Leaders Letter 30 – Leadership Principles

04/01/2021

Dear Leaders, happy 2021, I trust you are energised and refreshed from your recent break.

Leadership teams spend hours every week in management meetings, you sit there working through weekly or twice a week meeting and discuss a number of recurring themes.

Many inexperienced leadership teams fail to create a dedicated leadership improvement plan, even with annual planning sessions and reviews, these leadership teams neglect having an agreed set of principles to improve the company and improving their management.
Yes, we are all busy, but there should be no excuse when it comes to improving your management team and management skills.

With clients, I recommended leadership principles for the year ahead and ensuring one member of the leadership team keeps you honest and reviews regularly to ensure you are on the right track.

If you are returning to the office or in a place to use the office safely, print out the leadership principles and post across your office, if you have a virtual or digital HQ where you share and pin announcements, pin these, refer and reference these continually and return to the leadership principles to ensure everyone is onboard and reminded of them.

Remember good leadership is ensuring old messages resonate and gain constant cut through.

Example Leadership Principles

Improve Communications – Share knowledge. Reduce unknown knowns, gain cut through to all staff members and customers 

Develop Leadership – Bring the next leaders through with a dedicated program 

Build EQ – Build emotional intelligence between leadership team and their direct reports 

Commitment – to beliefs and bets and pillars 

Focus On Listening – two ears, two eyes, one mouth 

Seek Feedback – improve feedback loops, seek out feedback not opinions and address these flaws and weak points 

Participation – Always ensure we are present and participate in every conversation, every meeting, every event.

Relevance – improve our relevancy and our positioning 

Customer-Centric – show up every day and put your internal customer and external customers first.
It is important to note: Internal good company culture has to be considered customer-centric.

Improve The Status Quo – remove the average and create a movement forward to improving output

Growth Mindset – embrace change, ask what can we do, how can we grow, what’s the change we can make.
A good read on the growth mindset and leadership is business lessons from Jeff Bezos 

Challenge X – we are going to promise to show up in x number of times in y ways.

This week concentrate on creating the right leadership principles, sharing these and ensure your teams are empowered and live these. Here are five focus points for success in January 2021.

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

PS, You will want to read business lessons from Jeff Bezos today.