Top Ten Leadership Tips

Here is a list of my Top Ten Leadership Tips for people in Leadership positions who want to see a step change in their team or departments performance, or for people who have been newly appointed to a leadership position and want to make an early impact!

• Be Bold
  You can’t inspire teams with small goals, and you will not create a significant improvement in performance with small goals either.
  You should set ambitious goals, but not impossible goals. Stretch you team, challenge them, make them think about doing things differently.
• Simplify
  Keep things simple, complex goals are rarely achieved. The more you can simplify the more your team will be able to understand, and the more likely they will be able to come up with solution or new approaches.
  Too often teams are confused by following too many targets, my preference is always to set a handful of key goals, generally 3.
• Have Confidence
  The team will reflect your confidence level, if you don’t show confidence then they will not feel confident either. Confidence is very important, without it success has a lower probability. So be confident!
• Create Confidence
  Build you team up, give them positive feedback about their abilities, tell them that you have confidence that they can achieve the goals that you have set for them, in fact you believe they could achieve even more.
  Confidence builds belief and belief delivers success.
• Challenge Current Thinking
  Often its the current process that limit performance and its the processes that need to be changed. Challenge everything, especially any limitations which your team feel may exists.
  Limitations are usually self imposed, and if question they can often by removed.
  Don’t ask your team whats stopping them, ask then what would they need to overcome this obstacle.
  Get them thinking about what could be done, rather than what can’t be done.
• Be Honest
  Honesty is the basis of trust and trust is the basis for leadership. Without trust you will achieve very little.
• Lead By Example
  Lead by action and achievement, show the way, lead the way. Get involved, be hands on where possible, even if its just to provide positive feedback and encouragement.
  No one follow an administrative leader!
• Create Early Success
  Success breed success, so create some early success. Get you team used to achieving their targets, get them to expect to win, to expect to succeed. By doing this you’re well on your way to creating a winning culture. Every team wants to be successful and over time small success will grow into big successes.
• Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
  You can never over communicate. It’s true that you can poorly communicate, or communicate and say nothing, but if you messages are clear, if your targets are clear, then communicate, communicate communicate.
  Communicate you goals, communicate your plan and communicate your progress so that your team knows what to do, how to do it, and the progress that they are making.
• Celebrate Successes
  Always celebrate success, even small successes, you need to get your team to get used to being successful and enjoy being successful.
  We always get what e reward, so reward success with celebration. It doesn’t have to be a huge celebration it could just be a small affair, some positive public feedback and a bottle of wine. When you do that just look at the faces, and you will see people who now want more success, who want to feel this good about themselves again.

Non of these tips are difficult to implement, but they are extremely powerful and if you implement all 10 you will see a step change in your teams performance.

Not only that you will see a team that enjoys its work, is motivated and who are inspired by their leader, i.e. you!

Gordon Tredgold

Leadership Principles