Whether you are already a leader or an aspiring leader, chances are you want to achieve success over a long period of time.  These days it is not uncommon for people to find that they are in senior level roles in their early to mid thirties.  On one hand this is positive on the other hand you still probably have 30 plus years of your career ahead of you.

While it is relatively easy to achieve individual successes, the real challenge is how to have sustained success as a leader over the longer term.  This means being able to thrive despite changes in the economy, customer or client preferences, setbacks or even major failures.

Truth is there no guarantees when it comes to leadership success in the long term.  At the same time there are things that you can do and actions that you can take to increase the likelihood of sustained success over the longer term.  So what are some of the things that you can do?

Recognise you are never the finished article

Be honest it is a great feeling when you achieve a promotion and especially when you move into leadership for the first time.  Yet the truth is that until this point you have been on path that is all about getting that first break into a formal leadership role.  Once you achieve this you step on to a very different path, where the expectations, demands and pressures change.  As you conquer some of these challenges new and different demands arise.

What this means for you as a leader is that you need to be willing to continue work on your growth and development, even when you are in a leadership role, so see leadership success as being ongoing work in progress.

Identify the building blocks

When we take on something new it always seems like a huge mountain.  After a while when we have done it a few times it just comes naturally.  When planning your career and success strategy, it is important to identify the building blocks.  These are simply the types of skills, experience, knowledge and attributes that you will need to work on to achieve the longer term success you desire.

Don’t expect to find a shortcut 

Being a leader carries with it huge responsibility.  You are no longer just responsible for your own self but also have responsibilities to employees, customers or clients, service users, shareholders and stakeholders to name just a few.  Becoming highly competent in each of these areas of responsibility takes time, so don’t expect to find a shortcut.

Bottom Line – You can either choose to achieve sporadic or sustained success as a leader.  What choice do you make?

As an organisation starts to achieve success, it gets bigger and bigger and those in leadership roles can easily fall into the trap of losing sight of the core purpose of the organisation.

It is understandable that people in leadership roles can easily lose sight of the purpose.  After all, they are often judged on:

• The delivery of short term profit targets.

• The pace at which they make change in the performance of the organisation.

• Their ability to hit a whole bundle of performance metrics.

• The speed at which they grow and deliver returns for investors.

So what’s the answer to this challenge?  Truth is there is no easy answer but there are things that those in leadership roles can do to increase their chances of keeping sight of the purpose.

Go back to basics regularly

In all the hustle and bustle of the day to day running of an organisation, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of never standing back from the here and now and ask the question, why does the organisation exist.

The immediate response which most will come up with are things like to make profits, increase shareholder value, customer satisfaction to name just a few.

Trouble is all these things only occur if the business or organisation is addressing what it was set out to do, so it is worthwhile taking time periodically to make sure that everyone is clear on why the organisation exists at all.  It will help in times of conflict, when making decisions both short term and long term and ensure that efforts are directed to what matters most.

Get out of your office

While major decisions might be taken in meetings in board rooms, the execution of those decisions takes place on the shop floor or frontline.  Getting out of your office gives the opportunity to see first hand what impact decisions are having on the organisation and those that it is seeking to serve.  It also gives a strong message that you care about the employees who are tasked with making the big decisions work day to day.

Remember that no one is bigger than the organisation

Unless you are the owner of the business and the person who is providing most of the finance chances are that your services or expertise can easily be dispensed with.  While people bring their own unique expertise and skills, they can be replaced.  Keeping focus on the results rather than your own personal agenda can greatly benefit when it comes to keeping the core purpose of the organisation at the forefront of your mind.

Bottom Line – If you want to increase chances of delivering success in an organisation be clear about and then work on keeping your focus on the core purpose.

If you are a leader I am guessing that you want you be successful and gain the rewards from that success.  At the same time, leading just like everything else requires ongoing work from you personally if you are to achieve success.

There are many steps or things that you can do to boost your success as a leader.

1.                  Start with an honest self assessment

The key to any form of performance improvement is being clear about where you currently are.  Taking some form of assessment will help you to get a clear insight into what you believe you are doing well and what you might want to change to get even better.

