Do you have one of the characteristics of poor leaders?
- You recruit a competent professional; after a series of interviews and competence assessment
- You give them a job description – over 5 pages of lists of what their activities will be
- And then you tell them how to do it
If you do that, you are probably killing their creativity and innovation.
Leadership is about setting clear targets – clarifying on outputs or performance indicators based on say balanced score card areas – FLIC – financial, learning & growth, internal business processes (innovation) and customer focus.
e.g.
- Financial – Turnover US $100,000 annual revenue; gross profit margin 50% and net profit margin 20%.
- Learning & growth – 100% awareness of the internal policies and procedures by all staff; 10% staff turnover; etc.
- Customer focus – 90% retention, 80% referral rate
- Etc
That way, as a leader, you focus on the bigger picture. You have clear key result areas (KRAs) communicated to your staff; and it is up to them to give you interventions/ strategies on how they plan to deliver. As long as their interventions are legit – within laws and company policies, they have flexibility to be creative and think to deliver the expectations. The next thing is to give them a specific report format of how you want them to give you updates on the progress of attaining the targets, lessons and next steps — in case of failure to attain the targets. It could indicate need to review and revise the targets.
And that happens to be the secret of great leaderships.
Summary:
- Set clear result areas – what are your expectations of your team. what do you want your team to deliver
- Communicate it to them
- Give then flexibility to use their brains
- Conduct on going monitoring
Copyright Mustapha B Mugisa. All rights reserved. 2015
