Are You An Effective Leader?

Astute.Work provides management consultancy, PR and marketing to organisations wanting to articulate their purpose, manage change, engage with stakeholders and build profits both ethically and sustainably. Here managing director Sarah Waddington looks at what makes an effective leader.

In my last Northern Insight column I wrote about the competencies needed to be a strong director, using the Institute of Director’s Competency Framework. This article is about being an effective leader and some of the key components to this role.

Vision

Leadership is the ability to deliver a vision based on an organisation’s goals. It’s related to the forward direction of the business and sets out a shared purpose that empowers employees to deliver what’s needed. Effective leaders ensure a vision is motivating, creates a sense of belonging, establishes a standard of excellence and provides a clear pathway between the present and the future. Making sure it is well articulated and communicated throughout the whole organisation ensures every member of the team knows what you’re collectively trying to achieve.

Engagement

Engagement is about co-ordinating activities and motivating employees to come on a shared journey, ensuring everyone is aware of the part they play in making the vision a reality. Effective leaders build a culture that enables an organisation to perform well. They establish and execute good strategies.

According to the Chartered Management Institute organisational culture is made up of “shared values, beliefs and assumptions about how people should behave and interact, how decisions should be made and how work activities should be carried out. Key factors in an organisation’s culture include its history and environment as well as the people who lead and work for it.”

Effective leaders link good behaviours to business objectives, reinforce the right thinking, and ensure the culture evolves according to the organisation’s needs as time goes on.

Decision-making

The ability to make decisions is one of the key skills of an effective leader – and one of the most challenging. When working in real time, directors may not always have access to all the information needed or data may be imperfect; there may be time constraints; there may be conscious or unconscious bias; and often there are differing levels of uncertainty. All of this means making logical and informed decisions is not as straight forward as it first appears.

Having a formal decision-making framework can significantly help reduce risk when evaluating courses of actions that affect the business. It can also help increase the speed and transparency of the process.

I recently completed an Executive Leadership course at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. It advocates following an adaptation of Peter Drucker’s decision-making stages, as follows:

• Categorise and define the problem

• Gather information

• Identify alternatives and consider the consequences

• Weight the evidence

• Choose among alternatives

• Take action

• Review the decision Making sure this is adopted across all teams internally ensures consistency of approach and a basic quality standard.

Continuous improvements

Ultimately good leadership skills are not something that you either have or don’t – leadership is a set of traits and behaviours that can be honed through continuous development.

The most important role of being an effective leader is empowering employees to think independently and support them as they progress on their own leadership journey. Helping those around you to become more effective will make you a better boss, but most of all help your organisation become more sustainable and thrive.