The Three C's of Great Leadership

If you are new to a leadership role, or indeed are taking over a new team/department/business area, you need to do a lot of groundwork to set out your stall at the beginning and to rally your new troops around you for the benefit of the business.

These three C’s are a good starting point to embrace your new role in building your team. Following these will make sure you will have taken some great first steps on becoming a great manager/leader within your organisation.

Communication

Communication is perhaps the most pivotal and central piece of weaponry in the leader’s arsenal. Without communication, you cannot rally the troops, cascade your vision or make changes effectively. Yet communication is often the hardest thing that leaders get right. Too much communication and it seems overloading, too little and there are screams of discontent from the ranks.

I have found that the best way to face this challenge is to offer more communication from the outset and then scale back once you are in tune with your audience’s needs. Communication isn’t just one way though and you need to ensure that the lines of communication work both ways. You will learn far much more by listening openly than you would trying to tell people what should be happening in the business.

Here are some ideas for improving communication within your department:

• Having regular structured monthly team meetings with your direct reports
• Weekly/daily performance huddles for short progress updates
• Monthly email or Slack communication to all staff, regular
• Time set aside for anyone to approach you directly to discuss whatever is on their mind.
• Coffee mornings where an informal Q&A can be held
• Central inbox just for questions direct to you as the leader
• Facebook for Work/Slack/Yammer or other online comms system with groups within the office
• Skip-level meetings where managers sit down with a handful of employees

Stay away from allowing anonymous comments. You want to try and foster an open and honest two-way communication loop within your business. Allowing anonymous feedback will not help you get to the route of problems and may be abused to create issues where there are none.

Collaboration

After communication, collaboration in and amongst your team(s) is key. Too many times have I seen teams working in silos for their own agendas when really they should have been working alongside each other for the good of the company.

Encourage cross working and information sharing between teams. Even teams where you don't think will have anything relevant to say to each other, a different perspective and mindset could open numerous opportunities.

Ways to encourage collaboration:

• In-touch sessions hosted between departments to showcase what they do and who they are
• Highlighting the current projects to the wider team
• Encourage all staff members to comment and contribute ideas (make sure you go back to them with the outcome)
• Implementing a mentor or coaching scheme
• Celebrate together on successes
• Share goals and objectives across your teams so everyone aware what joint success looks like
• Paint a clear picture of the future for everybody
• Selecting staff from different departments to engage in projects that they might not have normally

Regarding my last point; I am not suggesting that people are unnecessarily invited to a project or meeting just for the sake of inviting them (I am a strong believer in only inviting people who are relevant to a meeting), but it may benefit all involved to have fresh perspecitve.

Consistency

This is all about making sure you continue with the good work you are building.

There is nothing worse to an employee than changing goalposts on a regular basis. Of course,  business goals and objectives change, some are a constantly evolving beast and your role in and amongst this chaos is to ensure that your focus and consistency in how you manage the team and work together is stable and absolute.

Continue to be clear in your communications, continue to collaborate across the teams, continue to stay calm in a crisis and continue to be yourself throughout. Your team and your business will be all the better for it.

Haphazardly changing your management style will damage the foundation that you are trying to build. So act consistently with each member of your team so people know what to expect when they deal with you.

Be clear on how you will operate from the outset and stick to it.