The Knowledge Bites blog - grow your skills

If you've been a leader for at least a few months, you’re probably beginning to notice a few things about your “new normal”. These might include: •    There are different facets of your role •    You need to use a different approach in different situations at work •    You still do your “day job” •    You feel that you have more to do, but no extra time to do it in. But that’s life…! Now you’ve recognised these things, it’s time to start thinking about the different elements of your role (I like to call them “personas”), which to employ each, and what that looks like. Persona 1: Leader Being a leader is about setting the vision for your team. It’s about know where you are as a group and where you want to get to. It’s also about thinking about what needs to happen to achieve that. This is about knowing your vision and making sure every decision you make supports that vision. It’s the leader who thinks about setting motivational ...

As a leader, you often don't benefit from the same level as support as your team do. For that reason, you need to be a little more self-sufficient about developing your own skills. Here are some ideas to help you do that... There are 2 topics in this article: Asking for feedback Proactively developing new skills How to ask for feedback Most people would agree, that when it’s delivered well and fairly, feedback is incredibly helpful. Our definition of feedback at Navanter is: Shining a light on something, positive or negative, that the other person isn’t aware of, and the impact their actions is having on their work. If you take this definition, then you should always want feedback, because it stops you doing things which make you look bad, and it gets you the appreciation and recognition you deserve when you do something well. Feedback is also just one person’s view on something, and not necessarily a balanced assessment of your performance. To ask for feedback (and use it), you sh...

Here's the next part of our series on leadership skills... There's an ongoing trend in organisations at the moment for decisions do be made further down the organisation where appropriate. As a leader, you’re going to need to take decisions, either alone or with others, so you’ll need to techniques in this section to ensure your decision is a strong one. The Impact-Ability matrix This is a particularly helpful tool to take the subjectiveness out of making decisions. It helps you to take an unbiased view by considering two elements: The impact your chosen path will have on the team, organisation or problem. How easy it will be to action the decision once made. The matrix is a simple 4-box grid: You plot your options on the grid according to the two axes, then you select the option(s) nearest to the top-right corner as your “good ideas” to take forward. Identifying risks So you’ve made your decision… except you haven’t tested it at all to check for problems. A major consideration...

Running an engaging meeting Unfortunately, if you ask most people in any organisation, they’ll likely tell you that they attend too many meetings. The first key element in an engaging meeting is knowing what the meeting needs to achieve. If you don’t spell this out, then the meeting lacks direction, drags on too long, and people don’t see the point in being there. Desired Outcome Statement A Desired Outcome Statement is a short, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, Time-constrained) statement which shows you what you want to happen at the end of your meeting. An example could be: By the end of this meeting, we will have an agreement on the current status of our sales, and five actions to give sales a boost. Having a statement of this sort in place at the beginning of planning for your meeting enables you to build the entire event with this in mind, including: Setting the topic Inviting the right people Engaging the right people in advance Considering th...