Impactful Leadership (Part 2)

What Should You Do To Leverage You and Your People?

Meet and Greet, then go Deeper.  Whenever we observe leaders that people follow or even yearn to follow, they have at least one of two attributes.  One we are not discussing here is a goal that all by itself causes people to follow. An example is Elon Musk and his goal to change the world through electric cars.

The one that matters to us today, and that each of us can strongly execute, is influencing via building and deepening your relationships with your people: your management, peers, and staff.  The deeper your appropriate relationships at work go, the more influence you will have. Trust building is relationship building.

It is all our responsibilities to work on our leadership skills.  If you want to define and improve your leadership skills, read on!

Our course covers these and many more topics in an experiential way.  

www.dataanalysis.com/training/courses/impactful-leadership-and-management-best-practices-for-supervisors-to-cxos

This post (Part 2 of 3) discusses Who are Leaders and What We Do and Should Do.

Set Their Expectations vs. Culture

When you start working with people, and then every chance you get, ensure that you set and fulfill expectations as you go.  If your organization’s culture is positive, reinforce it as best you can.  If it is not so good, at least where you are, strive to slowly change the culture via your behavior and your leadership.  Let’s walk through a short example.

If your group is known to be a “slow responder” to requests, start setting goals among your staff to respond to each other in a timely manner.  You will have to lead by example if you want this new credo to stick.  Test some metrics around your own responsiveness and prior to rolling them out, make sure your people’s work can support your new standards of responsiveness.

Picture your culture (around this aspect) the more productive, clear, and friendly way.  Once you have demonstrated the communication culture shift by your behavior and put specifics around it with metrics, roll it out on a couple of “friendlies” to ensure it plays well among your staff.  Once you have this small thing established with a few people and it shows your coaching style and goal-setting with recognition, you are ready to carefully roll it out to your entire group or area.

Build Deeper Relationships

Some easy ways to build rapport with your direct reports and their direct reports are listed below.

1. One-on-One Meetings – Introduce and define not only the process, but Why holding weekly one-on-ones is important.  Schedule them and strive to be available and present during them.  Remember your goal is to continue to develop your relationships and your staff.  Space precludes getting into the detail of this.  Contact us if you want help setting them up.
2. Recognition and Rewards – As you do your one-on-ones, note what seems to make your people tick, write it down, and test your assessment by sometimes offering them some of what they want.  When I was starting out in business, there was nothing I liked more than time in front of executives and even presenting proposed changes to operating or other processes.  Others hated being even in the same room with execs and “awarding” them with the chance to do a presentation for execs was a punishment, not a reward.
3. Feedback – Providing feedback is perhaps the best gift you can give your staff.  Providing you present positive feedback either in public or private as they prefer and always negative feedback in private quickly, but after your anger subsides if you are angry.

Status, Escalation, and More

Leaders seldom have a chance to build relationships more than around status and escalation.  At so many of our clients and in my early employment, status was almost universally hated and feared. Instead, let’s find ways to make it collaborative, learning, and relationship building!  Here are two of many ways you can move your culture toward building instead of damaging relationships.

As with One-on-One Meetings, your Status Process and Meetings should be planned, collaborated around, then demonstrated and practiced by you on your deliverables prior to rolling it out to your teams.  Setting the tone of collaboration around events and issues makes it so much easier to build and maintain staff relationships.

We at Data Analysis & Results may be a little biased toward data.  I always tell my team that their status reports should consist solely of data.  That data can include entries made of text in issues logs and more, but it should not be opinion.  Putting in place a culture of seeking, reporting, and relying on data will elevate your standing with your managers, peers, and staff.

What Should Leaders Do to Leverage You and Your People?  Your Thoughts?

Thoughts on how you can best apply leadership that we did not touch on?  Good luck and keep your eye out for ways to improve your relationship and leadership skills!

Your path to business success.