Leadership foresight combines your ability to lead your organization in the present and sustain it into the future.
How would you rate your current level of leadership foresight?
You’ve felt uncomfortable about this topic for a while. You have nagging self-doubt that you are not on top of the situation.
Yet you are unable to gain perspective. How do you develop leadership foresight and overcome your business’s unpredictable revenue stream?
Here are two tips for getting unstuck and some questions to get you moving forward.
Leadership Foresight Tip 1: Lead into each day instead of reacting to miscues.
You hired warm bodies to fill job titles. Did you communicate the functional requirements of each hired position? Did you simply give them a piece of paper with a job description? Did you make the assumption that your new hires understood what you expected them to do?
You assumed that your company functioned, operationally, on implicitly understood, self-correcting, auto-pilot. Your output and rework tells another story. When did you take your eye off that ball?
You are left holding the bag when some employees take matters into their own hands, making decisions “on your behalf.” How did they get the idea that they run your company, and not you?
To-Do: Convey leadership foresight through unambiguous communication. Make it a priority that everyone – including you – learns how a business functions.
Leadership Foresight Tip 2: Leadership foresight hinges on a different business model than yours.
Your business model is static instead of nimble. Your leadership style is one of benign delegation. You are the Figurehead.
Your business model is like a short-order diner. Your worker bees are its cooks and waiters. They are having difficulty cooking everything your customers order. How can they learn to do things differently?
Your “cooks” are supposed to understand your directives priorities implicitly. You expect them to perform consistently and flawlessly. You know that, on a daily basis, what you say is easily misconstrued and inconsistently applied.
To-Do: Leadership foresight includes: a) understanding what you and your staff already know; b) identifying what you need to know; and c) focusing on what you don’t know anything about, at all.
Leadership foresight involves comprehending and communicating to your employees that they all are customers of each other, first. Then they can better serve your company’s customers.
Leadership foresight means doing something to fill in your gaps in knowledge, communication, and vision.
Is it time to take a decisive step and do things differently moving forward? Together?
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, is a management consultant and business coach. She helps startups and small-to-medium manufacturing and service companies who have difficulty with unpredictable revenue streams. Babette is passionate in her focus on creating Workshops and providing Coaching Services targeting implementing sustainable outcomes for your business.
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