Archive for the ‘Leading’ Category

Leadership is in many ways a marathon rather than a sprint. Despite this we often see organisations continually chopping and changing:

• The leadership team
• The focus
• The priorities
• The direction of travel

While it might seem sensible and logical at the time, it might not be the best option long term for the following reasons:

Reason 1: There Is No Magic Potion

• Yes, making change might achieve some short term bursts of enthusiasm or motivation. At the same time the issues or challenges that were there previously don’t evaporate into thin air. The reality is there is no magic potion to change things overnight.

Reason 2: You End Up Going Backwards

• You might, in the longer term, make huge strides forward, which is great. On the other hand, in my experience you often end up going backwards or covering old ground in the short to medium term. Ask yourself, is it worth it?

Reason 3: You End Up Losing Good People

• People want to be part of a success and if you are forever chopping and changing you reduce the chances of success. When this happens many of your best people will vote with their feet and move on.

Reason 4: You Can Easily Stop Just Before A Breakthrough

• You might well have set out the plans, made the key decisions, taken the action and only seen small improvements so you quit too quickly. The consequence is that you miss out on a huge breakthrough.

Reason 5: Morale Falls Through The Floor

• If you are continually changing your mind, your people, your priorities, then staff don’t know where they stand and which way to turn. Faced with this there is a distinct possibility that morale will hit rock bottom.

The truth is there will be times when change, and even change on a major scale, is needed. At the same time, make sure you are not changing just for the sake of it.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

Success as a leader does not come with a guarantee. There are many highs and lows. In many ways it is a bit of a roller coaster. While many leaders spend a lot of time trying to learn how to do things, the key to higher performance often comes from increased self awareness.

When leaders have high degrees of self awareness they:

• Have the insights about what they do well and what they need to develop
• Know and understand the impact that they have on others
• Know when to push forward, when to take stock and when to back off
• Don’t get frustrated that they cannot do everything themselves: in fact building a team around them is something that they know helps achieve results
• Break habits, beliefs and mindsets that hinder progress

The truth is we can all focus on learning stuff but that alone will only take us so far.

Greater self awareness is the catalyst to transforming performance.

If you have enjoyed this article you might like to check out The Benefits of Self Awareness

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

We often hear that leaders need people in leadership roles to stand up and be counted. At the same time, being a leader can sometimes feel like mission impossible.

Think about it. If you decide to do something and it does not work out at all or as well as you had hoped, the hindsight squad are more than willing to analyse your failings.

If by contrast you sit back and don’t do anything, you get criticised for not caring, not taking responsibility or hiding away in the Ivory Tower.

If you try to change something, you can easily face massive resistance and a huge desire to hold on to things, even if people don’t like the current situation much.

So what’s the answer?

In reality you have to face up to the fact that in any situation, whatever you do, there are going to be people who don’t agree with what you do.

Of course you can listen, be flexible and not close your mind to different ways of achieving what you are trying to achieve.

However, you have to recognise that at the end of the day leading is not about winning a popularity contest but about delivering results.

The best leaders will always try to take everyone with them and win hearts and minds.

At the same time, remember that whatever decision or course of action you take, there are ultimately going to be some that will not get behind you and support you.

Accept this as just the way it is and keep moving forward towards delivering the results that you know you and those around you are capable of achieving.

Change is just part and parcel of business these days. No organisation, no matter in what industry or sector it operates, can rest on its laurels and take its foot off the gas.

Often when it comes to change initiatives, all of the attention is on the structures, processes and tools.

The trouble is that while this is important to take care of, it is really people who make change happen.

Sometimes organisations assume that because people are highly skilled in a particular field that they will somehow just know how to make change.

When I worked in the NHS I was surrounded by highly talented people. The flipside was however that many of them had no specific experiences to draw on from outside their own area of expertise or training on how to deal with major scale change.

As a result many initiatives fell by the wayside, not because of lack of effort but often because people had never been equipped to deal with major scale change.

So if you are serious about delivering major scale change, don’t just pay attention to the tools and processes. Focus on equipping and enabling people to make the change a reality.

The Bottom Line: Remember that people in organisations are really a huge asset. The question is, do you want to maximise the return on the investment you make in your people assets?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

In the fast moving world of business, it can sometimes feel to employees that they are on a conveyor belt, simply waiting for the next initiative to come along. While organisations need to be alert to the need to change things, there is a danger that this can turn into initiative overload. So how can you avoid this?

Get Clear On Priorities

• A year is a very short period in the life of a business. In my view, businesses realistically need to be thinking about the direction of travel in terms of 3 to 5 year horizons.

  To move forward over this time horizon, it’s essential to get crystal clear about what is and what’s not priority. Armed with this you have a basis for validating proposed initiatives against your agreed priorities.

