At the heart of every successful organization is a clear understanding of roles. As a leader, it’s vital to define your own five core responsibilities—the primary tasks that drive your business forward. But equally important is ensuring that every team member knows their responsibilities, too. If you’re not clear on your own role, how can you expect your team to know theirs?
Leadership isn’t rocket science. Creating the conditions for business success is actually pretty basic: be clear about where you are going and why; define what success looks like and track performance; make sure all of your key people on the same page; don’t “wing it” when it comes to important decisions; ensure that every single employee knows how they fit in the big picture and what they are supposed to be doing; create a process for providing on-going performance feedback; hold people accountable for results (including yourself); be careful about who you hire and put in supervisory roles; provide extensive training and support; never stop communicating with your customers; and make sure everyone shares in the success of the business but also feels the pinch of nonperformance.
I often get asked for a checklist of business management improvement ideas. While the following list isn’t exhaustive, it is a good start for anyone who would like to audit their existing business situation:
The more people know about the company’s basic metrics, the more they can connect their work to its results. If you’re a fair employer, they’ll take pride in the organization when things are going well and help when you need extra effort. Furthermore, numerous studies have demonstrated that your top performers want you to keep score.
We have a weekly newsletter packed full of weekly updates of latest content posted here.
