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Confident Leadership, Problem Solving and Decision MakingYou have to believe in yourself, so do your employeesThere are several elements to confidence. When it comes to leadership, you have to know that you'll be able to provide sustainable leadership to grow your company and meet every challenge head on. It's your responsibility to build your own confidence. There are three ways to do this: experience, read, and watch others. Experience is one of the best ways to learn, but not necessarily the quickest. You will make a lot of mistakes along the way. Good decisions build confidence, while bad decisions undermine confidence. Learning from your mistakes will help you make better decisions in the future. The best way to build confidence is to keep making better and better decisions. Each good decision will usually result in a win. Every time you win, you become more confident. Your confidence and your employees confidence in you will grow as they watch you effectively handle problems. Your employees will not only look at the solution, they will also observe your approach. They watch because they want to see the problem solved in the quickest and most effective way. You may solve a problem, but if the process was more tedious and painful then it needed to be, you are not doing much to instill confidence. The approach can be as important as the solution itself. Keep in mind all good leaders understand the importance of employees buying in. You will be given several opportunities to showcase your leadership abilities. One great opportunity falls in your lap when you are advised of a major screw-up. Every employee is expecting their boss to explode when they hear about it. Why? Because this is what always happens. However you, as the natural leader you are, don't react. You let them know you want to understand what happened, let's try and find a way to fix it, and we will deal with the other stuff later. This isn't easy to do, it is only natural to react impulsively. I always tell myself the bigger the problem the calmer I am going to appear. Bigger problems have the potential to be very expensive so if there is ever a time to exhibit exemplary leadership it is then. Once you get past the initial shock it is time to realize that every problem is unique, and requires a unique solution. Don't attempt to solve this problem the same way you solved another problem. There's always a unique facet that creates a different opportunity. It's extremely important to correctly identify the problem. Many times the problem turns out to be different than you thought it was. Put yourselves in the shoes of your employees, customers, or suppliers. What do you think they are feeling or dealing with? Look at each challenge from the perspective of everyone involved, not just yourself or your company. You are trying to make the best decision for everyone. Confident leadership is about making decisions that will make the company better, stronger and more efficient. A problem is an indication of inefficiency. The goal is to solve the problem in a way that makes the company more effective. Your solution to this problem must fit in with your long-term strategy, and has to be the impetus for a particular plan of action. When you look at a problem from another perspective, you start to see it in a practical light. I've seen managers solve their dilemma with a solution that wasn't good for the customers, and therefore wasn't good for the company. They assumed they came up with the right solution, but they didn't look at it from the perspective of everyone down the line who would be affected. If you believe everyone has a good understanding of the problem, the next step is to ask your team "given this problem what should the outcome to look like?" What would the plan of action look like? How would things operate in the future? Is this change better for the employees? What about the customers? It doesn't matter if it's a personnel decision, an infrastructure decision, or an expense decision. Whatever you do, the company should look and act better because of it. Know your starting point, and know where you want to end up. Once you've figured out those two critical aspects, you can formulate a plan. Do some research. Ask for advice. Get input from your staff. The most important step you can take right now is learning enough to ask the right questions. The idea is that asking the right questions will result in finding the right solution out of all the potential solutions. Be terribly creative at this point. Have everyone who will be part of implementing your strategy be part of the decision making process. The success of the solution will be in their hands at some point, so they need to have enough information and input to make the right decisions along with you. Sort through possible alternatives and make a decision. There are very few decisions in life that can't be reversed. If it doesn't work and it looks like you screwed up, don't let your ego get in the way. Find a new solution. Let's talk about emotions for a minute. Emotions are involved in almost every decision in life. From the clothes we wear to the car we drive to the house we live in. Emotions trump just about every other factor in the decision making process. We sometimes fall in love with the wrong person or buy stuff we really don't need because of emotions. It happens, its part of being human. To be a great leader, you have to understand that emotions will affect your decisions. You need to learn to set aside your ego and your personal gain. The emotion you should keep is empathy. Somewhere, at some point, people will be affected by the decisions you make. How you handle that aspect of leadership says a lot about you. Whether people are treated well or poorly, people will see it and assume they're going to be treated the same way. If you make a decision that ends badly for someone, go out of your way to minimize the affect, even when it means going above and beyond the call of duty. Even if you dislike this person, or they've screwed something up, you take care of them and make it right. It's not just one person you're worried about; it's the number of employees and clients that are watching you. You always want to be the person that takes the high road. Magnanimous people are the most admired. |
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