Regardless of where a leader is in the hierarchy of an organization, following are some challenges they all face.
- Being Effective: Leaders at every level have to juggle many priorities. The who can juggle the priorities to achieve the best results are the most effective leaders.
- Being inspirational: An effective team is a team that is motivate to achieve the organization’s goals. A leader must have the ability to inspire the team to motivate them to achieve the organization’s goals.
- Being a leader: The boss has authority but that authority does not make him a leader. A leader is able to develop a team and inspire individuals who collectively achieve an objective. A leader does not need authority of title.
- Managing expectations: Any person who supports a project, opposes a project, or could be impacted by a project is a stakeholder. Stakeholders have expectations from projects and other initiative. They can support a project if they like it or mount a serious resistance if they believe it will negatively impact them. Therefore, an effective leader must be able to manage stakeholder expectations.
- Managing change: Change is the norm but most of us resist change. Our primitive brain responds negatively to anything that changes the familiar or forces us to change our habits. Change forces us out of our comfort zone. An effective leader is able to lead change smoothly with the least amount of disruption and is able to communicate relevant aspects to those impacted by the change.
How can leaders achieve these qualities:
- Be honest and clear in your messaging: People are not stupid. They can tell often tell when the message is not genuine and when they are being lied to. Even if they believe a lie once or twice, the truth will eventually come out. After than no one will believe the leader and every form of communication will become ineffective. Fuzzy and unclear messaging give impression of incompetence and dishonesty. There the message must always be clear and honest.
- Set SMART goals: SMART is a abbreviation of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. SMART goals have a better chance of success than fuzzy goals. SMART goals are easier to achieve for the team because the team know what to deliver.
- Learn to delegate work effectively: No one can do everything. No one is an expert at everything. Therefore, effective leaders delegate work to experts and other competent team members. Effective delegation is an art mastered over time.
- Learn leverage the strengths of the team and cover for their weaknesses: Every team has its strengths and weaknesses. In a project to move the corporate infrastructure to the cloud, I realized that my team did not have the necessary skills to migrate effectively. So instead of training them on migration, something we will only do once, I hired expert migrators. For the team, I focused on developing their cloud skills the organization requires every day.
- Clarify everyone’s roles, responsibilities, and distribute accountability: Everyone in the team needs to know exactly what their role is? What tasks they need to work on? How their performance will be measured. If any of this is not clear to anyone, it is the leader’s failure.
- Focus on developing a stronger team: Effective leaders realized that their team will lead them to success. Outside contractors can help but not they cannot achieve the organizations key strategic objectives. Therefore, effective leaders invest in their teams and invest their time to improve their teams and team members.