Saturday, April 30, 2011

The three Critical D steps to improve your leadership

We often hear a lot about leadership and how to learn or improve on how we lead our teams to top performance. While much of this is way to technical for most of us, I like to simplify this to the three critical D steps to improve and maintain your leadership skills.

 What are my three critical D steps?

Destination,
Determination, and
Diligence.

To know where we want to go we must have the Destination in mind. It's important for us to visualise what the end goal looks like, is it one of efficiency, is it a task that's complete, is it a certain level of customer satisfaction. What the destination is will help shape how we will achieve it. But before we solve the challenge of getting there we must have a very clear picture of what our team's destination is.

Like most serious goals we set our teams, the challenge will be tough and its our Determination to keep at it, to find a better way, to look for better outcomes that shapes how we get to our destination. Without determination we will faulty along the way and team will fall behind. We must maintain our determination and keep our team focused so we can achieve our goals.

The final D is for Diligence and an area many of us struggle with. The temptation when a task is 90% done is for us to begin to celebrate and move on. Good leaders of great teams know that they must be diligent and take care that the last 10% of the task is finished to ensure the completeness of the task.  However our diligence also applies to looking at how we completed our tasks and searching for ways to improve so that next time we repeat this task its done faster or to a higher level of quality.

So basically that's my three D's to help us stay focused and improve our team performance. The application of understanding our destination, the determination to work through any issues and complete the task and then finally our diligence to search for the small details and make sure they are done to the best our team can.

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