Leadership priorities

Objective

The leader of a team will face what will sometimes seem like a constant challenge to priorities – the ebb and flow of day-to-day issues, dealing with the unexpected, organising yourself to deal with planned meetings and reports, keeping on top of e-mail and spending quality time with your direct reports and key partners and customers.

The major risk to you, and to your performance, is that you allow yourself to be buffeted by events, and to feel – and even to be seen – to be responding to whatever happens next. The sense – if it can be admitted – of being out of control in this way is an unpleasant one, and one you need to learn to recognise. The tactical solution is always to review time management strategies. However, no approach to time management is really worth it, or is going to be ultimately effective, if you are not clear what you are managing your time for.

You must have a framework of practical leadership priorities to inform choices about how to invest your time and energy.

Context

Day-to-day priorities are the most practical expression of the implementation of your vision and strategy. It is at this point that your view of yourself intersects with the way you define and manage your team. So in prioritising, you combine:

• a distillation of your organisation’s vision;
• an insistent focus on goals;
• a constant reminder of core strategies;
• your leadership persona;
• the messages you use to lead and motivate your team;
• your attention to performance delivery.

This remains an ever-present issue – ensuring that these factors remain in balance and that you are not buffeted by events into well-meant but marginal activities.

Challenge

A legitimate challenge is how leadership relates to management and the extent to which you as a leader regard ‘management’ as part of your responsibilities.

• Being a manager is about role, hierarchy and process. Organisations employ positions which, in their very definitions, are said to include ‘management’; which have a place in the structure that are recognised as managerial within the organisation’s formal or informal hierarchical code; and which demand participation in specific HR processes. A manager may or may not have direct line management responsibility for others. Most colleagues will know who the ‘managers’ are and will recognise that good managers execute job-specific and organisational tasks effectively – for example, they organise appraisals on time and record their outcomes faithfully.
• Being a leader demands unerring focus on delivery through people – by definition, the leader needs the led. Leaders have a clear view of what they want to achieve and how – by making a small number of key decisions about the organisation’s structure and its staff; and by relentlessly and unerringly informing their approach to everyday business activities with the view that all staff are capable of superior performance when properly motivated.

In essence:

• being a manager is about how you see yourself;
• being a leader is about how you see others.

You will need to be an effective manager to deal with necessary corporate and team processes and governance. But in bringing together the vision, goals and strategy you are a leader first and a manager second.

Success

As a successful leader you understand that there are six key practical priorities which inform your use of time.

• Developing and communicating a clear vision and strategy – your team will need a clear sense of purpose. They want a game plan. You continuously advocate, promote and refer to the core vision and strategy. Credibility is maximised by continual reinforcement.
• Implementing a supporting organisation structure – you assess your team or organisation’s structure to ensure that it has a focus on the competencies needed to deliver the goals. Your primary objective is to put in place a structure that affords your team the greatest chance of success. This may actually involve an overall reduction in activities – many a team has underperformed because a mistakenly ambitious belief in the limitlessness of its capabilities became a lack of attention to what really mattered.
• Rigorously filling key posts in the structure with appropriate competences and values – ‘fit the people to the jobs, not the jobs to the people’ I was once told, and how true this is, and how easy it is not to do it! You don’t want clones of yourself – to the contrary you will welcome a team with members contributing distinctive personalities. You do want them to share your values and be likely to take your stance on issues. You seek not to create uniformity, but a shared identity of purpose. If you cannot put trust in your team at this level, you will be unable to delegate and empower effectively.
• Establishing a complementary decision-making structure – your team must know how decisions are made, who needs to be involved and what they themselves have the power to decide. This is a fundamental crutch both to personal empowerment and also team-building. The decisions you make, and the way you make them, significantly characterise the type of team you are creating, and each individual’s sense of identity within it.
• Continuously monitoring performance – you review on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis the financial, operational and service milestones agreed for your business. These milestones and the actual performance against them are transparent and published.
• Relentlessly motivating – you do everything you can to make your team feel respected, valued, and capable of achieving their goals.

Pitfalls

There are generally few risks in remaining focused on agreed tasks. However, every leader needs to beware of falling into two major traps.

• Becoming blinkered to changes in the strategic landscape – being so focused on delivery against agreed goals and targets that you overlook the way the market (and therefore targets) have shifted.
• Disregarding important but non-priority issues – being so orientated to key strategic tasks that you overlook issues which need managerial attention but seem remote, and which if left unresolved may actually cause problems.

This can be an extraordinarily difficult balancing act. Over time, and with experience, the best leaders develop extremely sensitive antennae to pick up warning signals and prevent themselves from falling into these two traps.

Leaders’ checklist

• Constantly remind yourself of the six leadership priorities.
• Be prepared to articulate and reinforce your vision and strategy more frequently than you think is necessary.
• Constantly review your organisation’s structure to ensure that it delivers focus on business opportunities.
• Constantly review the appropriateness of your team and its performance to your goals.
• Regularly assess if your decision-making structures are enabling the decisions you need to make and with the timeliness that is required.
• Solicit feedback about your own performance – check that your team feels it is being empowered and motivated to achieve its best.