Give Me Three Minutes and I’ll Boost Your Leadership!

It’ll take about three minutes to read this blog post, and I guarantee that if you apply the principles below, you’ll take your leadership to the next level.

I have discovered a simple blueprint to enhance anyone’s leadership ability.   It is a guide that has consistently led my teams toward greater productivity and results.

As leaders, we make decisions every day.  In some ways, you can boil leadership down to a series of decisions, some are good, and others are bad.  I have used the term Process to describe how we interact with people to set and pursue our goaIs.

For years, I’ve made decisions that in a particular way that leverages the power of Process-based leadership.   Anyone can increase his or her effectiveness as a leader by following this simple plan for decision-making.

Decisions = Opportunities to Lead

Let’s say you have a challenge or opportunity that arises in your business. Before you try to tackle the problem yourself, focus on the following three questions:

–    Who can help me make a better decision?

–    Who is going to have to carry it out?

–    Who will be impacted by it?

Next, gather an appropriate team to discuss the challenge or opportunity and resolve how it can most effectively and efficiently be addressed.  Also, it’s important to resist the temptation to start finalizing your own solutions before the meeting.

Time well spent

I’ve found that this approach usually involves engaging your team over a period of time through a series of meetings. A good 4-step meeting approach is to:

1.  Start with a meeting to expose your team to an idea and then to give them some time to let the idea sink in and “incubate”;

2. Pull them together and ask for and record their input and ideas;

3. Get them together again to review, help “tweak” the plan and reinforce “buy in” from all concerned; and

4. Have them review the final solution or plan just to see if there are any more ideas for changes or improvements.

Now this sounds like it might take more time and effort than simply giving orders (autocratic) or telling someone else to figure things out (delegative).  Why would you want to adopt this procedure for your decision-making?

•   It’s based in a fundamental regard and respect for people
•   It usually produces better results than merely giving orders or shoving things off onto someone else.

I have learned that focusing on gooood process is the best way to obtain the desired result. I have grown to absolutely trust a “Process oriented” approach to leadership. Why? Because when I trust good process, I always get good results –  plus all the other benefits of people being involved in the “process”, e.g. buy-in, ownership, people were trained, cheerleaders of the decision, etc.

How do you make decisions? Would you consider trying this approach to decision making?