First Class Skills: Enhancing One’s Own Leadership
While supervision and management are of great importance, the actual building of a team is the paramount task of executive leaders. Kouzes and Posner emphasize building a team to accomplish the work at hand: “A one-word test for differentiating between leaders and managers that came through loud and clear in case studies was the use of we instead of I.
The Barrier of Structure: Part 2
If you are regularly working on tasks well past normal working hours, you could have a structure problem. Give careful thought to your work-life balance. What would the ideal work-life balance look like for you in a week? Strive to build an organization that can function well without you.
Part 3: Goals and Teamwork
Once you know your destination (vision) and have set guiding principles (strategies), you need to specify action steps for stakeholders to take. Your team should be clear on what their responsibilities are, how they are to do it, when they should be done, and how they know when they have been achieved. Here is a familiar and simple formula to help us remember how to define effective goals. They should be SMART.
Part 2: STRATEGIES ARE YOUR MAP
Vision, strategy, and goals are three very distinct components. They are all a part of the whole but stand alone in their function. To arrive at a specified location, you need a map (the strategy). They require thoughtfulness, teamwork, and developing specific action steps. While each part is important, no one element alone will help you realize your vision. Each is dependent on the other.