5 Key Business Strategies for Leadership Effectiveness

Align & Strategise

“Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.” — Jim Collins,’Built to Last’

One of the most important elements of long-term success is the perception of executive alignment. Align your leadership team, empower them to work collaboratively towards the goals you’ve set for the new year. Make sure your leadership team not only subscribes to the company’s vision, but also the company’s purpose. Consider how the company’s purpose aligns with their own personal values and what motivates them to work towards their goals. Once you’ve aligned your leaders, create your strategy and set specific objectives. These objectives should be effectively communicated all the way from top to bottom.

Align your leaders, engage your people and make sure you have their buy-in.

Look back, leap forward

“If you want to know the future, look at the past.” – Albert Einstein

It’s crucial to understand your organisation’s current and desired future state. Looking back, what lessons can be gained over the past 12 months? Start by making a list. Take note of what went well and what didn’t. Ask yourself, what are the common pain points and trends?

Develop a Value Stream Map of your current state, in order to visually understand all of the critical steps in a key process. Value Stream Maps easily quantify the time and volume taken at each stage of the process, allowing you to discover and eliminate inefficiencies or waste. Any step of the process that doesn’t provide value to the customer is considered to be ‘non value-add’ – work towards eliminating these steps. Value Stream Maps are your key to effectively working towards a desirable future state.

Develop your people

“You don’t build a business, you build people – and then, people build the business.” –  Zig Zigler

Knowledge is power and skill is applying that power to reach outcomes. A successful business strategy is no use if the people who are executing it aren’t trained accordingly. Once you’ve developed your objectives, understand how you can support your team through upskilling. Given the correct training, your team will have a much higher success rate, in a shorter turn-around time. Growth will be mutual and your people will feel empowered.

Invest in your people, develop them.

Manage the plan

“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them towards a certain goal.” – Walt Disney

Coach, guide, motivate and be there to support your team. Follow the processes that you’ve developed. Your people should feel empowered and proudly own the work they do. Celebrate and take note of the small wins along the way. When challenges or roadblocks arise, work collaboratively as a team to define the problem and solve it. Don’t be afraid to innovate and improve your processes. Be sure to have a system in place that will allow you to monitor progress.

Continuously Improve

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” – Mark Twain

Continuous improvement is all about making work easier. It means removing the headaches, clutter and any problems that may slow you down. It’s about refining, tweaking and looking at ways to make processes simpler – even if that means renewing last month’s manuals.

Organisation’s that employ a Continuous Improvement approach are constantly evolving and refining their processes. This not only improves culture and morale, but it provides them with a significant competitive advantage. Imagine a smooth-running workplace where everything runs great – so great that there’s ample time to focus on becoming even greater! Most importantly, Continuous Improvement is about creating a mindset and culture in your organisation. It’s about collectively striving towards Operational Excellence – one small step at a time.

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Contact us to find out how we can help implement Continuous Improvement Strategies in your business to help you achieve your 2022 strategic goals.