Effective communication is the bedrock of every successful organisation: helping to engage team members internally and to promote a positive external image. Understanding how different personalities process information, and whether their preferences are based on emotion or logic can help your communications be even more effective, and more openly received.
Do you know how you will get your business to the place you want it to be? Before that: do you have a good idea of where you want to go with your organisation? An effective leader should have a good understanding of where their business is going, and an overview of the steps to get there. Most importantly, they should be able to communicate that future and the plan in a convincing way to take their team with them.
Establishing a company culture is a long process that takes continuous effort to embed it. It is easiest when everyone works in the same place but in an organisation with physically disparate teams, it can be difficult for a culture to take hold and even more difficult to sustain it.
“And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
The Eisenhower Decision Matrix is one of those simple-yet-effective leadership tools that crops up in leadership skills circles all the time, although sometimes under a different name. The idea was derived from an Eisenhower quote, ‘What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.’ As leaders, we can often end up dealing with the top left-hand corner of the matrix – things that are both important and urgent. Crises, deadlines or problems demand our team’s immediate attention and send stress levels soaring.
“Once a month, go to lunch with someone who knows more about your business than you do.” Author H Jackson Brown.
Your attitudes, values, emotions, and moods will influence how you behave, whatever situation you are in. How you feel about a particular task that day will directly affect how much effort you put into it and, consequently, the success of that task.
Having a life outside of work is highly important; not having one is detrimental to the mental health and wellbeing of everyone in the organisation. There is a lot a pressure on people and having a demanding job or boss can sometimes affect personal lives.
When delegating work to your employees, it is essential to understand the time constraints they face. As a leader, you should understand how long jobs realistically take to complete and acknowledge the needs of your employees including their current workload, changing demands from others and potentially even their circumstances outside work. This may mean you need to spend time with them to understand their world. Here are a few tips to help:
Change is inevitable within any business – whatever the sector they are in. Some common kinds of change faced by organisations include downsizing, changing locations and restructuring. One thing is true for all changes in business and that is that they affect employees. It doesn’t matter whether the change is positive for an organisation or even a really simple one like changing the colour of a wall; employees will often still feel unsettled. In addition, the only constant is change as the world we live and work in moves on.