Experience tells us that some common traits exists as founding points of managerial leadership or which must be developed in order to maximise our efficiency as we coordinate a team, an organisation or even a company.
Let’s go through some of them.
Without delegation there’s no real leadership
The first point is also a decidedly not new topic as we have often touched on it in our conversations: delegation.
Delegation is one of the areas in which newly appointed managers usually find a topic of primary difficulty. This doesn’t come as a surprise since delegation includes a fundamental mental transition from being an individual contributor who receives the tasks to the manager who plans, assigns and monitors the tasks.
Looking deeply into delegating, there are many unclear topics at the very beginning, but the most obvious are both “what to delegate” and to whom. The answer is certainly not always immediate as it relies on many variables which we need to consider:
a) how is our work defined at the moment? Scope of our wok changes on a constant basis and so does our neet to delegate
b) How can you use the tool of delegation to be more effective?
c) How do we put our decisions on a timeline? Not everything needs to go at same time and not everything has same importance.
d) What you don’t need at all?
Once you’ve defined the “what” and “who”, you can then move quickly to monitor the progress and outcome as we’ve often described in previous news.
Planning is important, achieving plans even more
Another important point is, as imaginable, executing a plan or activities to obtain a result. Here too, we often discuss, the activities must be included in a planning and not activated in “first come first served” mode. Only by prioritising them and carrying them forward in a synergistic way can we optimise their progress. Ask yourself in a process of “continuous improvement” what your team is working on at the moment, where the individual deliverables are at and what requires new calibration because the priority has changed. As said before, things change, you and your team need to adapt.
I think it is important to remember that it is It is always necessary to find a balance between method and pragmatism. There are always exceptions to the norm. New and seasoned managers often fall into the trap of treating every situation or task with the same approach. However, it is counterproductive to be excessively faithful to the method as it is to be too “practical”. Always evaluate where in your team, in your schedules and in your work as a manager, there is room for exceptions.
Without committed people even the best managers fail
The last point we consider today is involvement, a word often overused in leadership today. It is definitely to be considered an important area of attention and concern for every manager, as helping team members exploit their strengths, keep them aligned with what is important for their work and see “things happen” thanks to the own effort are all strategies to increase the commitment of resources while maintaining high motivation.
