Effective Leadership Boosts Performance

It’s no secret, “effective leaders outperform ineffective leaders every time.” That is the conclusion of Douglas Day, 30-year leadership consultant and author. He further states that if companies are going to succeed, the CEO or person of highest leadership needs to work to develop leadership skills throughout all levels of the company. Here are three truths that Day offers about leadership and how this trait will help your business grow.

• Leadership is a sustainable competitive advantage. Leaders must develop at a rate that keeps pace with accelerating global change. Development challenges our most cherished beliefs and assumptions. Business performance is directly tied to effective leadership, and the most effective leaders are conscious, authentic leaders. The top leader in any organization should be the most effective, authentic leader, and keep current with changes in the industry, with technology and in business and setting an example for the others that work in the company.

• Authentic leaders create cultures of commitment.“Most people enthusiastically support only what they’ve had an active hand in creating. Disengagement is a huge financial cost, as it deadens spirit, passion, innovation, purpose and commitment,” Day writes. Great leaders are all inclusive. They make sure they offer opportunities for all employees to offer input, especially in their specific areas of expertise, where efficiencies could increase, or production costs could be lowered. The more included the employees are, the more commitment they have to the company.

• The best top leadership teams are all about results and relationships. The best teams leverage tremendous business capability, tap into deep wells of personal and collective knowledge, actively seek strategic interdependencies and relationships, and function together in a circle of key leadership processes. Top teams should ask the question: how effective are we individually and collectively as leaders? How do we know and what are we going to do about it?

Day further states, “Great leadership is a competitive advantage, and high performance is achieved and sustained through effective leadership practices applied with discipline over time.”

Now, what Day isn’t saying that is just because you have a great team of leaders means your business will grow automatically. But since those leaders are training those employees similar business, marketing, communication and leadership skills that the entire team will put into practice, then the business will grow.

Once you have these leadership skills four things must happen for your business to grow.

  1. Execute your strategy. You know the plan. You’ve got the skills. You’ve set your sales goals. Now, it is time to put those plans and skills to work to achieve your goals.
  2. Business Rhythm. Day defines this as the “management cycle of leadership processes designed to: track progress against strategy and planning; review status on operational results through clear key metrics; update the strategy regularly, and ensure action is being driven by insight based on relevant, current information, and is focused on achieving the vision. Senior leaders need to build discipline and depth into their leadership process and management cycle, to achieve accountability, predictability, ongoing learning, renewal and sustainability.”
  3. Operational Performance. Organizations should develop simple processes that are internally efficient, locally responsive and globally adaptable. Complexity is removed from the customer experience to enable them to engage you in ways that are both well-designed and sustaining.This means continually making improvements, increasing efficiencies, developing new products and strategies.
  4. Strategic Communication. Nothing happens in business without conversation. This can be conversation between customer and employee; employee and employer; employer and board member. Every sale, new product development or product enhancement happens because of a conversation that started somewhere.

Leadership. It starts at the top, and those businesses with the most effective examples of a great leader will show performance and growth. They will implement their strategies through their business rhythm, evaluate their processes and continue the conversation to grow into the future.

Information for this article curated from: https://leadershipcircle.com/en/business-resultsand-effective-leadership-effective-leaders-outperform-ineffective-leaders-every-time/

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