figuring out the cause of the problems.

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Every project that a team works on has a review session at the end of it. This helps them figure out what they learned from it. But it’s even more effective for teams to learn as they go along. A leadership role is extensively seen in someone who prompts the group to engage in mini-reviews regularly and learn from them. This helps as the events are fresh in everyone’s mind. And the team can use what they learn from these minireviews to make the necessary adjustments in the project.

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An effective leader should suggest writing down a list of chores and give each chore to subgroups or individuals. If no one wants to do a particular task, you can then brainstorm ways to make that task more interesting or challenging. You can help draw out the group’s quieter members so that everyone can feel a part of the overall project.

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If you’re not the boss, it’s not a problem, you can still provide feedback. One thing that is always valued is appreciation. Sometimes, you can help your coworkers improve their performance through coaching. Ask them questions on how they feel about a project or what made it hard to accomplish a task. They will give out thoughtful suggestions for improvement. And if you think a certain job could be done in a better way, you can always give out a suggestion to the team.

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