Sometimes people resist doing some form of assessment for fear that it will just leave them feeling de-motivated.  In my experience it has the complete opposite effect in that it I highlights and reminds you of the many things that you are dong exceptionally well.

2.                  Get some feedback

The honest self assessment will give you some great insights.  Supplement this with some form of third party feedback and you will have a really comprehensive picture of your overall strengths and areas where you can become even more effective.

3.                  Find role models or mentors

It is easy to think that your own challenges are unique.  The reality is that there are few challenges are completely new and chances are you might just be struggling to find the people who can help you.  Once you have your self assessment and feedback, you can start to seek out role models or mentors who excel in areas that you want to develop.

4.                  Stand back and reflect

Nearly all of us are doing things out of habit rather than necessity.  You know that piece of work or project that you are holding on to when deep down you know that you really should be passing on to someone else.  Create some time and space to determine what your priorities are and then focus your attention on those priority areas.

5.                  Take on new challenges

You probably made it to a leadership role in the first place because you are someone who is willing to step up and have a go, whatever the challenge.  Yet sometimes when you become a leader, it is all too easy to become complacent and be more concerned about survival rather than prospering.  Remember that if you continue to prosper and show that you are a real asset to the organisation, your chances of survival and success are greatly enhanced.

What else would you add to the list?  Add your comment and help boost leadership performance.

As a leader, you know that your ability to communicate effectively is a vital contributor to the results that you achieve.  After all if you don’t communicate effectively you might struggle for example to:

• Engage others by building rapport

• Miss out on good ideas or opportunities

• Fail to get your point across as well as you would like.

Communication is often seen narrowly as being about speaking.  Yet you know that this is just one component of communication.  Of equal importance is your ability to get your message across in writing and listen effectively.

So what might you do in each of the three areas to boost your communication skills?

Speaking

• Take the time to properly plan, especially when giving a formal presentation.

• Keep the focus on your key messages rather than trying to memorise things word for word.

• Don’t detract from your key objective. This is sometimes easy to say but more difficult to do, particularly if in a challenging situation.

• Practice, practice, practice – it really does make a big difference.

Writing

• Think about structure right up front.

• If you are preparing a report, make sure you include an executive summary or précis of the key points.

• Watch out for technical jargon that might mean something to you but not to your readers.

Listening

• Focus on paying attention to what is being said when someone else is speaking rather than formulating what you are going to say next.

• Make sure you are watching out for disconnects between what is being said and the non verbal signals like body language.

• Try being completely silent or making minimal contributions if you are usually very vocal in meetings.

Bottom Line – There is always scope to get better at communicating.  So what other tips would you add?

Teams and organisations exist to deliver a specific result.  If a team lacks clarity about what it is to deliver, then it may deliver something but chances are it will not be optimal performance.

So how can you create clear goals for your team?

Ask yourself what the problem or need is

Chances are the team has been established to address a specific need, for example, to recommend new markets, products or services or to respond to some sort of problem that the organisation is facing.  Sit down and make a list of those needs or problems.  At this stage, focus on volume rather than evaluation.

Define how you would like it to be

In my experience people do a great job at defining what the issues are but struggle more when it comes to defining how they would like it to be.  The big trap that people fall into is trying to get it to how they would like it to be word perfect.

Don’t worry at this stage if your description goes to a quarter or half a page as you can scale it back later.

Scale down your description

Once you have your detailed description of how you would like it to be, you can take this and scale it down into a series of short specific key goals.

Communicate goals and refine

Share the goals with the team and seek their contributions on how they could be made better, more specific and easier to measure.  Keep refining and adapting until you get to the point where the team is crystal clear about what is expected and can sign up to deliver from an informed place.

Bottom Line – Creating clarity about the goal or outcomes for the team is a vital part in team effectiveness.  So what steps do you need to take to set better goals?

Successful teams are highly motivated and consistently deliver better results than any one individual working alone could ever hope to.  If as the leader of the team you are to get optimal performance, you need to be leveraging the skills, qualities and expertise of each and every team member.

