It is hard to coach or teach leadership in a few paragraphs.
But let’s try by limiting this short insight to a list of the five principal tactical skills of a great leader. These are not the strategic visionary skills, like leading companies through risky product launches, or steering the course through economic storms where leaders become oversized personalities for their superhuman efforts. These are the skills of daily operation, the ones that make or break a company – from the top.
Think of those leaders from your past or present whom you respect most. Compare their leadership style with these five skills.
Skill number one: delegate.
Nothing is more of a turn off to a subordinate than having their leader do the work for that person. Worse yet, failures to delegate make the leader the principal bottleneck in the flow of work through an organization. A great leader learns to delegate, first.
Second: measure the results of delegation.
If there is no attempt to measure, no-one will know if the work is up to standards for timeliness, quality, or the vision of the leader. There are many types of metrics, some very easy to manage. But failure to find and use them regularly is a failure at the top.
Third: support.
A leader’s duty is to make sure that anything s/he delegates, and measures is given a chance of success by providing the tools required to perform the job. Those include funding, people, training, and facilities.
Fourth: reward.
[Email readers, continue here…] A great leader is a great cheerleader, knowing when and how to reward effective achievement through all levels of the organization. People naturally work for rewards, from simple recognition to financial incentives.
Fifth: celebrate.
There is no greater feeling than to achieve a goal and to celebrate that with some form of out-of-the-ordinary event. It can be a simple handshake and comment in front of others who count, or an all-company celebration after achievement of a major goal. A leader who fails to follow through and celebrate misses a major opportunity to enhance the culture of the organization and motivate the troops to further achievements.
Delegate, measure, support, reward and celebrate.
These qualities are applicable whether you are leading your company, a board, or a group of people – and certainly are aspiration targets for you if you are measuring yourself against the best.
issues first, before the easiest ones to knock off the list.
to you to be just an unimportant little stretch of the facts. An estimate of the number of customers, of the amount of traffic to your website, of the numbers of products sold or hours spent in development – there are thousands of areas where a number sounds better when it is larger.
customers and then central systems that in turn support direct customers. The company in mind provides systems to serve both, but its salespeople count as customers all the indirect customers served by the one system sold to oversee them. The result is an inflated number of total customers, which when compared to the competition counting only direct customers, makes the company look much larger and with greater market share.
expenditure of company money for expansion, acquisitions, purchases of large assets, hiring of senior management and more. A board is usually composed of a mixture of the senior executives or the CEO, at least one representative of the investors, and at least one industry expert from outside the company.
It is important to make time for the required duties at board meetings. Approving the budget and watching over it during the year and approving any actions that would dilute ownership including stock option grants, are two examples. Much less understood are issues that address the management of risk, such as review of corporate insurance policies, adherence to OSHA or HIPAA safety regulations, and oversight of the terms of real estate and large equipment leases that could affect a company’s ability to maneuver in times of crisis or extreme growth.
overhead and increases profit or reduces cash burn. So, this issue becomes one to be dealt with by every manager at every level of your organization. Building efficiency into every corporate activity should be a corporate mandate, one to be discussed interdepartmentally, to be refereed by the CEO.
experienced in your past or present. It is your job to drive the company out of the time bankruptcy zone and to watch for signs of it occurring in the future, stopping the process before it becomes critical. That means watching quality control efforts more carefully, developing metrics to track incomplete processes and track remaining time committed to completion, watching the number of customers exposed to a new product or service before general release, and more.
the case of board members, if a board member has few appropriate relationships in his or her field of expertise or from past experience, then perhaps the board member is not appropriate for the company at this time. And if the board member refuses to volunteer or allow such relationships when needed by the CEO, that board member should be held to task by the other members of the board. And it is wise to have a private discussion with that person because sometimes the reason for refusal to make such introductions is because of a lack of confidence or passion relating to the company or its founder.
find many ways to focus on personal issues while at work, detracting from productivity and demonstrating a disrespect for the time paid for by their employer. In fact, if we were to be direct, we might label it “stealing time,” and consider it a crime of sorts.
As in all two-sided arguments, there usually is a middle ground. The boss who requires complete adherence to the work-every-minute ethic called for in the employee handbook generates ill will when enforcing the rule. But the manager, who openly ignores the behavior, encourages more of it from employees who will fall in to follow the example they see openly acknowledged.
with all the details each employee or associate deals with daily. Yet, many times that other person tries to explain an important finding or breakthrough, or make a significant comparison, using names of destination sites or apps or tools we have never used or heard of.
predicable. Small companies have trouble finding new people to honor after a while. Some employees even disingenuously consider the process an exercise in pandering, discounting the effectiveness of the award, and disenchanting those very managers who thought they were reaching out to do a good thing.
arranging for my assistant to obtain the appropriate amount of hundred dollar bills from the bank, and then to follow me around checking off names, I had my own personal holiday celebrating each individual in the team with a handshake, words of thanks, and a C-note. With lots of laughter and thanks, the celebration and words “Great Job” made for a completely memorable event. And those pop-up thank you visits from the boss certainly contributed to the culture of the company. Word does travel.
