Effective Leadership Actions
At the end of the day, only action produces results in the business world. Building relationships, developing others and making decisions lead to more effective actions. However, it’s the actions of you and your team—along with the outcomes they produce—that truly build your reputation as a great leader and demonstrate your ability to master and enact effective leadership skills.
Practice great leadership skills in your organization and with your teams with these ten steps:
1. Choose Action or Inaction Wisely
Deciding when to take action is a fundamental leadership choice. You can lead your people into action quickly, or you can let the energy build while they prepare for what must be done. Both approaches are appropriate at times given their situation.
2. Make Teamwork a Priority
Even high potential employees must perform as part of a team to be successful. Conflicting actions or complaints about difficulties in getting agreement and working as a cohesive group are symptoms of poor teamwork.
Effective leadership means taking care of teamwork issues first, which will make other challenges much easier to navigate.
3. Hold Planning Conversations
The time you spend in upfront planning conversations with employees and teams is less than the time you would otherwise spend correcting the unintended and costly consequences of poorly planned and misaligned actions. They allow you to get everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction as a team.
4. Ensure That the Plan is Understood
Ask high potential employees, especially those who didn’t participate in the planning stages of the project, to describe your organisation’s goals and strategies. If their answers are accurate and in alignment with the overall goals, congratulate yourself. If they aren’t, improve the methods you use to communicate the strategic plan to your employees.
5. Plan for Obsolescence
Look at the products and services you offer today. Which will be irrelevant three years from now? Keep the ones that make sense for the long run and develop a plan for how you will transition out those that don’t.
6. Create a People Strategy
Invest as much time and resource into creating a people strategy for your next major change as in developing new processes and systems. People are much more open to and will accept change when they feel it is necessary, when their inputs are heard, and when they believe that the process of change is fair.
7. Learn From Success
Looking back, would you say you learnt more from your failures than from your successes? If you said yes, spend more time examining your recent successes to determine how you can repeat and expand them. Ask your teams what they feel created the successes and where things went wrong with the failures.
Developing a plan together, based on feedback and experiences, is an important tactic for effective leadership.
8. Stretch the Comfort Zone
Think about your team’s biggest achievement last year. What have you learnt since then that could have made it bigger? Consider where employees can grow and develop. Then, gently push your employees into the uncomfortable learning zone and coach them to higher levels of success.
9. Confirm Alignment
When you finish a key meeting, ask each person what they will do next. Focus especially on how they plan to support each other through the life of the project or ask. Agreement is real only if all parties share the agreements, the actions to be taken, and the expected results.
10. Get Comfortable With Silence
Silence can be the prelude to a big decision or decisive action. Don’t rush to fill the silence. Give others a chance to think through and synthesize the information they have been given. Use silence in your conversations as a strategy and as time for thinking and reflecting on what is being said and planned.
Effective Leadership Builds Great Teams
The point of leadership is to align different groups of people toward a common goal. This requires a careful study of individuals and situations, which is why one of the best leadership qualities focuses on being a lifelong learner. It’s also why you need access to a trusted adviser who knows what it takes to build and manage a team. At Monster, that is our specialty, and we are ready to pitch in. Let us help you develop your workforce of the future. Post your job opening for free at Monster.