Time management - Poor leadership
Poor leadership
General
If you have no time to think about leadership your long term activities will suffer as will morale.
Ideally, you will have delegated the majority of your tasks to your staff and others.
As we have seen previously, delegation allows people to gain valuable experience and grow in their jobs.
However, they will need the means of carrying out the tasks. You must make sure they have the correct skill set.
You must empower them.
This will have the long term benefit of increased morale and well motivated staff.
If you are able to delegate then you will have more time to consider leadership. A few of the key areas are:
- A need to consider long term strategies and the tactics with which to achieve them.
- Motivation of your team and ensuring they perform well.
- Making sure that all jobs / projects should be well defined, measurable with suitable timelines.
- Adequate control exists by monitoring the work and taking action as necessary.
Approach
There are some simple techniques to consider when improving leadership.
The main aim is thinking about strategy and the tactics to get there.
- MBWA (management by walking about) allows you to check on progress and the competence of your staff.
- What skills do they lack?
- What training can you plan for the future?
- What new jobs are there around the corner and can you delegate them?
- Organise regular meetings with your team, the boss. Any problems that arise or key knowledge of future events should be added to your strategic thinking for action.
- Develop your own training.
- Discuss issues, objectives, new jobs, personal development etc with one to one talks with staff as necessary and develop future plans.
- Plan the next day events and think about those of the next week.
Note training needs at the time for action. If you leave it until a year end appraisal not only will it be too late you and the person being appraised will have forgotten.
Useful skill
If you do not think strategically then eventually the work will grind to a halt due to unforeseen issues, lack of resource, lack of financial resources.
Immediate plans will be executed OK but what happens in 1 week or 6 months with no forward planning?
This will not occur unless you start to think strategically.