by Mattie Mutare

Created on: January 24, 2009   Last Updated: March 04, 2011

Effective leaders may differ in personality and style but each in their given context produces results for all to witness again and again. You know you are an effective leader if you induce animation in others, exude infectious energy, generate enthusiasm and confidence. You are an effective leader if you head an eager procession of committed followers chasing lofty targets with irresistible commitment. Being an effective leader must surely mean that you get improbable goals achieved fast, effectively and efficiently. You know you are being an effective leader when the commitment you generate in subordinates, peers and associates is enduring, and their motivation is almost religious.

 You know you are being an effective leader when team members relate to you, almost exclusively, from referent and expert power and almost never from your legitimate or reward power. Coercion is nearly never necessary because each team member is driven from internal volition to serve the team cause. When you speak of the future and goals the team members' eyes twinkle with ready zeal.  Contemporary management literature points out that General Electric, Apple, 3M, Microsoft and others are organizations where effective leadership has been at play and the results exemplify it.

You know you are being effective when the entity you lead is the best or nearly the best in its industry especially in innovating uncharted ways and directions; you and your organization are the ones everyone else is mimicking and emulating. You become a phenomenon to be beheld, studied and marvelled at. This is the almost magnetic effect that separates effective leadership from merely excellent management. Leaders know they are being effective when they regularly cut fresh paths to new universes of possibilities in which mere mortals then build their own arenas for ordinary performance.

The outstandingly effective chairman of General Electric, Jeffrey R. Immelt, wrote this closing paragraph in his letter to investors in their 2007 annual report."We have averaged earnings growth of 11% over the past 25 years, including 16% in 2007. We have increased our dividend for 32 straight years. We invest and deliver: every day every quarter every year and we will in 2008. Thank you for all of your support. Our best days are ahead."

You know you are being effective when, month after month, year after year or decade after decade you continue achieving quantum leaps of progress, however measured. You know you are being effective if, over these long stretches of time, followers and team members push themselves up impossible cliffs of challenges and overcome them  from internal dynamos fired up by inspirational leadership and neither carrot nor stick.

Finally, you know you are being an effective leader when you continually seek feedback from your team members; being sensitive to the common opinion on how your pursuit is going. Characteristically you inspire higher thresholds of tolerance to difficulty at the frontiers of performance. Your team remains fully charged for further assault on a future continuously re-created in your shared imagination. You cannot help knowing and seeing that you are being an effective leader if you are truly an effective leader - the results are too obvious to miss - after all you are the standard against which all other ordinary leaders are measured.

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