Leaders' Role as Counselors: Techniques, Qualities, and Challenges

This essay delves into the crucial role of leaders as counselors within a workplace environment. It emphasizes that effective leadership extends beyond traditional job roles, encompassing the ability to motivate and inspire employees to reach their full potential. The study examines the benefits of leaders adopting a counseling role, highlighting various leadership techniques, such as active listening and problem-solving, that can help address employee issues, including burnout and miscommunication. It also identifies essential leadership qualities like strong communication skills and the ability to build trust and empathy. Furthermore, the essay acknowledges the challenges leaders may face while acting as counselors, such as preventing employee dependency. The conclusion reinforces the importance of communication and observation in fostering effective leader-employee relationships and achieving a harmonious work environment. The essay also includes a reference list of supporting literature.

LEADERS AND COUNSELING
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Leadership is not only about sticking to a particular job with limited roles and
responsibilities but rather this is a special ability that allows the leader to motivate and
inspire employees so that their potentials can be maximized in a workplace scenario.
Leadership can be successful if the leaders play the role of a counselor for their
respective employees. Thus, this study deals with the role of leaders as counselors and
the benefits that come with it. For that reason, various leadership techniques have been
mentioned that can be helpful in directing the leaders to be effective counselors to solve
issues related to the employees. On the other hand, some leadership qualities have
been mentioned here that make a leader more efficient in employee counseling.
Moreover, some challenges of leaders being counselors have been illuminated further
in the study.
Leaders have an agenda to maintain a harmony in the workplace by communicating
with the employees. For doing so, leaders need some qualities that can make them
efficient in being counselors. Firstly, communicative ability helps a leader to solve
issues generated from any kind of miscommunication among employees (Crawford,
Arnold and Brown, 2014). This quality can assist the leader to persuade the employees
not only to work harmoniously but also to solve employee burnout issues. On the other
hand, the problem solving quality within a leader makes the employees comfortable
enough to rely on the leader at the time of confusion. Thus, this ability can be helpful for
the leaders to deal with psychological issues of the employees (Goodyear et al. 2016).
Moreover, leaders need to build a reliable relationship with the employees so that they
can feel free to share even their personal issue with the leader. This is helpful because
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employees need to have a stress free personal life in order to give their maximum
efforts in any workplace scenario.
The qualities of being efficient as a counselor can only be achieved by following certain
leadership techniques. For example, the leaders can be able to solve issues related to
employee burnout or work exhaustion by using the technique of active listening
(Raffnsøe and Staunæs, 2014). This is so because employees can get a scope to share
their problems with their leaders if the leaders listen to them actively. This, in turn, can
be very helpful in creating a rapport between the employees and the leader. On the
other hand, the leaders need to share an equal space with the employees so that they
feel comfortable to share their problems with the leader. In addition, leaders can only
earn the position of a counselor for the employees if the leader can spontaneously show
empathy and trust towards the workers (Slater et al. 2014). This can be achieved by
giving employees the opportunity to engage themselves within the leader-employee
communication.
On the other hand, a thorough counseling is needed from the part of the leader in order
to keep the employees motivated. In addition, with the counseling techniques, a leader
can make his/her employees feel safe and secured within the workplace. Apart from
that, leaders are the ones whom the employees follow and thus the above mentioned
leadership techniques can help the employees in building self counseling capabilities.
Leadership training is highly needed for the leaders to be efficient in the above
mentioned leadership qualities (Roberts, 2013). Moreover, communication is the key to
employee counseling that works as facilitator of a great group performance in a
workplace. On the contrary, leaders can face several challenges while acting as a
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counselor that can hamper the pace of organizational growth (McKibben, Umstead and
Borders, 2017). For example, employees can become more dependent on their leader if
the leader becomes unable to teach them how to use self counseling skills. Thus, the
aim of the leaders needs to prepare the employees in a way that they become able to
differentiate between which issue to rely on and which issue to solve on their own.
In order to conclude, it can be said that counseling is one of the vital aspects of being
an efficient leader. Thus, it is essential to observe the employees first in order to learn
more about them. This observation can help the leaders in using appropriate leadership
techniques for the employees. In this study, it has been found that the role of leaders is
multifaceted and communication is the key to build an effective relationship among the
employees and the leaders.
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Reference list
Crawford, E.R., Arnold, N.W. and Brown, A., 2014. From preservice leaders to
advocacy leaders: exploring intersections in standards for advocacy in educational
leadership and school counselling. International Journal of Leadership in
Education, 17(4), pp.481-502.
Goodyear, R., Lichtenberg, J., Hutman, H., Overland, E., Bedi, R., Christiani, K., Di
Mattia, M., du Preez, E., Farrell, B., Feather, J. and Grant, J., 2016. A global portrait of
counselling psychologists’ characteristics, perspectives, and professional
behaviors. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 29(2), pp.115-138.
McKibben, W.B., Umstead, L.K. and Borders, L.D., 2017. Identifying dynamics of
counseling leadership: A content analysis study. Journal of Counseling &
Development, 95(2), pp.192-202.
Raffnsøe, S. and Staunæs, D., 2014. Learning to stay ahead of time: moving leadership
experiences experimentally. Management & Organizational History, 9(2), pp.184-201.
Roberts, G.E., 2013. Leadership coping skills: Servant leader workplace spiritual
intelligence. Journal of Strategic Leadership, 4(2), pp.52-69.
Slater, M.J., Coffee, P., Barker, J.B. and Evans, A.L., 2014. Promoting shared
meanings in group memberships: A social identity approach to leadership in
sport. Reflective Practice, 15(5), pp.672-685.
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