WRITTEN BY GARRETT DELPH, CEO AND FOUNDER OF CLARITY OPS
Leadership is both an art and a science, a fusion of vision, values, emotional intelligence, wisdom, boldness, adaptability, clarity of direction, problem-solving, thinking outside and sometimes, even inside the box, and so much more. Leadership is a syncopated dance of both hard and soft skills. At its very core, practical leadership is the output of how you think, what you believe, and your judgment capabilities. If you’re ready to take these insights to heart and lead with intention, grab your notebook and join me on this journey through these leadership best practices.
14 Leadership Practical Plays
1. Accountability: The Cornerstone Of Leadership
Accountability builds a foundation of trust and ownership within teams. It’s more than assigning blame or praise; it’s about setting clear expectations, repeatedly measuring those expectations, consistently providing feedback when required, and then iterating change as the future needs. The benefits are guaranteed to show up as increased gross profits, improved efficiency, and a healthier culture.
2. Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)
SOPs are the instructions, guidelines, formulas, and recipes for activities in your businesses that are repeated by different teams and people. They act as blueprints to ensure consistency and efficiency. Documenting, training, and maintaining active SOPs will reduce errors and streamline productivity.
3. Org Chart: Clarifying Roles & Responsibilities
A well-structured and defined organizational chart empowers clear decision-making and business alignment. So, define your org chart, titles, and positions. For each unique role in the org chart, ensure that decision rights are embedded. There’s nothing worse in an organization than its people not knowing who to go to for what and for the team leads to be unsure of who’s responsible for critical decisions. It stresses people out, causes delays, and prevents momentum. Establish the org chart, have individuals sign off on it, and review it at least once a year.
4. Recaps & Follow-Up
Leaders go fast. And if they are in charge of and responsible for other teams and people, they are responsible for directing and giving instructions. The mistake many leaders make is the dispersing of vision, instructions, and directions audibly with the expectation that people will remember what was said and then execute accordingly. So, before you deliver your vision, instructions, and directions, write them down, then share. After you are done sharing, give them to your people and invite them to ask questions, poke holes, and get clarity. It will pay you back in dividends. This practice, a staple in practical leadership skills, eliminates misunderstandings and keeps everyone aligned with objectives.
5. Project Building: Structured Management For Success
If part of your role as a leader is managing projects, then you must master the art of project building. The degree to which you get the project architecture correct will be the degree to which you succeed. Consider these basic project-building steps for your foundation: Define clear objectives and scope, identify the owners of each major milestone and/or task, measure your resource supply and capacity, ensure you can measure your definition(s) of success, and assign deadlines to all activities. Deadlines move mountains.
6. RIPA: A Framework For Continuous Improvement
The RIPA framework—Review, Identify, Plan, Accountability—is a continuous improvement framework that drives growth and improvement. Leaders frequently operate at a rapid pace. As your business grows and expands, it’s very common for the operations (people, process, and performance) to degrade from order to disorder, from well-organized to disorganized, and from efficient to inefficient. What’s the best insurance for this standard occurrence? Adopt a repeatable continuous improvement framework. That’s it. Invest in the insurance and the practice. It will ensure you don’t fall prey to the threat of waste and loss.
7. PAC: Encouraging Inquiry & Clarity
The PAC approach—Poke Holes, Ask Questions, Get Clarity—fosters a culture of questioning and critical thinking. Encouraging your teams and people to challenge what they have been given by asking questions to both understand and improve leads to better innovation and outcomes.
8. Begin with, “Maybe It’s Me”: The Power Of Self-Reflection
Self-reflection is critical in practical leadership. And, when problems arise, it’s all too common for leaders to immediately put their laser beam focus on everything and everyone around them. I have found that the best place to start is with “Me.” Before the problem-solving hunt begins, start by asking questions like, “Am I the root cause of this problem? Was there anything I did or did not do that led to this problem?” (i.e., Maybe it’s me?). Then, as you go to your teams and people, you will have grounded yourself and can pursue solving the problem from an unbiased perspective. This will increase your clarity and strength.
9. Know The State of Your Team
Seek to understand their mindsets, challenges, and professional expectations (.ie., how they are measured for success). This is a function of leadership EQ and professional behavior. The benefits? You’ll come to understand your team dynamics and opportunities, and this will allow you to proactively head off future problems before they grow and fester.
Also Read: Hiring The Right People: The Process And The Impact
10. Project-Specific Recap Meetings
Project-specific recaps are integral for reviewing outcomes. These meetings, guided by practical leadership training, identify lessons learned and areas for improvement, ensuring continuous progress.
11. KPI Transparency/Ownership
How are you measuring success? Would you know what success looks like for each of your teams and people when you see it? And is that because their success was predefined and measurable? Or, is the success based on “feelings” or “gut”? If the latter, let me encourage you to define measurable success for all teams and all people. If you have not defined success and made it measurable, you will not know when you achieve it. A measurable state or marker becomes the “indicator” of the kind of performance you want or don’t want. This is the idea behind a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). And, so, build them—use them. Publish them and ensure people know that it is their job to own the delivery of those success markers. This approach, when done correctly, will move your business in the right direction.
12. Celebrate Excellence
Public praise and private coaching are golden mantras. Make it a priority to celebrate and praise small and big wins. Most wins throughout a business come in small, almost imperceptible sizes—they actually make up the majority of wins. So, if we reserve our applause and praise for only the big stuff, we miss out on 90% of the opportunities to build up people and culture.
13. Demand-To-Resource Equation
When managing demand-to-resource, the idea is to properly load balance the amount of demand expected of any given person. We can learn from how computers are built. As computer users, we know what happens when we ask a computer to process or do more work than it has the computing power or memory capacity to support. And when this happens, the computer becomes extremely sluggish, slowing to a snail’s pace. Keep asking it to do more, and it will crash. Humans are the same way. So, as a leader, your job is to ensure you get this equation right. It will set your people and the company on a path to health and success.
Also Read: Workload Management: Achieving BHAGs Without Burning Out
14. Tell Them & Ask Them To Repeat
People need clarity. We depend on the people in charge of leading for outcomes to give us clear guidelines and instructions to be accurate in our execution. And, so, if you are a leader, take this seriously. Be professional and communicate clearly with written and audible instructions. THEN, ask those that you lead if they are clear and if they have questions about what is expected. Be a chief reminder officer in this way. Their accurate understanding and retention of that information will result from this best practice.
A Continuous Journey Of Practical Leadership
Embracing these practical leadership plays enhances effectiveness and fosters a culture of growth. By adopting these strategies, leaders can navigate business complexities with confidence, driving success and sustainability.
Also Read: 7 Strategies That Will Turn Your Business Around
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