Leadership doesn’t grow from a steady state but through a continuous analysis over yourself and your organisation: asking yourself and knowing how to ask the correct questions is a fundamental tool to be able to make correct diagnoses of the state of your situation as a manager and encourage those who work with us to build meaningful and shared answers.
Only with this cycle you can achieve and enforce the right positioning of actions, thoughts, plans and finally of personal leadership.
Often in our analyses we have, however, the tendency not to want to raise potentially “uncomfortable” issues or that can alter the balance: it is precisely these types that allow but to “perturb” the situation and move the team and ourselves to a situation of greater performance.
What to analyse then? This time we go through a simple task of dealing with three areas: efficiency, focus and priorities
Being effective leveraging differences
First of all, let’s ask ourselves how we can work more effectively knowing that in any case we start from a situation of inhomogeneity on a personal level.
Each of the team members, including managers, is the result of their own professional history that has defined different aspects and skills. This “functional diversity”, if properly valued, is also what makes the team highly efficient, like in a dance, every movement of every participant must be calibrated to avoid disharmony. The danger to always keep in mind is that greatly amplifying one component over the others, will shift the balance in an uncontrolled manner. Much different if you consciously decide it and be able to control it.
Focus: eat the elephant spoon by spoon (no elephants were armed for this article)
The second area is related to the ability to focus.
No team or work group is able to tackle all the problems at the same time, it is therefore necessary to make choices to concentrate the available energies. Be aware that fully exploring the range of what can stimulate the different aspects of discussion but can be too large to achieve.
Some of the questions on which it is useful to focus our energies are:
- Where are we directing our attention?
- What do we have to say no to (these could be things that don’t add value, that serve as a distraction rather the ones that are really not important, …)
- Which areas to focus on to raise the bar on ongoing tasks or become more selective?
Once you have the answer, do a sanity check to understand whether those are functional to achieve the results you expect or need to be rebalanced.
Prioritise and move forward
From this clearly follows the third area of examination that relates to priorities: let’s ask ourselves how we can improve the definition and management of the urgency for the tasks in front of us.
Whether you are dealing with daily work, a project or a resource management activity, it is essential to plan what is going on, it becomes more or less urgent or functional to the optimisation of other activities. Improving the definition of priorities can be for some teams an antidote to being overwhelmed and, even for those who are not in this extreme situation, a way to begin to recompose the pressures they suffer. Ask yourself:
- Are particularities in the sequence and urgency levels of your organisation’s tasks?
- How to compensate for the variable and unplanned component of each of the members of your team?
- How does the change modify the rest of priorities?
