Developing Leadership Strategy

Posted by Aleksandar M. Velkoski on January 11, 2010 under General Leadership | Be the First to Comment

Having an effective leadership style is crucial for individuals holding positions of power within organizations. Knowing your personal goals and having motivational skills simply isn’t enough in today’s competitive environment. Instead, leaders need a clear-cut strategy for obtaining organizational goals and objectives, as well as the lower-level deparmental goals that they’ve established. Learning to develop and implement an effective leadership strategy is one of the most important  steps in learning to lead a successful team.

First, it’s important that a leader clearly define a cause or purpose. This could be developed in terms of a mission and vision statment if you’re an organizational leader, or a more comprehensive business plan if you’re an entrepreneuer. As a corporate manager, however, setting sales goals and developmental milestones would also be a requirement. It’s important to note that leaders will develop goals that are difficult, but not impossible to obtain. Leaders must constantly challenge their employees to be bigger and better.

The second piece of an effective leadership strategy is the development of clearly defined goals. These goals are, in effect, the steps needed to be successful in the ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ discussed above. True leaders will clearly define primary and secondary goals and set milestones for employees to reach.

Third, it is important to have a way to measure success. Leaders realize the importance of positive feedback, and implement a plan whereby success can be easily measured and recognized. Leaders always remember that it is their primary goal to make sure that their ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ is attained and that employees are successful and properly recognized.

Finally, a good leadership strategy will include access to the tools and education needed to be successful. Leaders recognize the importance that proper knowledge and tools can have on the outcome of their project. Hence, the ideal strategy will include both the time and the money to educate employees as necessary and to upgrade software and other tools to ensure success.

In summary, effective leaders work diligently on developing a leadership strategy for their project or organization. By carefully reviewing the strengths and weakness of team members and setting obtainable goals, leaders can easily become the driving force for success. Being a leader is about much more than charisma and charm; it is the diligent application of strategies and careful review of that strategy that will make or break a leader.

The Significance of Envisioning

Posted by Aleksandar M. Velkoski on July 6, 2009 under General Leadership | 5 Comments to Read

Firstly, to regular readers of The Prime Leader, I would like to apologize for not posting for the past few weeks. As I’m sure you are aware, working full-time, and studying full-time, can get rather difficult to manage. Add on top of those requirements posting to your blog and you can easily see how some time off could become useful and necessary from time-to-time.

I’d like to resume posting by discussing the significance of “envisioning” for a few moments. In industry, you hear a lot businessmen and women discussing the need to develop vision statements and mission statements for their organizations. Of course I am not going to sit here and argue against developing a vision statement and mission statement. If anything, I am going to be a major supporter of the concepts. However, how do most people, or organizations, actually go about developing vision statements and mission statements for their organizations? Do you think that their method is effective? Let me share a few of my thoughts with you.

Based upon my experience and inquiry, I’ve come to the conclusion that many people go about developing vision statements and mission statements in a manner that is somewhat backward. It seems as though this is especially true for small business owners. They first work toward developing brief sentences that meet the qualifications of a vision statement and mission statement, and then they loosely try to move their organization in the direction set by those statements. It’s almost as though they use their vision statement and mission statement in place of their strategic and business plan. This is, of course, the wrong approach.

In essence, what I am trying to say is that a statement cannot drive the direction of an organization. A leader, however, can do so. How? Well, she must FIRST envision. Envisioning is a concept that describes the act imagining the future. Its core meaning is to picture the future in your mind as it would play-out in reality. The core of envisioning goes much deeper than writing a statement down on a piece of paper. It’s actually imagining where you want your organization to be in the future, and then developing a written plan to get there. Part of that written plan, then, is your vision statement and mission statement. A vision statement and mission statement, alone, cannot guide your organization. A leader that “envisions” can.

What are your thoughts? Can you think of some examples of leaders that envisioned?