The Two Tactics

Bite sized leadership advice

As a leader, change agent or change shaper you have just two tactics to transform your team and your organisation.

The tactics fall into two categories to solve two problems;

• ability is linked to skills, which are built by training,
• willingness (or attitude) is linked to motivation, which is driven by leadership.

In todays technologically advanced world, where even your grandparents are fluent in using Facebook, WhatsApp and more, humans demonstrate that they can learn and adapt quickly on a daily basis.

In the last decade, since technology has really impacted our lives and created adaptability, training and ability have rarely been the barrier to leaders success.

It comes down to willingness. Do my team *want* to change. Which leads us to the other tactic; Leadership.

Leadership is a broad subject. To make it tactical let us look at leadership in its simplist form; Communication.

Ten ways to communicate more effectively as a leader

1. Make it personal. Change does not happen from a lecturn, it happens in 1:1 conversations.
2. Be authentic. Don’t cascade the corporate message, what does it mean to you, why do you believe in it?
3. Be consistent. Simple messages, applied consistently.
4. Amplify. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Louder and more frequently than you think you need to. Otherwise your message will get missed.
5. Be focused. Stick to one priority, if not, a maximum of three and explain why they are important. Your impact is as good as the last news cycle or communication you made.
6. Use empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of your team, use your emotional intelligence
7. Measure. Find ways to measure that your message has been received. If you can’t measure it, don’t do it!
8. Do not delegate. You cannot delegate leadership, do not delegate one of your most important tasks in either the delivery or the writing. It needs your authentic voice, your passsion.
9. Boss*Boss. You are only effective for two layers. Any more than that and your message becomes informational rather than actionable. Create advocacy in your middle managers to ensure the cascade flows.
10. Connect the dots. Why is this important to you. If you don’t know or don’t feel the importance, work on this *before* you communicate. If you are not 100% convinced, your team will know.

The single most important role of a leader is lead their teams, the single most effective tactic you have is communication. How you show up. This is the heart of leadership.

Learn your craft and be more inspiring.

This is part of our Leadership Wizdom series, bite sized leadership advice for leaders who wish to improve their leadership, but don’t have much time. For more indepth articles check out The Change Wizard. We coach leaders and help their organisations become more adaptable at www.thechangewizard.com