Prioritise Your Initiatives

• Of course all of your initiatives are likely to have some benefits. At the same time you want to avoid ending up with a bundle of resource intensive but low impact or low return initiatives. Look out for initiatives that are low to medium in resource need but have the potential to make big differences.

Look Out For The Tell Tale Signs

• If you notice that people are run ragged doing lots of stuff and this is not translating in terms of results or satisfaction, the chances are you are overloaded. This is the time to re-assess and re-prioritise.

The Bottom Line: Organisations do need to stay ahead of the pack. At the same time, initiative overload can easily result in a lot of effort and little in the way of results.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. You can sign up for his free audio e-course leadership success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk.

Holding people to account is one of those areas that leaders often find challenging. Maybe it is because they have pre-conceived ideas of what it means to hold people to account. It certainly is not about being nasty or a bully.

• The first key to holding people to account is to be clear about what you expect of them. Too often expectations are vague or poorly stated which means people are left guessing. State your expectations in terms of results or outcomes.
• The second key is to be clear about how performance will be assessed. This might be using some sort of personal balanced scorecard or setting key milestones to be achieved if the person you are leading is working on a project or may even include the results of client feedback.
• The third key is to be clear about how you will let people account for their performance. This might be very formal but could just as easily be a fortnightly meeting where you follow up on progress, issues and actions being taken to address them as well as offering support where needed.
• The fourth and final key is to make consequences of not delivering clear. An important point here is to make a clear distinction between the one in a while failure to deliver and the repeated non delivery of what was promised. You only really need to bring the consequences to the fore when you are continually being promised but not seeing results delivered.

The truth is most people are happy to be held accountable for delivering results provided you have involved them, made expectations clear and support them in delivering results.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. You can sign up for his free audio e-course leadership success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk.

The business world will always be challenging. In many ways it’s those challenges that make it fun and rewarding. Many organisations strive to be high performing. We probably all have different views on what makes an organisation high performing and here are my thoughts.

A Compelling Vision

A high performing organisation is my experience very clear about where it is heading, the markets in which it operates and the customers and clients that it serves.

While many organisations might have the clarity, the best engage the hearts, minds and support of others to make it a reality.

Open Communication

Open communication for me is about freely sharing both the good and not so good news. Of equal and perhaps even greater importance is really listening to and encouraging ideas and insights from employees, customers and suppliers.

Strong Involvement

If you spend all of your time telling people what to do and how to think; sooner or later you de-motivate them. Once you start to de-motivate, you are on a downward spiral. People have things to contribute and the vast majority want to be part of creating success.

Customer Focus

It’s all too easy to lose sight of the fact that it is customers who buy the products or use the services that generate the money to pay for day to day expenses like salaries.

If you lose sight of the customers, then they will in many cases vote with their feet and take their business elsewhere.

Willing To Learn

Things move on days these days so standing still is no longer an option. You have to keep developing individuals and the organisation as a whole.

The Bottom Line: At the end of the day being a high performing organisation brings many benefits. The key question is, are you ready to grab those benefits?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. You can sign up for his free audio e-course leadership success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk.

It is fair to say that we are in challenging times right now. If you are leading and managing in these challenging times it can be difficult to maintain morale, especially if jobs are at risk. So what can you do maintain morale in challenging times?

1. Remind everyone regularly about the direction of the department and organisation in the longer term and the potential opportunities that will be created.
2. Take the time during staff appraisals and one to one meetings to find out about areas of experience that individuals are keen to get and then aim to get them that additional experience.
3. Continue to support learning and development of all staff, not just those undertaking professional exams. While budgets might be tight, there are still plenty of low or no cost opportunities for CPD.
4. Make a point of letting people know when you are particularly impressed with a piece of work that they have done or a challenging situation that they have handled well.
5. Be positive as a leader of the team as you set the tone. Pay particular attention to how you interact with people in the early part of the day.
6. Be visible and avoiding locking yourself behind a closed door for large parts of the week.
7. Consider setting up open meetings where staff have the opportunity to raise concerns, issues and get some responses.
8. You probably recognise that several heads are better than one. If your stakeholders are looking for more from your function, get people involved in generating ideas and making suggestions to maximise the value that is delivered.

Remember that is often the simple, low or no cost things that have the greatest impact on maintaining morale.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

Trust is vital to achieving results as a leader. After all, if you don’t have trust, it is difficult to get the support for your vision, plans or ideas.

So if you are a leader, how can you build trust as a leader?

Don’t Fall Into The Seniority Trap
• There may have been a time in the distant past where people would tend to trust you just because you were the most senior person. The reality is that those days are long gone so it is pointless to rely on this. Being a leader and having followers is nothing to do with the job title that you have.

