leadership tips
What sort of person are you? Are you someone who prefers to be with the sheep or do you want to be with the wolves?
Being a sheep person, a follower, is easy but boring. Being a wolf person, a leader, is lonely. Choose which you want to be with care
For those of you who are wolves or aspire to be then below are my
35 Tips to Being an Effective Leader
1. 1. Make decisions. Don’t be a boss that sits on the fence and is unwilling (too frightened) to put his/her neck on the line.
2. 2. Trust those to whom you’ve delegated authority to make their own decisions. If you don’t trust them why have you given them authority? You may as well do it yourself.
3. 3. Be appreciative of people – give your team positive strokes (words of encouragement and praise), especially important for the younger and less experienced employees though everyone likes this.
4. 4. Don’t be afraid to delegate upwards. Your boss is part of the team too.
5. 5. Be nice. Its costs nothing to be likeable and you’ll get a lot more from your team as a consequence.
6. Focus on what matters. When you are confronted with an overload of information and have to make a decision cut to the central issues and ignore the peripheral ones.
7. 7. Don’t be a workaholic. And if you are, don’t demand that everyone else has to be also. Work-life balance makes for a contented person and a happy team. If you have to work 24/7 then you are in the wrong job.
8. 8. Don’t be an email fanatic. Talking can be good. Too many managers spend too many hours emptying their inboxes.
9. 9. Don’t judge people on appearances or on their social skills. Some of your most effective people will often be those who don’t fit easily into conventional ‘social boxes’. Embrace the rebels.
1 10. Don’t surround yourself with conformers. The best teams can challenge the norms, the convention. They come up with new ways of thinking and these lead to new and more effective ways of doing. Creative organisations survive. Be a creative leader.
1 11. Recognise budding leaders and mentor them along. No one is indispensible and a good leader is always thinking ahead, planning for the succession.
12. Be confident in yourself. Avoid the temptation to constantly assert your authority. If you have to work hard to show others that you are their leader then you aren’t.
13. You cannot be everyone’s friend, so don’t try to be. Respect is more important. Not respect born out of fear but respect born out of the recognition that you are fair, honest and consistent but will take tough decisions if you have to, and that occasionally that might require giving people a hard word.
14. Stay ahead of the game. Advance your own skills and knowledge. Every leader has a sell-by date. Make sure you extend yours by keeping up with the latest ideas, practices, and innovations.
15. Don’t stay in post too long. Know when to move in and when to move on.
16. Recognise the skills of those in your team, at every level. Everyone is important and every single employee contributes to the whole operation in some way or another.
17. Recognise your strengths but especially your weaknesses. Everyone has weaknesses, even the most effective leader. No one is perfect.
18. Be prepared to play politics. But not politics for the sake of it or for your own career advancement; play politics in order to protect your team.
19. You will have favourites amongst your team just don’t let anyone else know who they are.
20. Don’t adopt a silo mentality; you are just one of many leaders in the organisation, work and share with your peers and your bosses.
21. Recognise that any power you have comes largely from your team, not from your bosses. If your team are not with you then you are powerless.
22. You will learn more about your team from listening to them and observing them. You’ll learn very little from constantly talking at them.
23. Don’t become a ‘meeting freak’. Meetings may be necessary on occasion but they are no substitute for work.
24. Don’t be obsessed by targets and never judge people only on whether or not they ‘achieve’ them. Some of the most ineffective leaders appear good on paper, especially on ‘performance measurements’. Statistics can lie.
25. Make your office a place of connection, not a cave in which you hide from others.
26. Don’t lie and don’t deceive. Never make a promise in order to manipulate, to calm someone down or to make someone temporarily happy.
27. Have a code of ethics. Even the most ineffective leader can be a little forgiven if they are honest and trustworthy.
28. Be clear about the larger aim to which you are working. Clarify this and the smaller objectives will fit into place a lot easier and a whole lot quicker.
29. Don’t worry about meeting resistance, especially during those times when you are charged with bringing about change. People will resist. Its natural. So allow them to and don’t get emotional or defensive as a result.
30. Don’t preach your individual ideology and beliefs to people. Encourage diversity and difference.
31. Don’t recruit in your own image. No organisation can survive long if it’s staffed solely by clones of the leader.
3 32. Adapt to the circumstances, the situation. Be flexible. Learn to roll with it. There never was, and never can be, only one way to do things.
3 33. Sometimes you will need to say ‘sorry’. Don’t be afraid to.
34. Often you will need to say ‘thank you’. Don’t forget to do so.
35. Finally, don’t take any of it too seriously. All things pass. Including you.
O So which of these 35 tips for leadership do you consider the most important? – For me its the last one.