Three Ways Leaders Can Achieve What They Were Hired To Do
As a leader, you’re inundated with tactical, transactional, and strategic decisions daily.
It’s natural for you to take on and solve problems because it’s easier and faster for you to do it.
The problem is: this doesn’t develop your team to be able to support you.
And you’re using your precious time on projects and problems that are drawing you away from what you were hired to do.
There are three things you can do to stop dealing with things that your team can handle so you can focus your time, skills, and strengths on the objectives of your role.
1. Have regular one-on-one conversations with your team members.
When you reflect on how you lead, are you really giving your team the knowledge and wisdom they need to thrive and succeed?
Are you giving them opportunities to take over issues that you normally deal with?
Are you allowing them to stretch outside their comfort zone, do something new, and make mistakes?
Taking this a step further, sit down with each member of your team to determine:
What is their “why” over the next 30 days, six months, or year?
How are they doing?
Are they struggling somewhere?
Are the things they must accomplish in their job in alignment to what is important to them?
If you understand their “why,” it’s a lot easier to coach and manage their why.
You can also discover what their monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals are, and then align their activities towards accomplishing the goals they’ve set up for themselves.
The main point here is to get to know your team members and what motivates them.
2. Track behavioral KPIs.
It’s time that we started tracking behavioral KPIs, not just financial KPIs, because not everyone is motivated by money.
And then tying in their behavioral KPIs and rewards to their “why.”
This helps your top performers and all team members understand what they need to do and what it looks like.
This could be as simple as helping a sales rep, who communicates well over the phone, to be more comfortable conversing face-to-face. They can be coached by a team member who has already mastered this skill, through role playing, or you can mentor them directly. Or, by having a lone wolf top performer work with the new hire and coach them. The results of how that new hire performs at their job, with the team and the confidence they demonstrate, will be the measurable for that performer’s behavioral KPI. Values should be verbs not just adjectives.
What is a behavioral KPI? Any behavior you wish your team member to improve on or do better with that will enhance their skill and opportunities, add value to the team and create momentum towards achieving the organizational goal.
What is a behavioral KPI? Any behavior you wish your team member to improve on or do better with that will enhance their skill and opportunities, add value to the team and create momentum towards achieving the organizational goal
Regardless, the main takeaway is to ensure team members are being coached to support their KPIs.
3. Constantly communicate.
Lastly is constant, constant, constant communication.
It can be a test of patience to refrain from jumping in to save the day. I get it, you want the issue fixed and moved on because you have a lot of pressures as a leader.
But it’s critical that you step back, ask questions to understand, and coach your team so they can perform at a higher level—because when they do, that frees you up to focus on what you were hired to do.
So before jumping in to solve a problem, ask yourself these two questions:
Of all the fires I put out, how many of them should be put out by someone else? And are they empowered to do so?
If that someone else is not putting out the fires, is it because they don’t know how to, they don’t want to, or they don’t think they’re supposed to because I’ve been doing it for them for too long?
The answers to these questions will guide you on your next steps on what to communicate.
Based on an excerpt from the It’s Personal, Not Business podcast, Episode 1.