Inspirational leaders as enablers play a crucial role in creating a culture of collaboration, empower teams to drive optimum performance by encouraging employee involvement in decision making and in developing high-performance leaders/teams. Inspirational leaders should be experts in articulating the vision, mobilizing the required support and involvement of their teams for the achievement of the ultimate vision. They should be able to assess the opportunities and visualize the possibilities, communicate the same with others and gather their support and be able to align the individual goals with the organizational vision. Successful leaders must have an extraordinary ability to anticipate the change, analyze the developments or changes in the external environment, capitalize the opportunities by taking proactive initiatives and be skilled in experimenting or taking risks.
Inspirational leaders motivate teams for achieving excellence in performance by appreciating & recognizing their contributions, sharing the success stories and achievements with the team members and celebrating the achievement of the common goals. Inspirational leaders do have an extraordinary ability in personifying and representing the organization’s values before everyone and get the support of others in modelling the common values. They should be able to cite out success stories or live examples of how others have achieved success by endorsing the common values and following it in their day to day behaviour.
‘Emotional Self-awareness’ means reading one’s own emotions and recognizing their impact such as using a ‘gut-sense’ to guide decisions. It is one’s ability to be aware of one’s feelings and emotions, to be able to differentiate between them, to know what one is feeling and why, and to know what caused the feelings. It means recognizing one’s emotions and their effects. ‘Accurate Self-assessment’ means knowing about one’s strengths and limits. It means thriving on an open, honest, compassionate feedback about one’s strengths and limits.
‘Empathy’ means sensing others’ emotions, understanding their perspectives, and taking active interest in their concerns. Hence, ‘empathy’ means ‘fellow feeling’ and understanding and entering into another's feelings. ‘Organizational Awareness’ means understanding and reading the current, decision networks, and politics at the organizational levels. It means understanding a group’s emotional currents and power relationships.