Textbook leadership

Studies on leadership have produced theories involving vision, values, power, charisma, intelligence, and even traits among others… Since every industry, every organisation, every business, every team is different, defining an accurate path to being a great leader [great for any business] is rather impossible. But in generic terms, it all simply boils down to defining the right goals and objectives and attracting individual talent—with carefully chosen complementary competences—to achieve these as team. While described as simple, this is solely the most important factor in building a sustainable business!

Meaningfull supported objectives

Defining meaningful objectives that receives the buy-in from an entire organisation, followed by clear logical steps on how teams themselves agree to achieve each objective in sequence, allows for a more collegial, fun, and certainly more productive work environment. This also helps everyone to see their own accomplishments within the whole process, which reinforces a sense of responsibility and achievement.

Flexible organisation, distributed decisions

Seeing hierarchical organisations struggle with centralisations bottlenecks and staff responsibility commitments, companies have been looking for other types of organisational governances, such as sociocracy, heterarchy and holacracy. Whichever structure a company opts for, the end-result needs encompass empowering people to achieve their goals, meeting market specifics and customer journey, flexibility to change things for the better, and foremost delegation of decision-making.

Competences and aspirations

Accurately assessing a company’s human capital, evaluating individual competences and aspirations, should be a continuous HR activity. Falling short, a company may see either a risk of having too much ‘management’ and too little field specialists, or seeing people leave because of not reaching their own personal aspirations.

Agile meetings

An important aspect of managing decisions throughout the company is the way meetings are being held and outcomes shared. A company-wide wiki platform with team/task lists and short-term objectives, comes in handy, among other tools. Companies should keep meetings short, focussed, prepared, agile and actionable.