#14 - Leadership Series - Providing Direction
Friday, May 1st 2009 @ 10:30 AM
Neville Johnny provides an interesting overview on key principles of constructing and communicating a vision and/or direction.
So what can a leader do to provide the best direction for his company, department, team or even himself!
What we need to focus on is putting togeter a Vision Statement!
So what do we need to consider here:
- It needs to take a look back and into the future to understand what has worked well and where the challenges have been for the company.
- In today's world, one has to get a good view on the marketing opportunities and assess this against the company's strenghts and weaknesses to see if it is a good match.
- When looking further ahead, you are having to rely on your own projections and forecasts from business experts and also government bodies.
So what are some of the key ingredients to a good vision statement:
- motivate your staff as the organisation is moving up a level
- goals need to be achievable but expect them to be tough targets
- needs to focus on the most critical and important areas of the organisaton and business
- aim is to compel staff to act as the tasks are exciting!
What is the best approach to communicating your direction to staff?
The more methods/approaches you use the better! Some of the most popular are email, staff meetings, web site promotions, online training.
- Email - good choice if you want to alert staff of this.
- Staff meeting - keep your announcement short as it wil be easier for staff to recall. Consider a Q&A session to involve people in the discussions. Pitch the speech around how the staff can contribute.
- Web site - good source to serve reminders to everyone (including customers) as to the company's vision etc.
- Online training - clever idea to involve everyone and also to check that staff have understood the message by asking some multiple questions at the end.
