The Secret Ingredient of Leadership Development: The 5 Pillars of Leadership

You want to have great leaders in your organization — people who embody the 5 pillars of leadership and can:

• Lead your team effectively
• Manage teams through demanding projects
• Create a pipeline of future leaders in the company

To do that, the leaders you have will need to embody the 5 pillars that create a stable foundation of leadership. This article will help you understand the 5 leadership pillars and how your team leaders can develop them professionally and personally.

The 5 pillars of leadership

There are 5 pillars of leadership. They are reflective of one’s:

• Values
• Motivations
• Support teams
• An integrated life
• Self-awareness

All of these pillars are essential if you want to have strong and stable leaders within your organization. Let’s jump right into each pillar to understand why they’re so fundamental when it comes to leadership.

The leadership pillar of values

Values are an individual’s or organization’s deeply held beliefs. They provide guidelines that direct a person’s behavior, whether from a personal or professional perspective.

A leader always has a set of values, whether they’re aware of them or not. Their values are seen through the individual’s or organization’s actions when they’re entrenched in various complex challenges, problems, and situations.

Because a value is only of worth when it’s tested, there’s no point in claiming that honesty is an individual’s value if it was never tested during a potentially compromising situation. For example, an individual claiming honesty as a value will uphold that value even if they’re offered millions to do something that isn’t ethical or honest.

In order to develop values in your leaders, you will need to allow them opportunities to go through difficult situations, challenges, and problems and to come out the other side as a stronger person.

The same principle applies to all values — they can only be confirmed through situations that test them.

Honesty, integrity, courage, generosity, and other values must be tested when implementing them is difficult. That’s why they’re deeply rooted in the fabric of one’s existence.

In order to develop values in your leaders, you will need to allow them opportunities to go through difficult situations, challenges, and problems and to come out the other side as a stronger person. Give them projects you know will be difficult to successfully implement. Throughout the process, jointly evaluate their behavior.

Although individuals can consciously decide what they want to hold as their own values, they will likely find that those values change and evolve as the person overcomes complex challenges. Therefore, make sure you provide your staff with opportunities for development.

The leadership pillar of motivation

All motivations can be divided into two buckets: intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic motivations come from within the individual and are deeply personal. They’re the elements that feed and nourish the individual’s soul, heart, and mind. Some examples of intrinsic motivation include:

• A sense of autonomy
• Expertise in a field
• Purpose in life and business

Extrinsic motivations come from outside the individual. They’re the elements that exist in the world around us, and once received, they provide us with satisfaction for a job well done. Extrinsic motivations can range from:

• A salary increase and bonuses
• Receiving the employee of the month reward
• Gaining a higher social status in the company

A stable leader will understand how much motivation they need from one bucket and how much they need from the other bucket. Everyone needs both intrinsic and extrinsic needs met, but they’re not the same for every leader.

Some leaders want more intrinsic motivations, while others will thrive when receiving extrinsic rewards. It’s up to every leader to understand themselves and realize how much inspiration they need from each bucket to function optimally.

When they asked Shackleton how he managed to keep his team mentally stable when they were lost in the Antarctic sea, he said, “I treated every member of the team fair, but not the same. Fairness isn’t sameness.” Shackleton realized that some members preferred extrinsic motivation. In contrast, others thrived from intrinsic motivation, so he gave them what they needed.

As a leader, you need to understand your employees’ needs and provide them with that so they can be effective and productive in the organization.

The pillar of a strong support team

No person ever succeeds alone. A stable leader must create an effective support team that will keep them grounded. It doesn’t matter if it’s one person who steers them away from disaster or an entire group of people that provide the necessary support.

As a leader of leaders, you need to be the pillar of support for your team leaders. They will need to know that you’re there for them whatever happens and that you will advise them on how to proceed.

A leader that isolates themself from others and no longer hears any advice is bound to make terrible mistakes and be their own downfall. If values are a building’s foundation, it’s critical to acknowledge that a support team is a framework that leads us into an integrated life.

Living leadership through an integrated life

Integrated life changed the term work-life balance because it’s impossible to have a work-life balance. Work-life balance meant you needed to shut down your entire thinking regarding your career and office once the clock hits the time for you to go home.

That was possible when most people worked in factories, and the job required the employees to perform repeatable mundane tasks. In today’s market, employees need to be creative and innovative. This requires them to be fully engaged and think about their role. Try telling your marketing manager to stop thinking about their work once they leave the company — they can’t. It’s nearly impossible.

But this approach started creating problems with employees who were always “on” when it came to work, and they couldn’t shut down their thinking. Productivity experts learned that the solution to the problem wasn’t work-life balance but an integrated life.

People started to live their job, which became a part of their identity. That was how they achieved “work-life balance.” They decided they didn’t have to find balance when their work was already a part of them.

Imagine telling Usain Bolt that he is no longer a runner after he finished his daily training and went home. He would look at you like you’d lost your mind.

Employees today need to embrace the same mentality, and that’s particularly true for leaders. They must lead by example and adopt the mindset of an integrated life. As a leader of leaders, you can help them do so by enabling them to find their purposeful work.

The gift of self-awareness

The final leadership pillar is the most important of them all — self-awareness. Just as courage is a foundational value because it’s required to practice all other values, self-awareness is the leadership pillar that enables all other leadership pillars.

As a leader of leaders, you need to be the pillar of support for your team leaders. They will need to know that you’re there for them whatever happens and that you will advise them on how to proceed.

A leader with self-awareness will:

• Understand their values
• Find the proper measure when it comes to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
• Create a stellar support team
• Lead an integrated life

As a leader of leaders, you must provide your team leaders with leadership development training to help them develop self-awareness. This will allow your leaders to understand their blind spots and start working on them.

Implement the 5 pillars of leadership

Once you implement the 5 pillars of leadership in your team leaders, they will become better and more effective team leaders. If you need additional information and inspiration regarding creating leadership experiences, you should read Why Courage Is an Essential Leadership Quality in our blog section.