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Leadership roles are difficult to fill in the UK. Leadership involves a skill-set distinct from that of management, and a quality of candidate that can often be hard to come by. Indeed, a recent survey found that four in ten UK employees are currently unhappy with the quality of their work leadership. If you are in line for a leadership role, what could you enact to become a quality leader in your business?
Plan, Ruthlessly
As a business leader, you will gain all manner of responsibilities – both to the business and to your team. As such, your time will become something of a commodity, and a commodity which will need managing efficiently to order to bring out the best in you.
In a leadership position, you may be able to entrust your schedule to another member of staff, whether a personal assistant directly assigned to you or a more general executive office manager. However, there are elements of your daily timetable that you will need to manage yourself, to guarantee the best possible performance at work.
One such element of this personal timetable is travel – specifically, commuting and travel to meet partners or potential clients. If you are London-based, you will need an eye for forward planning, and a good grasp of train times at London King’s Cross Station; knowing the times for your morning and evening commute enable you to ensure timely arrival to work or work meetings, and foreknowledge of train routes will give you an edge in planning longer-distance trips.
Make Time for Staff
With time your most valuable commodity, where you spend it is a crucial consideration to make as a leader. While you may be tempted to give the majority of your time to furthering business development, such development can become inefficient without a proper grasp of your employees’ bandwidth.
Filling your schedule with executive discussions and growth administration can effectively shut out your staff, resulting in a directionless team and low productivity. With some clever scheduling, you can leave ample time for employees to meet with you and discuss their work. Some may have questions about a project that only you can answer; others may have personal issues relating to workload. Making time for them ensures that you can meet their needs just as they meet yours – making for a more positive and engaged working environment.
Transparency
Another key facet of good leadership is transparency – something which comes hand-in-hand with direct employee engagement as above. Regular scheduled meetings with your team enable you to keep them clued in on the bigger picture, and better understand their personal contributions to the business as a whole. This can also brace your team for incoming business, or downturn, enabling them to adjust their working patterns accordingly.
