10 Leadership Tips You Can Implement Today
For those in leadership roles who want to see a major improvement in their teams or departments’ performance or those who have just been assigned to a leadership role and want to have an immediate impact, here are my top ten leadership tips!
- Be Bold
You can’t inspire teams with small goals, and you will not create a significant improvement in performance with small goals either. You should set ambitious goals, but not impossible goals. Stretch your team, challenge them, and make them think about doing things differently.
- Simplify
Keep things simple, complex goals are rarely achieved. The more you can simplify the more your team will be able to understand, and the more likely they will be able to come up with solutions or new approaches. Too often teams are confused by following too many targets, my preference is always to set a handful of key goals, generally 3.
- Have Confidence
The team will reflect your confidence level, if you don’t show confidence then they will not feel confident either. Confidence is very important, without it success has a lower probability. So be confident!
- Create Confidence
Build your team up, give them positive feedback about their abilities, and tell them that you have confidence that they can achieve the goals that you have set for them, in fact you believe they could achieve even more. Confidence builds belief and belief delivers success.
- Challenge Current Thinking
Often it’s the current process that limits performance and it’s the processes that need to be changed. Challenge everything, especially any limitations which your team feel may exist. Limitations are usually self-imposed, and if questioned they can often be removed. Don’t ask your team what’s stopping them, ask them what they would need to overcome this obstacle. Get them thinking about what could be done, rather than what can’t be done.
- Be Honest
Honesty is the basis of trust and trust is the basis for leadership. Without trust, you will achieve very little.
- Lead By Example
Lead by action and achievement, show the way, lead the way. Get involved, and be hands-on where possible, even if it’s just to provide positive feedback and encouragement. No one follows an administrative leader!
- Create Early Success
Success breed success, so create some early success. Get your team used to achieving their targets, and get them to expect to win and to succeed. By doing this you’re well on your way to creating a winning culture. Every team wants to be successful and over time small successes will grow into big successes.
- Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
You can never over-communicate. It’s true that you can poorly communicate, or communicate and say nothing, but if your messages are clear if your targets are clear, then communicate, communicate communicate. Communicate your goals, communicate your plan and communicate your progress so that your team knows what to do, how to do it, and the progress that they are making.
- Celebrate Successes
Always celebrate success, even small successes, you need to get your team to get used to being successful and enjoy being successful. It doesn’t have to be a huge celebration it could just be a small affair, some positive public feedback and a bottle of wine. When you do that just look at their faces, and you will see people who now want more success, who want to feel this good about themselves again.
None of these tips are difficult to implement, but they are extremely powerful and if you implement all 10 you will see a change in your team’s performance.
Not only that you will see a team that enjoys its work, is motivated and who are inspired by their leader, i.e. you!
If you want to learn more about creating highly engaged teams or being a better leader click the link to make an appointment to talk about how I can help.
