Leadership: Goals and Decision Making

One of the most important traits of a successful leader is being able to inspire others to believe in a common goal.
These goals need to be compelling, cooperative and understood by every member. It’s absolutely critical when leading multiple teams. More often than not, each team will work towards their own goals without understanding how it fits into the bigger picture.
The goal needs to be powerful enough to create its own energy and inspire each team member to work towards it. In other words, your staff need to feel personally connected to it.
One of my recent goals was to set up and open an offshore office and team. This wasn’t easy. My team at home in Australia were hesitant, to say the least. But I managed to motivate my team with my energy and optimism and refusal to divert away from why I believed it would work.
Once my team could envision the potential, they were just as motivated to help me achieve it. It lead to a point where the team were able to drive the initiative themselves.
They worked together to facilitate the necessary growth, which allowed them to take ownership of it. Looking back, it all came down to empowering my team and allowing them to have ownership of the decisions. Sometimes you need to take a step back and let others own it.
In addition to ensuring everyone in the organisation understands the overall vision, successful leaders tend to be open to new opportunities and are quick to act.
The best decision-makers I’ve come across, tend to approach things a little backwards. Instead of focusing on gathering copious amounts of data, they spend their time defining the problem. A specific, detailed problem enables you to collect the right kind of data rather than spending your time working on something thats not as important.
It’s the ‘less is more’ theory. With less data that’s more appropriate for your specific problem, you’ll have a better chance of making the best decision faster. Better decisions made quickly is what your aiming for remember.
It’s also common in business for leaders to think they cannot make decisions involving emotions.
This kind of thinking is wrong.
More often than not, empathy is critical when making the best decision, as it forces accountability on those directly impacted by the decision.
Here are some additional tips to keep in mind when making decisions:
Don’t lose sight of the objective, losing sight of the objective can lead to overcomplicating and delaying making the decision.
When it comes to gathering data, don’t cross the line from idealism to perfectionism. Perfectionism will get you nowhere.
Choosing not to decide is still a choice — but it’s one that dodges accountability. You owe your staff an answer. Be prepared for confrontation as they may or may not agree with it, but they’ll be happy you made the call so everyone can move forward. Even a wrong decision is better than no decision. This way you can keep moving forward to your goal
Remember there’s a cost to not deciding (burning more employee time and energy, falling behind competition further, skyrocketing costs just to name a few).
To become a successful leader, work on building these traits. They will come in handy more often than you think.