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Tuesday, 11 December 2012

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Year end stock taking of leadership qualities

The year is almost over. It is time to take stock. Salespeople and many others live and die by the annual review. Auditors have built an entire industry around it. For the next month, print and television media will pour out gallons of coverage of the past year in review.

And yet, as leaders, we often move from one year to the next with little or no time spent reviewing the year just past from a purely leadership perspective. Every business, division, department, project, group, or team ends the year with an often unspoken but widely accepted narrative: “We messed it.” Or “We achieved it.” Or possibly: “Our customer service team let us down.” And another such as: “The first three quarters were a failure, but the fourth wasn’t too bad.”


Building trust

Your mileage will vary. As the leader, it is your job to understand what narrative has taken hold in your team and to manage it accordingly. This isn’t the same as PR or spin. Managing the narrative isn’t about manipulating what people think. It’s about knowing what has taken root in your team’s perception and helping the team members understand its importance.

So as this year closes, what narrative has your group or team subliminally adopted? How accurate is it? Do you need to amplify or clarify any of it? Does it need to be discussed as a group? What lessons can you all learn from the narrative?

Next week, we will put up the Christmas tree in our house, and as always, the final thing we’ll do is to straighten the angel at the top. Whether you’ve had your best year ever or the worst year imaginable, some, probably all, of your top performers will have been bent out of shape getting you through it.

Some of them will have developed less than helpful traits - of arrogance, perhaps, or gruffness, or maybe just thoughtlessness. Some will be harbouring grudges or feeling hurt or confused. Others may have been blindsided by events and are finishing the year off their game. One or two may simply be exhausted.


Planning on business

They are your angels. You are their leader. You need to go and straighten them out. In the course of any year, you will encounter a whole lot of individual and group dynamics that lose efficacy and that only you can un-tether. There may be several practices that have become outdated, policies that no longer work. There could also be routines, rituals, and habits that now just get in the way and meetings that have lost their purpose.

Ask for nominations of less-than-useful activities from your team, but make the final decision yourself. And make everyone’s life simpler by culling those that truly yield no ongoing benefit.

During the year, you and your team will undoubtedly have used up one or more of the staples of healthy group interaction, such as energy, perhaps, or enthusiasm. Maybe as a team you have lost a sense of fun, humour, or maybe you’ve run short on objectivity or perspective.


Respecting employees

Take a moment and think about it. Again, take soundings from your colleagues. One way or another, you don’t want to start the new year with one or more of those staples missing from your team’s pantry.

When you have identified which is missing or has run down to dangerously low levels, think through how to restock in the next couple of weeks. Can you give the holiday retreat or your end-of-year address a theme? Do you need to give your folks some mentoring or coaching or training? Or just a rest or a new perspective?

So as we begin a new year and examine what new challenges and opportunities lie ahead, it’s a good time for all businesses to take stock and ensure that they have the right processes in place to effectively manage their business in 2013.

It’s worth noting that while planning will help to keep your business one step ahead, there will be some events that are completely unexpected.

The first step in preparing for the unexpected is to identify a comprehensive list of risks facing the business. At the start of this process, it’s an idea to schedule a risk mapping session involving all the significant people in the business. Challenges are part of any business, but they also present an opportunity to build trust with your team and prove that honesty is truly a core value. Show your employees you respect them enough to be frank about your challenges, and trust them enough to give them new opportunities to re-invent or reinvigorate the business.

Every business has setbacks. But helping create an atmosphere of trust and collaboration to navigate through the rough patches pays rich dividends. Just as the organisation itself can provide clues to how the team operates, so does the behaviour of the team members. Do they behave as though they were responsible for the success of the organisation and their duties? Are they trying to be helpful to others on the team?

Examine your results for patterns. If people are willingly involved and energetic, and if they get to use their creativity and talents to solve problems for the team, then you are passing power along. On the other hand, if you don’t empower team members and delegate to them, the patterns will be different.

The only way you can be successful as a leader is to engage the potential of everyone on your team. You must be ready, willing, and able to recognise the value that each employee brings to the table. Everyone will have different strengths and weaknesses, but each can play a crucial role. Finally, what about you? How have you changed as a leader this year? Do some soul-searching. Draw a line down the centre of a page, and list in one column your defining characteristics at the start of the year, and in the other, your defining characteristics at the end of the year. How do the two lists differ, if at all?

Ask someone who knows you well to repeat the exercise, from his or her perspective of you. How similar is his or her list to yours? As you look at the two lists, which characteristic of yours most helped your group or team this year? Which characteristic caused the most trouble? When you have decided, ask your team members if they agree. You may be surprised by how differently they view which characteristics are your strong points and which are weaknesses.

By using common courtesies, you demonstrate you respect the people with whom you are dealing. Even if you don’t work in a customer service job, keep an attitude of customer service. Your colleagues and, more importantly, your superiors will begin to realize you are a go-to person if you’re almost always pleasant.

Next year, how can you do more of the first characteristic and less of the second? To run a company, you of course need to delegate, but pick your spots and continue to roll up your sleeves and get dirty. You’ll see the entire organization follow that lead.

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