4 Leadership Trends Impacting the Business Landscape

The world is changing fast, and businesses must adapt to the demands of the times. Businesses need leaders that can see their companies through the uncertainty.

As the business landscape shifts, leaders need to stay on top of the developments that either threaten their companies or present opportunities. Here are four leadership trends to watch in the years to come.

1. Focus on Change

No longer is it enough to simply direct a business through times of change. The concept of change leadership emphasizes that leaders must be a part of the evolution, using vision and inspiration to encourage the business to anticipate and embrace change. Doing so will allow people to direct change instead of just reacting to it.

2. Challenges of Flexibility

Teams have greater flexibility to work remotely and set their own hours. There are many benefits to allowing employees to work from home, including increased satisfaction and decreased costs. Businesses also have access to a wider pool of talent than ever before.

However, companies also face many challenges with these flexible models. Leaders must ensure worker productivity and develop and manage new types of workflows. Developing a cohesive company culture can be difficult when employees are not located in one place. The most successful leaders will be those who can adapt and reap the benefits of remote work while mitigating the difficulties.

3. Employee Wellbeing

The wellbeing of employees is an increasingly greater focus for businesses as they find that taking care of their human capital leads to more productive and satisfied workers. Leaders should develop programs that address both the physical and mental health of their employees.

Managing with employee wellbeing in mind will become imperative as the workforce continues to demand it. Those businesses that are unable or unwilling to keep up with this trend will find it difficult to hire and retain the best workers.

4. Ethical Accountability

Businesses will need to do more than pay lip service to the growing demand for ethical accountability in corporations. Stakeholders will only accept meaningful change. 

In addition to addressing obvious areas, leaders will also need to eliminate areas of unintentional ethical lapses. Reducing competitiveness in the company culture can help to do this.

Leadership must develop clear procedures for how to handle unethical behavior and follow those procedures consistently.

As the business world continues to see unprecedented change, leaders must anticipate and adapt when faced with the unexpected. Those that can will see their businesses flourish.

Leadership and Management Skills That Sports Are Teaching You

By: Jordan Fuller of www.golfinfluence.com

During our younger years, many of us participated in sports, and the experience gave us all a lot of sense about ourselves as individuals, along with teaching us about hand/eye coordination and the importance of exercise in being healthy.

Sports do far much more than just build athleticism. Athletes learn how to push themselves and strive as a team, working together towards a goal and learn the value of sportsmanship. Each player has a role to play that through the direction of the coach determines whether the team succeeds or not.

This all translates very well into one’s social and professional life, and the leadership lessons can be applied to today’s business world.

Time Management

Any football player, at any level, can tell you that practice is a daily occurrence. Teams come to practice and go through preparation, and then get to work. A good coach expects his team ready to practice at a set time, not arriving at that time. Good athletes show up early and are ready to go when the whistle blows.

In a work environment time is money, and balancing your workload between business commitments and personal time, among other distractions is important. Athletes learn to be prepared, on time, and how to have a schedule and a plan that is based on time and resources that are available to them.

Companies effectively manage their daily processes to ensure workplace efficiency, and learning early how to follow a schedule during participation in sports can help to learn early how to manage time and employees’ time, keeping clients satisfied.

Individuals Makeup the TEAM

One of the most popular cliches in all of the sports is “there is no “I” in TEAM,” and understanding the principle that success is better achieved if everyone works together, as a cohesive team, is just as important in the boardroom as on the field of play.  Like how most sports teams know that every athlete on the field is important to success, so is every member of the team putting together a large business deal.

Setting Goals and Expectations

All athletes have goals, whether it’s to win a game, better their statistics, or move into a new level of their game. Goal setting is a skill that is mastered in athletics and can easily be transferred to any business setting. From a client relationship-building standpoint, it’s also useful as by finding out your client’s goals, and what they are trying to achieve you can help them to achieve those goals. Once we know those, we can help to create a plan and develop processes to meet our clients’ goals.

Identifying Sources of Strategy

When playing a sport, the strategy taken by a coach or player can be the difference between winning and losing. Football is all about the style of offense your team runs, or how your defense takes on the approach of stopping the offense. In the business world, much of the time is spent developing strategies and coming up with new tools to implement ways to succeed with a new business venture, or how to market to new demographics to increase sales. 

Much like on the field, time is spent analyzing the competition strategy to ensure that we stay ahead of the game, effectively planning and executing our own plan to get or stay ahead.

The Numbers Tell the Tale

Athletes are driven by the scoreboard, along with the numbers that represent how they are succeeding or failing. Just as a scoreboard or stat sheet will tell you how effectively executing your play of the game, or realizing your goals to succeed, businesses collect similar data. Management teams collect, calculate, and analyze data all the time with respect to how successful their strategies are working, or failing. These results help to keep employees and staff accountable, as well as to motivate them to hit their objectives to do the best job they can.

Professional Representation

Watch sometime if you have the chance to see a college or high school basketball or football team heading to a game, you’ll usually see the players well dressed, sometimes in a suit coat and tie. Representing their school on the road in a respectful, professional manner is something that most of the best coaches try to impress upon their players. In the workplace, making an impression upon clients and customers in a professional manner is important, and usually translates to success. Even in a warehouse environment, a uniform or standard dress code which typically includes the company logo or colors can convey to clients that brand representation and presentation are priorities of the company.

Relationships are Key

In sports, coaches and captains know the importance of building relationships with their athletes and teammates. The time spent together as teammates, learning their interests outside the game and building relationships is a key step to building team chemistry, which leads to success on and off the field. Likewise, the importance of relationships in the work environment is a major factor in the success or failure of a business, creating a perfect team might be difficult but achievable. Having a business that runs like a “well-oiled machine” can make production numbers skyrocket and keep morale among managers and employees high. 

