3 ways to up your leadership game - today

If you feel as though your leadership could do with a tune up after the uncertainty and turmoil of the last year you’re not alone. So many people I’ve spoken to recently feel as though they’ve been in survival mode for months. 

With so little certainty over the future, looking longer term has felt impossible. But that feels so tiring and demotivating that many of you are looking for ways to get back on track. 

I recent coaching sessions, I’ve found that the same things have come up again and again. Leaders want to feel as though they’re leading again. They want to feel as though the business is going somewhere and that they are in control.

Being able to do that actually tends to require very small shifts but the results are overwhelmingly positive when you make even small changes consistently.

I thought it might be helpful to share three of the most common, and most powerful leadership ‘adjustments’ that come up on repeat. These are all changes you can make today, and they will all have a significant effect on how you and your team perform.

Stop getting involved

The last 10 months or so has required many businesses to adopt an all hands on deck mentality just to get through. Stepping back from that and getting intentional about rolling your sleeves back down is the first step to feeling like a leader again.

Imagine your team have a number of ‘empowerment chips’. Let’s say 10. When they have 10, they feel empowered, confident and able to make decisions on their own. They can get on with things, take measured risks and creatively problem solve.

Each time you get involved with what they’re doing you take away one of their chips. Each time you make a decision for them, you take away one of their chips. Each time you undermine what they’re saying in a meeting, you take away one of their chips.

Now, 10 isn’t that many to start off with, so it doesn’t take that many of these episodes before they start to run low. When they reach about 6 they start to lack confidence. Any lower than 4 and they become incapable of making decisions on their own.

You are not the holder of the chips. They win them back by taking tough decisions, taking risks and solving problems. But the problem is, when they’re running low, these things feel immeasurably hard. When they’re running low, you keep having to step in — and each time you do you take away another chip.

You can see that this is a pretty quick downward spiral and if you don’t know about the chips then you start to wonder, as their leader, what is going on.

Your job as the CEO is to push those tough decisions down the chain. To stop getting involved. To encourage risk taking and fast failure. To support with reflection and fast learning if things don’t work out as planned.

To give you confidence that you can step back and leave them to it though, and to give you something else to focus on, your energy needs to go, instead, into creating 100% clarity for your team.

Crystal clarity

Every piece of client work I ever do starts with getting the vision ultra ultra clear. Having a super clear vision gives you something to come back to again and again. It gives you a decision making framework, a prioritisation mechanism and a planning tool.

Having clarity in your business involves significantly more effort than many people think. But, putting that effort in allows you, your business and everyone in it to move forward with much more intent, less wasted energy and better results.

If everyone is working towards the same thing, with the same understanding of what that thing is, then organisational friction is significantly reduced.

Spending time on the vision and the elements that sit beneath it, will give you confidence that:

a) you know the actions that will work towards achieving the vision

b) that you are able to put the right resources in place to make it happen

Working with less friction and greater confidence vastly improves pace.

“Does it make the bike go faster?”

As part of the underachieving men’s 8 in 1998, Ben Hunt-Davies and the team set themselves a crazy goal of winning an Olympic gold medal. To turn the team around, they created an entirely new way of working that centred around one simple question - does it make the boat go faster? From then on in, every single thing that the team did, or planned to do was held up against that same question….

Does it make the boat go faster?

If the answer was no, it didn’t get done.

Having something that simple allows you to essentially leave the team to it as long as you set clear parameters around the things that matter.

Listen more, speak less

The more you listen, the more in touch you are with your business and what’s really going on. Listening properly allows you to hear not only what’s being said but also what isn’t being said and, as we all know, sometimes that’s actually more important.

It’s so easy to assume that if something is being brought to you it’s because it’s being escalated AFTER the team have tried to sort things out themselves but that isn’t always the case. There’s myriad reasons you might be being involved by someone and giving your input before you’ve fully understood the situation is potentially unhelpful and as per the first point, disempowering too.

Give your team permission to come to you with ‘for information’ points instead of needing input. Ask questions that help them to tell you their ideal solution. Try to keep your questions neutral and curious — help them to understand their own issues as the person best placed to solve them rather than helping you to understand their issues for them.

If you can implement one or all of these points quickly, you’ll be back on track to being the leader you want to be.

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If you’d like to chat about the leadership issues you’re facing in your business, drop me a line any time on hello@rebeccamorley.co.uk or book a 30 min chat using the box at the bottom of the page.

As always, thanks so much for reading!

Til next time.

Rebecca