Management: Turning Goals into Results
The Business School UK’s Operations Director, Helen Chambers talks about Successful Leadership and Management
Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll need to decide how you’re going to make it all happen – yourself and through your team. It’s necessary to more than just establish clear objectives, regardless of your situation or place.
It’s the senior managers’ and directors’ responsibility to step back and take an objective look at where their team is and where it’s going, and how you need to behave and act to take the team forward.
You may also need to consider re-evaluating your leadership style in order to keep everyone on track. A management and leadership coach or mentor can be invaluable, not only to provide a neutral perspective on your leadership style and the current state of your team, but to make sure everything remains goal-focused. It is important to be aware of the need to adapt your leadership style to different situations, according to the Situational Leadership theory. The different styles within this theory are:
- Directing (or telling)
- Coaching (or selling)
- Supporting (or participating)
- Delegating
The choice of style will depend on how long the team has been working together, their skills and attributes, levels of trust and communication within the team – and of course your level of confidence! Your natural style may not be the style required at that time, and it takes confidence to adapt! Alternatively you may need think about the traditional leadership styles of:
- Autocratic
- Democratic
- Laissez-faire
What is your natural style? Is this the most appropriate at the time? Again it takes confidence to adapt.
We’d also highly recommend implementing something called ‘action learning’ for your team. This is simply a regular meeting (typically once a month) where the team gets together and one person raises an issue that’s bothering them.
The whole team then discusses the issue and develops a solution.
This often requires a designated facilitator early on if it’s to be effective, particularly if there is dissension in the group. But once a team gets used to the process, it can be an extremely effective method of problem-solving.
It also gets people used to pooling their resources and discussing problems rather than working in virtual isolation and allowing them to escalate to the point they become unmanageable. And – perhaps more importantly – it increases levels of trust and communication within the team.
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Free Guide
Print off our Turning Goals into Results Essentials PDF, created for you in A4 format. With one half for your own notes and the other as shown below, you can fold in half to create a handy guide.
Turning Goals into Results Essentials Printable.pdf
Over To You
How, in your experience do you turn goals into results? It would be great if you shared by leaving a comment in the comments section below. If you have enjoyed our post on management we would appreciate you sharing, and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog so that you can easily keep up to date with our latest articles and news. Helen Chambers, The Business School UK’s Operations Director.