Determination and Empathy

In trying to get people to go the extra mile and enthusiastically jump on board with a project, keeping your level of enthusiasm high can be a big help. Also, show them you care about them, not just as an employee but as a person, and the message can get across that you want them to not only be satisfied with their job but that you care about them as a person. This attitude will be helpful when building a foundation of trust and camaraderie, making your team stronger in the end.

Finishing/Closing the Deal

When setting goals and working towards checking them off your list is all part of the process of improvement. Whether you're at practice trying to move into the starting lineup, or stay in the lineup, or working on a project to bring in new clients or expand the sales demographic, it’s important to keep working until the job is done.

What Does It Take To Be An Effective Leader

Being an effective leader takes a lot of learned skills. You need to have the right energy, and you need to know how to carry yourself as it can be a cutthroat world when you’re in business, and when you’re a new establishment and you’re trying to compete with the best of them, there’s a lot of pressure on your shoulders to succeed! 

You can worry about how well you’re managing your team, and if you’re meeting the right quotas, and even if the office is set out right! You can doubt every single decision you make, but as time goes on, you’re going to get more and more confident in what you do, trust us on that one. But at the moment, it’s all about setting a good foundation that you can build your leadership skills off of, and what you can do with your time to get the most productive and useful results at the end of this process. 

So, what does it take to be an effective leader? We’ve collected a few points together below that might be a good place to start. Do your own research, make sure you know your own strengths, and then put yourself out there. It’s all about getting your head in the game, and doing what you do best, and as a business leader, that’s taking your company from strength to strength. 

Set an Example

You’re the leader here, and that means you set the example for your team to follow. The way you act, the things you say, and the actions you take are all equally important at this time - they send a message to anyone watching you (a.k.a., your employees) about what is expected, and what is wanted within your workplace. Sure, we think of bosses as sitting back and letting their team do most of the work, but that’s just an outdated cliche that you can do your bit in helping to break. Because you need to take part in the action, and you need to be able to put forth the kind of behavior you expect from those around you. Because if you don’t, who will? 

Being an effective leader is all about leading by example, and knowing your company’s message is ingrained so deeply that your employees know exactly what to do in any professional situation they could end up in. You’ve shown them what to do, you’ve let them know, each and every day, what you expect from them, and you hold yourself to those same standards. 

You’re no hypocrite, and you’re never dropping the ball or not pulling your weight. This is your company, after all, and you more than anyone else wants to see it succeed! Realizing this, and keeping it to heart, will help you to make informed decisions more than anything else. 

Prioritize Organisation 

Of course, you’re going to have a lot of top priorities on your list. But at the moment, in these early stages of establishing your authority within your business, you need to place quite a bit of emphasis on being organized. You need your company to run like clockwork, with only the occasional hiccup that you immediately know what to do about, and that means putting some systems in place. 

You need to file well, you need to create backups that are kept secured (but also easily accessible), and you even just need to ensure the office is clean and tidy too. You need to provide plenty of organized space to work and think, for everyone who works within your company. You definitely need to keep track of your cash flow, and any receipts that come in and out of your company. 

At a time like this, you could even turn to automation programs, and streamline systems, to ensure that your business is running well without your constant eye on it. Indeed, Payroll Services for Small Business are incredibly popular with small teams like yours, because it ensures your staff gets paid, on time every time, and that you can set up for good. 

Think of this as delegating out to technological team members - you’ve got a lot of software and hardware on hand that you can put to good use, and being able to use these programs to their full capacity is key to running a modern, functional business. As the leader of said business, you make the final decision on all implementations, so why not get some advice from your IT or HR department on what other software could be best for your business? 

Know Your Best Team Players

Speaking of taking advice and a bit of delegation, it’s time to get to know your best team players so you know their strengths and what weaknesses they need to develop. You need to know who you can rely on, and who you can turn to in times of trouble. You can ask yourself some questions for this; for example: Who is the most responsible on your team? Who’s always got their eye on the ball? Who stays calm in a crisis? Who is the best at holding and instructing in workshops?

It’s all about being able to identify the most obvious strengths within the people who work for and with you, and then encouraging them to use these strengths for the business’ benefit. 

And one of the best ways to do this is to hand out promotions or pay rises to ensure your team members are feeling inspired to achieve, and motivated to always do their best. It creates a culture of aiming high and landing high within your workplace. 

But at the same time, make sure you’re not setting apart the average Joes. You have some absolutely stellar team players, of course, but don’t forget about the others within your company. Try to look for more soft and subtle skills within these employees, and ensure your professional encouragement extends to them as well. An effective leader leaves no one behind, and if you want to be one well into the future, you need to think of your team like a chain and inspect each and every link separately. 

Be Open 

And finally, you need to be an open and honest sort of person to be an effective leader. Once again, lead by example here, and let your employees know that it’s OK to be themselves while at work. Health and wellness in the workplace need to be something you place a bit of priority on too, and despite how much preparation you can make with normal health and safety standards, you need to go one step further. 

Communication is key to be an effective leader, and if you can’t be open and honest with your employees, why should they do the same? You want working relationships to be positive and encouraging, and you want your team to want to show up to work with smiles on their faces and positive attitudes. It’s all about equal opportunities, and being able to have an open dialogue. 

So, let your team know that you understand. You know just how much mental toll a busy workday can have on a person, and you don’t want one of your team members to just push that kind of stress under the rug. You want them to come to you with it, or to know it’s perfectly fine to let their workplace know about their situation. 

Being an effective leader takes a lot of effort and patience, but you’re capable of it. Make sure you keep the tips above in mind when going about your days at work, be the best you know you can be, and always try to put your team’s well being first.