What do I need to do to become a great leader and empower my team? If you’re an entrepreneur, chances are this question is constantly running through your mind. Being a leader is challenging and building a thriving business means leaning into growth every day, often every hour.
Start with just three simple steps that are likely to make a huge impact on your business.
The Power of the Pause
What if bigger, better, and faster isn’t the way to achieve goals? What if—get this crazy idea— more silence in your life will help you make better decisions?
Think about what it feels like to sip your coffee slowly, allowing the clock to tick to the next minute, and the next, and the next, for a short while. Pausing allows you to stop current activities, take a breath, and reflect upon specific circumstances in the ensuing silence.
Perhaps you feel “too busy” for the much-needed power of the pause. Many entrepreneurs secretly crave exhaustion. These feelings give a false sense of accomplishment. Functioning on fumes means you’ve worked hard, right? On the contrary, these feelings signal that something is wrong. You weren’t meant to feel fried. The hamster wheel life is not good for you or your loved ones.
Without those moments of silence, you will never know what’s working and what’s not working in your business, and you won’t be able to discern whether the people around you are on track or ready to walk out the door. Give yourself the gift of space and grace.
The power of the pause leads to clarity, direction, and redirection in real-time. This creates empowerment and success. As a leader, you must allow your thoughts to ruminate, you develop a powerful habit of thinking before speaking.
Talk to Your Employees
Clear communication can be difficult, especially when tempers run high. The root of the problem is often inconsistent communication standards. Employees and bosses don’t know how to get everyone on the same playing field. Employees don’t understand how their bosses feel. And bosses don’t understand how their employees feel.
When managers and employees spend more time one-on-one, employees feel empowered. I challenge my “boss” clients to carve out time in their company calendars to connect with members of their staff, either in-person or virtually, on a daily basis. According to the Harvard Business Review, “those who get twice the number of one-on-ones with their manager relative to their peers are 67 percent less likely to be disengaged.”
I encourage bosses to treat these meetings like a locker room huddle before players run onto the playing field for the championship game. This gives the team the motivation and desire they need to successfully hear each other, listen well, and implement new tactics for growth. By creating this framework, everyone involved will be used to coming into work, greeting each other, and discussing their agenda items for the day.
The meetings don’t need to be longer than 15 minutes and must be held at the same time, in the same location, and for the same amount of time daily. Consistency is key.
Accountability is Not an Abstract Concept
I’ve seen many employees and employers over the years who dread the idea of goal-setting and being accountable to those goals. Accountability means that someone takes responsibility for their actions, reactions, and communication.
I guarantee you that by utilizing accountability strategies, everyone will communicate more effectively, create more profit, and become more engaged in the workplace.
Start with self-accountability. It begins with smart decision-making. By instilling self-accountability, you’ll stay ahead of your competition, keep your team members on track with their clearly defined goals, receive positive client feedback, and understand how to get ahead on tough tasks.
A lack of accountability creates chaos and crisis, which leads to frustration, mistrust, and poor results. Here’s what you (and everyone at your organization) can do to implement accountability today:
- Articulate your role as a leader in terms of goals, tasks, and objectives. Start macro and move toward micro.
- Link the duties associated with your role to key performance indicators (KPIs). As a precursor, ensure every team member is with the KPIs your organization pursues.
- Organize your tasks and goals according to priority level (as reflected by KPIs) and time to completion. Map this information onto a weekly, monthly, and quarterly schedule.
- Identify those tasks which require collaboration or depend on the work of others. Open up lines of communication so that everyone involved knows about one another’s timeframe and objectives.
- Schedule periodic, collective, goal-oriented reviews. Create a space to talk about individual and collective progress.
- Institute support and redistribution mechanisms when loads are disproportional or timeframes don’t align.
- Upon completion of each project or significant objective, make time to assess what went well and what could have worked better. Avoid pointing fingers. Frame this step in terms of organization-wide success or failure.
- Ensure everyone on board has an active voice in determining how your organization pursues accountability.
Following these steps won’t immediately transform your company’s culture but fostering the awareness and skills needed for every employee to take consistent responsibility for their role will make it a company practice.
Let’s go of perfectionism. Let’s go of any pressure you’re putting on yourself to be a perfect leader. One of my favorite sayings is, ‘Done is better than perfect.’ Start with these small steps: taking a pause, speaking with your employees, and implementing accountability. Begin now, and perfect the process as you go.
Molly McGrath is the Founder of Hiring & Empowering Solutions and the author of Amazon’s #1 Best Seller, “Fix My Boss: The Simple Plan to Cultivate Respect, Risk Courageous Conversations, and Increase the Bottom Line.” Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Leadership stock image by ImageFlow/Shutterstock