Set The Tone

• As a leader you set the tone for the whole department. By that I mean you set the expectations in terms of things like the way people behave, the way people interact with each other, resolve differences of opinions and solve problems to name just a few.

Find Out What Matters To Others

• Ever notice that in every job interview you go to you are asked what motivates and de-motivates you? The trouble is that interviews are often the only time this question gets asked. Think about it; if you know what matters to people you can start to do things and behave in ways that focus on the things that matter to people.

Give Regular Feedback

• Most people in the workplace crave feedback yet study after study shows that it is sadly lacking. Giving regular quality feedback to people gives a really powerful message that you care about them and their success.

Start Small

• It can be really tempting to try and be too ambitious at the start. It is much better to break the overall goal into smaller steps. As each step or stage is progressed, it builds confidence and trust.

Be Honest With People

• When leading a team or department there will be times when some difficult choices will need to be made. It can often be tempting to either avoid communicating or to make promises that cannot be kept. Broken promises will end up destroying trust.By contrast people may not always like the news that you are giving them but will respect your honesty.

Be Supportive

• Allowing people to move out of the comfort zone with the assurance that they will be supported is a huge step to giving them a message that you trust them.

Don’t Blame

• We have all if we are totally honest fallen into the trap of blaming others when things don’t go to plan. While it might offer in your own mind some sort of short term cover it will demolish trust, stifle creativity and dilute the results.

Hold People To Account

• When it comes to managing or leading people, it is important to have accountability in place. This is not some sort of heavy handed approach but simply involves agreeing with people what they are going to deliver and then asking them to keep you informed (or to account) for what they have done and what they still have to do.Doing this consistently with the team and individually creates trust.

Listen A Lot

• All of the best people that I worked with were brilliant listeners. When you focus your attention as a leader or manager on listening to others you get some real insights. People want to contribute and have the opportunity to do so. Listening does not mean that you have to act on every idea, concern or suggestion. At the same time people will respect you more. If you encourage and teach your people to listen effectively to others’ points of view you will build great team work and trust.

Do What You Promise

• If you say that you are going to do or deliver something then make sure that you do it. People will use this as an indicator as to whether you can be trusted or whether it is all just talk.

Empower and Delegate

• Delegating work to others not only provides opportunities for growth, development and challenge, it also sends a strong signal that you really trust your people.Empowering, where you give experienced people an outline of the result that you want, step back and let them get on with it is another great way of creating trust.

Stand Up For Your Team

• There will be times when privately you are disappointed with your team. Maybe they have done a poor job on a project or in dealing with a disgruntled client. In these situations it is vital to make sure that you deal with the issues privately but still stand up for your team publicly.

Take Responsibility For Results

• If you are running a department you will be well rewarded for taking on that role. At the same time, responsibility for the results ultimately is down to you. Maybe this might not seem fair but that’s the way it is. If you want to build trust, take responsibility for the results, whatever they are.

Give Recognition To Others

• Good leaders and managers look to give recognition for the successes that are achieved. See yourself more as a facilitator of delivering great results and give recognition to others when things go well.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to  sign up for his free team leadership audio masterclass here

Managers and leaders like you have many demands on their time. In this situation it is all too easy to fall into the trap of trying to do everything and becoming overloaded. The fact is we all only have 24 hours in a day. How you use that time is what sets you apart as one of the best. So what are the 5 simple steps to greater success?

Step 1: Know your deliverables

• Everyone has job descriptions, most people have some form of appraisal and some idea of what is expected of them. On the other hand, how clear are you on your key deliverables? These are what you are ultimately going to be measured on. Performance against your key deliverables impact on your salary, your promotion potential for example. Yet surprisingly, people often do not know what their key deliverables are. If this applies to you, make it a priority to find out today.

Step 2: Analyse your time

• I often have clients keep a record of where they spend their time over a 2-3 week period. In many instances they discover that the bulk of their time is going on activities that do not directly contribute to key deliverables. Once you are clear on your key deliverables, do this for yourself and see if you are spending your time on what really matters.

Step 3: Make changes

• Once you have analysed your time and identified mismatches between your deliverables and activities, it is time to do something about it. This might mean that you delegate more, get more selective about meetings you attend or how you deal with e-mails.

Step 4: Make time for planning

• As a leader, planning is an important part of your role. You and your team need to be clear where they are heading over the coming months. Start with a plan covering the next quarter that subsequently breaks down into monthly, weekly and daily plans.

Step 5: Monitor results

• Plans deliver results when they are executed. Sometimes you will get the results you expected. Other times you will get different results than you expected and may not even get any results. Make sure that when you execute plans you have a process in place to check progress and make changes where appropriate.

At the end of the day we all have 24 hours at our disposal. The question is how smart do you want to be in using this?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk