What defines a great leader is something that everyone has tried to know at some point. But if you have a business, the search for that answer is more than mere speculation; She can define her financial result.
There are two apparently opposing points of view on how to approach leadership. On the one hand, you can it isr focused on results. Just like a soccer coach or military sergeant, you can intimidate and direct your employees to success by keeping them focused on achieving their individual goals. The other alternative is to focus on employees and the relationships they have with each other. Focus on what motivates them, minimize what distracts them, and believe the results will come naturally.
However, this choice is flawed; To be a successful leader you have to focus on both. A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review shows that results-focused leaders were considered strong leaders by 14%. of respondents. Leaders focused on social skills were considered strong by 12% dthe searched. But leaders who struck a balance and focused on both were considered strong leaders.per 72% of respondents.
The balance between results and people need not be 50-50 necessarily, nor should it be the same in every situation. Finding the right balance requires understanding how people interact socially.
Social networks
The concept of “social network” is strongly associated with “social media”. When people listen to “social networks,” they think of Facebook or Twitter. But the idea of social networking is much more powerful. * Matthew D. Lieberman describes in his book “Social: Why Our Brains Are Programmed to Connect,” that our need to build connections with other people is what determines who we are and how we respond to situations. To define ourselves, we use as a basis the connections we have with those around us, our social network.
Nevertheless from an anthropological point of view, the development of social networks by mankind precedes, at least two million years, the cyberculture phenomenon of social media, because our genre is precisely defined by the ability to establish large social networks between distantly related individuals or even unknown to each other. This formidable cooperative capacity — that social media only empowers — distinguishes us from the cooperative behavior of other social species.
So social networking is a prerequisite sine qua non of our species, which transcend the channels in which they develop; in this case, the social community - be it a hunter-gatherer neolithic tribe or a business organization in the midst of interconnectedness.
If leaders want to succeed, they must be students of social networks. They need to learn how to interpret the dynamics of these interactions and understand how they can bring out the best in each person. They also need to learn how to prevent interactions that bring out the worst in each one.
Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)
The best way to become a social networking student is to perform an organizational network analysis. As discussed in Rob Cross and Andrew Parker's book, The Hidden Power of Social Network, network analytics can illustrate how employees communicate and work together effectively. Organizational network analysis is an exercise in visually mapping the connections between people, areas, and organizations, and discovering their relationship patterns, supported by a new type of Key Performance Indicator (KPI). As a result, leaders can literally see where their business's social network is failing and what can be done to reverse it. This enables leaders to improve their connection with their employees and enable them to achieve the results they desire.
