Follow the Leader, Build the Perfect Leadership Environment
Simply Hired Staff
Hiring and developing leaders in the workplace has long been a popular topic in recruiting circles. But in recent years, leadership has been on track to become far more than water cooler chat.
According to recent Simply Hired data, 23 percent of job descriptions seek leadership and strategic thinking in 2015. This is a significant amount of demand that indicates an interesting trend: what is leadership, and how do we become, hire and encourage leaders in the 21st-century workplace?
Defining Leadership in the Workplace
The first definition we should identify is how employers define leadership. According to data analysis of Simply Hired job descriptions, common words that employers use to identify leaders are leader, leadership, strategic thinker, goal-oriented, assertive and self-starter.
However, these words don’t completely encompass what leadership means to each of us in real life. Since leadership means different things to different people, it is often difficult to define on paper. Instead, we recognize it when we see it in real life and in the stories that we pass down from job to job.
Some of these stories are so common that they border on mythical, such as IBM CEO Tom Watson’s message of the power of failure. Other stories are more personal and tied to our own career experiences, such as the stalwart manager who fights for her team behind closed doors.
What do these stories have in common? How do they play out in the workplace to build and sustain company culture? And how can you learn from these stories to recruit and train leaders in the workplace to meet the growing demand for leadership in 2015 and beyond? That’s what we intend to explore.
Exploring Leadership in the Workplace
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring the idea of leadership and how it plays out in the modern workplace for recruiters, human resource managers and employees alike. Our goal is to help energize you to become a better leader, hire better leaders and encourage more leadership in the workplace. To get us started, click on the reply arrow below and share your definition of leadership on Twitter.
Fill in the blank: My definition of #leadership is _______________________.
— Simply Hired (@SimplyHired) June 1, 2015
Throughout this series, we’ll identify important metrics and characteristics that indicate leadership in the workplace. We’ll also consider how individual HR managers can activate their own leadership skills to become better leaders, recruit and hire better leaders and nurture leaders from within.
We invite you to reflect on your understanding of leadership as you read through this series and contribute your thoughts on leadership in the workplace. Because if there’s one thing that’s true about leadership, it’s that it starts on an individual level and grows when individuals take action.
