No one ever said leadership was easy. But in recent years, as with so many jobs, being a leader has, in fact, become harder… understanding how and why each of these leadership loads has become more difficult to carry can set you on the path to doing better.
Melissa Swift, Founder/CEO, Anthrome Insight
Takeaways of Note:
4 areas that many leaders care about and that have become more difficult in recent years, along paths to do better…
1. Leader as Cheerleader – Hyping Up Your Team
- Don’t retreat behind robotic, bland, distinctly corporate-flavored communications – keep the team’s spirits up in ways authentic to you and fight the clutter and the conflicting messages around you
- Join in the conversation wherever it occurs — think shorter, frequent communications across more channels (you can’t be everywhere, but you can make your personal warmth felt in bursts)
- “The basics of keeping your team energized haven’t changed. But the environment in which you’re doing so certainly has.”
2. Leader as Detective – Getting to the Truth
- Ask better questions of information… i.e. where data came from? what the gaps in data set might be? what analytics were performed to get to the numbers?
- Being a tougher data analyst makes us a better truth sleuth
3. Leader as General – Focusing on Strategy
- Clear time to check on how team’s strategy is doing
- “Strategy is not a dog that needs to be walked twice a day, but it might be a plant that has to be watered a few times a week.”
4. Leader as Human Being – Staying Sane Yourself
- Pick your battles at work
- Focus on what must get done
- Draw boundaries… balancing life with getting ‘must-dos’ done
- Fix the broken work of your team… supporting the sanity of the people around you