What smart leaders do right
Seven steps:
1. Appoint the right people. I assume you already have made a few smart appointments and would wish to continue this trend in more than an intuitive manner? In expanding your team, select very carefully and only the best talent. Be coached on how to select professionally and to ask the right talent-based track-record questions. You need people who will understand their roles and contributions to making them and your company grow. They should understand your company's mission and be able to execute your plans and strategies. Match the strengths of the applicants to posts and make the latter demanding. Will the candidates be able to fulfil even more demanding senior posts or roles five to 10 years from now? Appoint present and future leaders. Include your values in your selection criteria.
2. Determine direction with your people and plan together. Involve, if possible, everyone in participating in a future-oriented scenario conversation and in developing your company's strategic and operational plans. Develop new insights and sound, simple and balanced plans which are crucial to your survival and growth. See ... planning.
3. Install basic systems and processes and ensure that you have reliable information and data on hand. Work incrementally.
4. Build people and mould a well-functioning team by focusing on their strengths (talents (recurring patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour), knowledge and skills; by finding their own voices; by providing positive, thoughtful feedback and praise; and by providing opportunities to learn and grow, to be creative, to become emotionally involved and to do so in a principled way. (ABPLAN coaches a modern Knowledge/Information Age approach.)
5. Focus firstly on your employees and, secondly, on your clients/customers, as this approach will ensure a type of service by your employees that leads to experiences and emotions among clients or customers which result in the latter's emotional engagement, client loyalty and life-long work relations.
6. Execute your plans/ideas meticulously as a team. Make the discipline of execution part of your plans. "Now that we know what we want to achieve, how will we achieve it?" Link execution and results to your performance appraisal system which in turn is linked to the strategic and operational plans of your enterprise. See ... execution.
7. Create a specific company culture - and do so in terms of a culture strategy which is aimed at creating a work environment which attracts and retains the right people. Not any people. The right people with talents which are specifically needed by your company to purposefully grow into a great company.
Smart outcomes
If you do these things right, the rewards will be a smart team of emotionally-engaged people, a company where working smart is the norm, and where clients become emotionally loyal because your company simply wows them by looking professionally after their interests.
ABPLAN delivers these seven outcomes in partnership with you - if you have the yearning, the commitment and are willing and able to do the learning and hard work required to create these seven conditions. Check Ideal Client and if you fit the description, call us.
Your most important clients are your internal clients
Your colleagues and team members are your company; not the building or a registered entity. People seek equity, recognition of achievement and camaraderie. Put your people first!
Invest in your intangibles these being your Human Capital, Information Capital and Organisation Capital. The right people really are the foundation of your business. The right culture and climate can turn your company around. We will assist you to do so in terms of an incremental programme of change.
Assuming you have the right people on board, your departure point would be ... what we offer and our Plan and Accelerate Your Business Programme
For the Balanced Scorecard focus on people, see balanced scorecard and scorecard intangibles.
Also visit the related important topic of company culture.
For information about The Enthusiastic Employee by David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind and Michael I. Meltzer, and about The 8th Habit by Stephen R Covey, please visit worth reading.
Last modified: 16-10-2011