What Does Leadership Mean?

Formal Definition:

Show pride and passion for public service. Create and engage others in delivering a shared vision. Value difference, diversity and inclusion, ensuring fairness and opportunity for all.

The behaviour Leadership also know as Leading and Communicating is an essential skill. It can help to inspire, unite and organise, give direction, and bring out the best in coworkers.

Contrary to popular thought, it is not just managers who show leadership; we can all do so, irrespective of the role or level we are at.

The key points summarising what Leadership means:

• Being a role model, inspiring your peers to conduct themselves with authority and
• integrity and carry out their tasks with enthusiasm.
• Showing enthusiasm, pride and passion in your work and taking personal accountability for your role.
• Acting in a fair, inclusive and respectful way when dealing with others.
• For senior roles, it is about creating and engaging others in delivering a shared vision.

How Can I Show This Behaviour?

Many people associate leadership with seniority and titles, but it’s often so much more than that. Leadership can take many forms, it’s the ability of an individual to inspire their peers, to conduct themselves with authority and integrity and carry out their tasks with enthusiasm.

Showing leadership means being inspirational and you can do this on a daily basis by supporting and motivating, asking questions and learning from your co-workers and doing the very best you can in your work.

Here are some practical ways you can apply it in your job.

• Give guidance and support to those around you
• Act in a fair and respectful way in dealing with others
• Inspire those around you to be the best that they can be
•  Adapt to challenging situations and able to think quickly and selflessly
• Delegate responsibility when the need arises and ensure delegates have the tools to thrive
• Build relationships with other the team, colleagues and other department leaders
• Excellent communication in terms of the goals, objectives and needs of your team
• Being a role model showing enthusiasm and energy about your work and encourage others to do the same

What Type of Situations Could I Talk About?

Even when recruiting for starter or junior posts employers will be looking for leadership qualities. Our advice is to review your experience and identify situations where you showed Leadership skills. Keep in mind there is a difference between leadership and management and an interviewer will be expecting you to show that you understand that difference.

Leadership can be displayed in many forms and here are some potential scenarios to help refresh your memory when choosing your examples.

Did you….

• Act as a role model during a difficult time, conducting yourself with integrity and enthusiasm.
• Volunteer for projects showing that you’re willing to take on additional duties.
• Take on additional tasks demonstrating that you’re able to help out your managers and co-workers to deal with their workload.
• Bring in new processes to improve efficiency, showing that you have what it takes to step up.
• Share your good ideas and explain why they could be helpful proving that you’re committed to the organisation.
• • Inspire others to do something great, to make an improvement to do something
• better.
• Initiate something, a project perhaps which resulted in a special outcome.
• Make a difficult but correct decision and persuade others to agree with it.
• Deal with conflict, an argument or other issue in the team and help resolve it.
• • Give guidance and support to those around you.
• Deal with an emergency or unusual situation stepping up to the mark and taking the initiative to resolve it.
• Delegate responsibility, encouraged the best from your team and delivered a great outcome.
• Build relationships with other the team, colleagues and other department leaders.
• Communicate clearly the organisation’s goals and objectives, motivating the team to achieve those goals.

Questions to Expect in Your Interview

The application form and the interview both give you an opportunity to demonstrate your skills in this area and you will be asked to give an example of where you have used them effectively. The questions will most likely be competency-based requiring an example of a past situation where you have demonstrated the required behaviours.

Here are some sample questions – take a moment and see how you would answer.

• Give an example of when you have demonstrated this competency.
• Describe a time when your leadership skills made a difference.
• Tell us about a time when you showed leadership. What did you learn from the experience?
• Describe a time when you showed exceptional leadership skills and inspired outstanding performance.
• Tell me about a time when you inspired someone more senior than you, a manager, stakeholder or partner and how you went about this.

How to Answer

Answering successfully will be based on a combination of a relevant example structured in the right way. Here are our top guidelines for giving a winning answer.

Guidelines for Answering

1. Use the STAR or IPAR Formulas: Study the lessons on using STAR and IPAR if you haven’t done so yet.

2. Choose the right example: Talk about a decision that is relevant, recent and sufficiently complex. Learn more in this lesson.

3. Be ready for probing questions: They may ask about obstacles and challenges or about what you learned from the process.

4. Be creative: Interviewers will like to see that you can think outside the box for solutions when required.

5. Watch out for risk: Employers will want to know that you have considered the risk of your decision not meeting the outcome and assessed that likelihood.

6. Strike a balance: Understanding potential conflict and making a decision that takes this into account will be important.

7. Remember the bigger picture: Show interviewers that you took on the decision considering a broader scope and how it played a part in future decisions.

8. Describe a positive outcome: Employers will want to know that you can achieve success from effective decision making.

9. Stay on track: Select an example that is clear and succinct to explain, and that is relatable to the organisation that is interviewing you.