It’s a new year so this is a great time to review some essential leadership focus areas, so we can inspire and grow our teams. We have a great responsibility to invest the time and energy to lead with purpose and establish a path to achieve team and individual goals.
As leaders, we get to change lives for the better. We have the privilege of growing people and see them earn great opportunities. We grow people by giving them tasks that will challenge them. Easy tasks never contribute to long term growth.
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
Great leaders approach everyday with an open mind, a positive attitude and ready to make a difference. Our people need us to be strong and capable of guiding the team through conflict and an overwhelming workload. Most importantly, we live for seeing our team members develop and become ready for greater responsibility.
Apply These Leadership Focus Areas to Inspire and Grow Your Team
How we lead, think, and view the world
- Lead with purpose. What vision can you communicate to rally the team around?
- Be positive even when dealing with a crisis and major changes in the business. Inspire hope in tough times.
- Be fair in everything: promotions, raises, evaluations, rewards, admonishments, and assignments to high visibility projects.
- Check our bias. What is affecting how we view our team members? Are we looking at our team members through a lens that is unfair? We must be self-aware of our bias, so we don’t treat our people unfairly.
- Do we have the right, daily mindset to reach excellence and lead our team through a crisis?
Prioritize and delegate
- Protect the team from distracting tasks. Other managers may be sending requirements to the team without your knowledge.
- We can’t do everything ourselves. Assign work throughout the team. Delegate a task and hold that person accountable to get it done.
Focus on development
- Every team member (and us too) must have an individual development plan.
- Daily, we must look at how we can grow our people. It may be through a tough project. Easy tasks contribute nothing to growth. Ensure you are challenging your team.
Communicate
- We fill in the gaps with truth and facts so that rumors do not set hold in our team.
- We teach our team to collaborate so that a problem can be solved across the team. Each person may hold a valuable piece of information that can fit together for the solution.
Improve processes
- We need to fix horrible processes that are time consuming and contribute no value.
- Our team members often are completing reports that consist mostly of cutting & pasting other reports to form new reports. We should strive to eliminate this type of work, so our team can spend more time with thinking, analyzing, and solving.
- Most of our time should be growing our lines of business.
We want to build an atmosphere of growth and a workplace where people find joy in their role. We love for our people to accept new challenges and to develop a closeness that serves to lift each other up every day. We lead because we are passionate about our people.
What leadership focus area do you need work on most for your team, and what is your plan for improvement?
Please comment or email me at comment@stephenmclain.com.
Copyright 2019 – Stephen McLain
