High-performing leaders can effectively increase business capacity to accomplish more with less, resulting in innovative, efficient, strategic solutions. Such leaders relentlessly follow proven behavioural principles by ensuring team members are pulling in the same direction and creating focused teams that build continually improving and sustainable projects.
The articles in this series look at how successful leaders are trustworthy, visionary and inspirational. As leadership of an organization occurs in real time, the next important best practice is "helping the business learn and adapt." To ensure they build projects with the capacity to help their business make important strategic adjustments, high-performing leaders believe in and efficiently follow the six measurable behaviours described below.
Sensitize the business to adapt to changing conditions
As market conditions and/or new regulations can negatively affect performance, project leaders need to rigorously identify and execute improvements that enable their business to adjust to change. Successful leaders monitor and prioritize important internal as well as external – such as social and economic – changes that could affect the organization. For example, if new environmental regulations affect a service organization, leaders should execute a detailed risk analysis to improve the business in advance of these changes. As a leader, you must facilitate team commitment, buy-in and ownership for performance improvement projects that achieve the highest ROI.
Accomplish business goals through high-performing projects
High-performing leaders follow the mantra, "If you're not getting better, you're getting worse," and they leverage the momentum achieved from gaining their team's agreement to a measurable and calendarized end-state (see second article on "How to be a visionary leader"). The key is to adopt continuous improvement and increasing capacity as your two highest-priority strategic objectives. High-performance projects have all employees constantly seeking ROI improvements for the business, and their leaders ensuring that everyone in the organization is pulling in the same direction to achieve the company's strategic objectives.
Challenge the traditional way of thinking or doing things
Every business leader has their own set of principles to lead the organization, and this approach cascades down and is emulated throughout the company. High-performing leaders (such as the late great Steve Jobs) constantly challenge the status quo by increasing the rigour of their business processes. To achieve their desired results, they envision high ROI projects and have the business focus on improving such key result areas as market share by effectively and efficiently executing the projects. Assuming these best practices are followed, this effectively transforms the organization, as it challenges the traditional way of thinking or executing projects.
Mandate continuous learning and improvement from yourself and others
High-performing leaders walk their talk by demonstrating their commitment to professional development. One highly effective tool is to benchmark their use of the evidence-based best practices that improve business performance. If you, as a successful leader, adopt such strategically valuable activity, your direct reports will do the same. They will be able to leverage and prioritize their strengths; identify and improve on their weaknesses; more effectively take advantage of opportunities; and efficiently mitigate threats. The high deliverables from such professional individual review increases commitment, buy-in and ownership to achieve improvement objectives.
Learn from best practices used by other organizations
The best practices explained in this column are evidence-based and provide the maximum ROI in building continually improving and sustainable high-performing projects. But it is also worth viewing the project learning experiences of other organizations as opportunities to improve your own company. Stay focused on your business but consider all avenues for improvement ideas.
This column is the fourth in a series of edited excerpts from Donald Scott Andrews's forthcoming book "Increasing Your Performance Intelligence®: How High Performers Follow Best Practices to Effectively Execute Their Strategies."
Next month in Leadership Best Practices: Being a team builder for your business