So how do you do this?

Know your team

Okay, I guess that if you asked a team leader whether they really know their team, chances are that they would say they do.  While this might be true for a minority, in my experience, most leaders don’t really understand the range of skills and expertise available to them.

As the leader, make time to find out what range of skills, expertise and attributes that each team member has and then start utilising these.

Be a role model

If you want to bring out the best in your teams, why not consider being a role model for the team.   Often people confuse the idea of being a role model with being a bit of a show off. 

By being a role model, you will demonstrate the skills and the behaviours that others can follow.  This benefits the results and also the individual as they acquire new skills.

Let go of your ego

You might well be one of the greatest leaders around.  However, the job in the team is to get results and bring out the best in everyone.  When you are more interested in how you look and how you are seen by others, your personal ego ends up being a barrier to team results.

Remember it is the results that matter rather than looking good personally.

Deal with the overly dominant people

In teams there will be some people who are natural extroverts and others who are more introverts.  The challenge as the leader is to make sure that those who are most vocal and outgoing don’t dominate the proceedings rather than encouraging the contributions of others.

Make a commitment to training the extroverts to involve others and help the less vocal to get their contributions heard.

See beyond the labels

Right or wrongly, people tend to be pigeon holed based on their job title or function that they work in.  You know the scenario, accountants are only interested in numbers, only marketing are creative, human resources are too soft and not commercial to name a few.

As the leader never confuse roles with people.  Just because someone chooses to work in a particular function does not mean that they only have skills in that area.

Bottom Line – Well run teams can deliver great results.  So what do you need to start focusing on to leverage the brilliance of teams?

We have all probably experienced a time when we were part of a team that delivered great performance.  In reality, none of the great performance happens just by chance.  So what steps can you take to fast track to better team performance?

Be clear about the purpose

A team needs to know what it is trying to achieve if it is going to deliver consistently high performance.  As the leader of the team you need to make sure that the outcomes or results are clear and completely unambiguous.

Get the right people on board

What makes a team succeed is having the right people, with the right mix of skill, experience and personal attributes.  Take the time to select the best possible people for the team and if you are inheriting a team, take the time to discover what the team has to offer.

Empower people to deliver

Too often in teams leaders tend to micro manage rather than making it clear what is to be delivered and then empowering people to make it happen.  On the other hand the best leaders focus on bringing out the best in each team member.

Listen a lot

Ever been in teams where people are more interested in giving their own opinions rather than listening to each others views?  Trouble is when it comes to communication people are often skilled at verbal and written communication but less skilled at listening.  Train your team to become great listeners.

Be clear on roles and responsibilities

There are always lots of different activities and roles to be undertaken in the team.  As the leader, make sure that everyone on the team is crystal clear on what they are expected to deliver.

Focus on team accountability

There may be a leader of the team but it is vitally important to make sure that the team as a collective is responsible for delivering the results.  As the leader, creating dependencies is an important contributor to people working together effectively.

Bottom Line – Teams have the potential to deliver great results.  So what steps do you need to take to create more success in your team?

Leading a team on the face of it looks really easy. In reality it can be extremely challenging. As well as having the eyes of your boss and peers looking at how you are performing, you have to deal with all the different personalities and characters in the team you lead.

Given these pressures, it would be easy to crack and really struggle as a team leader.  Yet in truth there are things that you can do to become a better team leader.  So what are 7 things that you can do to become a better team leader?

Increase your self awareness

If you are going to lead a team effectively, you need to have a high level of self awareness.  Being self aware is not about identifying all of your faults but about understanding your motivators, your impact, what you do well and where you struggle.  When you are armed with these insights you start to build your team from really strong foundations.

Be clear about what is to be delivered

Every team exists for a reason and ultimately it is to deliver some result or contribution to business results.  As the team leader, you need to understand totally what is expected from the team and be able to effectively communicate it to other team members.

