If you follow us on social media, you might have seen our recent Leadership Lessons series.

There are thousands of books written about leadership. We’ve distilled some lessons from some of them into the acronym JUST FOR ME – nine things within your control to help you become a more effective leader.

1. Just do it.
So often we get in our own way of implementing our ideas. There will always be a reason why you shouldn’t do something. But the trick is to just start and push through whatever is stopping you. You’ll find that once you start, the momentum will pick up and you’ll push through whatever it was stopping you in the first place. 

To help with this, remember to:

• Always be consistent
• Do one thing at a time
• Don’t worry about failure, failure breeds success
• Systemise systemise systemise!

Stop limiting the business’s potential and prioritise your time to ensure the important things get done!

2. United vision and values.
Have you got a business mission and vision statement? What are your business values? 

Your Vision Statement is where you want the business to be in the future. What are your long term business objectives ?

Your Mission Statement is your company’s purpose and how you and your team plan to achieve your goals set out in your Vision Statement.

Your Values are what drive your behaviour to get there

Why are these so important? It ensures everyone is on the same page, it encourages motivation, drive and ambition. These establish consistency and can shape company culture.

3. Safety.
It’s part of a leader’s job to ensure physical and emotional safety for their team at work. This goes beyond legal obligations; the safer employees feel at work, the more productive, innovative and loyal they’ll be. 

4. Teamwork and Trust.
As a leader, you should aim to form a team of people who are smarter than you in different ways. Use your collective expertise to achieve results impossible to achieve on your own.

Build a culture of trust so your team know they can rely on you and that the feeling is mutual.

5. Focus.
As leaders, it’s important to bring focus to each team member’s individual contribution towards achieving the business goals and vision. By providing clear key performance indicators, you will ensure everyone knows what to focus on.

Below is a five step process to help you implement actionable KPIs that your team can focus on:

• Review your current business objectives
• Analyse your current performance and areas for improvement
• Set short term and long term KPI targets
• Schedule time to review targets with your team
• Review progress and re-adjust where appropriate

6. Opportunity.
The way leaders tackle challenges and adversity may separate good leaders from GREAT leaders! Great leaders will look for the opportunity in every mistake, challenge and difficult situation. Rather than being bogged down or discouraged by difficult situations, great leaders are able to adapt and propel forward with these opportunities. These are key sources of learning.

7. Resilience and Resourcefulness.
Resilience helps you recover quickly from difficult situations

Resourcefulness helps you find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties

Being a resilient and resourceful leader can see you and your team through difficult situations and it’s something many of us have had to find within ourselves this past year. It’s also important to build resilience and resourcefulness in your team and not just yourself

8. Mindset.
This is the attitude you bring to your role as leader. Do you have an abundance mindset or scarcity mindset? Do you take ownership, accountability and responsibility for your actions? Your mindset has a huge impact on how you and your team feel about coming to work each day and you must ensure your conscious of this in your day to day.

9. Empathy and Energy.
Empathy is the ability to see things from another’s perspective. For example, instead of disciplining a team member for struggling, first seek to understand why they’re struggling, then offer support and training. Increased empathy increases energy across the team and the business and improves results.

Take these nine factors and make a plan for how you can develop your leadership skills. Which one will you focus on first? If you need help implementing strategies to become a better leader, get in touch.

“Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying fundamentals.” – Jim Rohn