Involve others

Imagine there are two teams.  In the first team all of the ideas, ways of working and plans are developed by the team leader and imposed.  In the second team, the team leader fully involves team members in coming up with ideas, creating plans and deciding how to achieve them.  Which team do you think will deliver most?  As the team leader, focus on involving others more.

Have an effective decision making process

Every team member might not agree 100% with every decision that is taken but on the other hand they will find procrastination even more frustrating.  Make sure that for significant team decisions there is a clear process and criteria for reaching decisions so that things keep moving forward.

Don’t ignore the deficiencies

It is incredibly difficult to deliver results through a team if you have deficiencies in terms of resources, skills and expertise. At the same time, it can be incredibly tempting to make do, especially if you know that the organisation is facing challenging times. 

Don’t fall into the trap of ignoring deficiencies in the hope that they will go away.   Tackle them so that you keep progressing.

Encourage and support others

It is so easy to forget just how difficult it was when you were doing something for the first time or operating in a new set of circumstances.  Some just deal with this without any problems while others will have crisis of confidence.  As the leader, make a point of encouraging and supporting others through the good and not so good times.

Remember to recognise team effort

It never ceases to amaze me just how few leaders take the time to recognise the efforts and contributions of the team to deliver.  If you are someone who falls into this category, do something to create a habit of looking out for good things that the team has tried or done and acknowledge them for their efforts.

Bottom Line – Becoming a better team leader is a career long learning process.  So what steps can you take to become an even better team leader?

It is often said that if you want to become a great leader of others you need to become a great self leader.  In the busy and pressurised work environment, mastering personal effectiveness can often be a huge challenge. 

So what can you start to do to boost your personal effectiveness?

Take time to plan

You have probably heard the term, fail to plan and plan to fail.  Most people understand this at a conceptual level.  Fewer do this in practice.  When you plan, you ultimately achieve more as you make the best use of the time available to you.

Find out what’s important

There is always plenty to do.  Yet in truth everything does not have equal importance.  Do you know what the 5 most important things in your role to achieve optimal results?  When I ask clients this question, it never ceases to amaze me just how much of a struggle it is to come up with an answer.

Do a time audit

Simply recording your time for a month will bring into sharp focus where you are allocating your biggest limiting factor.  Chances are you will identify some scope for improvement.

Compare your time audit against what’s important

If you know what is important and have recorded your time for a month, compare where you have spent your time against what is important.  This will help you to re-focus where appropriate.

Tackle the time wasters

We all have things that are time wasters.  It might be meetings, a lack of preparation, people who continuously turn up late for meetings, junk e-mails or drawn out telephone conversations to name just a few.  Start listing and recording the impact of time wasters and take action to reduce or eliminate them.

Bottom Line – Successful leadership starts with successful self leadership.  So what changes do you need to make to achieve more success as a leader?

Targets, targets, targets.  It can sometimes feel like all of our time is spent ticking the right box rather than on improving business performance.

Just about every organisation has some form of performance measurement in place.  So how can you go about setting performance measures that are a real contributor to business success?

Get clear about what you are trying to achieve

If you don’t know what your organisation, function or team is trying to achieve, how can you ever expect to put any useful form of worthwhile performance measurement in place?  Every organisation large and small needs a clear set of goals that it is trying to achieve.  The clearer you are about goals, the easier it is to set measures.

Know what matters

In running your business, function or team, there are lots of activities undertaken.  While all activities have relevance, some are more critical than others.  What are the critical activities in your organisation, function or team?  Make a list of them and make sure there is consensus

Have a range of measures

Many organisations still rely too heavily on financial measures.  While cash is an important day to day financial measure, the majority of financial measures are after the event.  You need to have measures that tell you, pretty much real time what is going on.  Aim for a mix of financial and non financial measures, lead (real time) and lag (post event) measures.

Don’t see it as task and finish

Organisations change, the industries and sectors in which you operate change, customer preferences change.  Your performance measures need to reflect what is happening now, not what was happening 2 years ago.  Make sure you periodically re-assess and review your measures. 

Bottom Line – Performance measurement can either be an asset and part of your leadership success strategy or a time waster.  What do you want it to be?