Three Skills Business Owners Need To Master This Year
Working remotely has been a big change for many business owners. It has meant a change in routines. What do you miss the most from the times where nowhere wore a face mask around you?
The reality is that most professionals were forced to adapt to new scenarios, new strategies, and new tools. Many had to reinvent themselves completely. And that is no easy task. So how can we best manage a business in the middle of this uncertainty?
Communicate Your Mission With Clarity
Any leader will tell you that one of the top skills for any leader is to be able to inspire people with you vision and mission. Leaders usually organised meetings, had great one-to-ones with peers, and held free-form conversations to help employees share their mission and believe in it too.
To provide clarity of mission you cannot simply explain what needs to be done, or even how it needs to be carried out. You need to provide a solid inspiring "why". And then it is most beneficial to give indicators that will help your people assess whether they are on track to achieve their goals or not.
How effective is video-conference to inspire other people with your mission?
Define A Good Action Plan
Employees that know why they have to do something, how to do it, and what needs to be done are more engaged. And yet, it is so important to be able to help them prioritise tasks through direct communication. The thing is that this interaction comes more naturally through informal conversations in a physical work space.
Remote leaders should spend more time analysing how a task needs to be broken down and executed by a team. And here scheduled team meetings can help remind teams of the order of implementation and efficiency in their efforts.
Pause To Get The Big Picture
Short heads up sessions can go a long way in re-calibrate our teams to make sure everyone is on the same page in achieving the goals of the organisation. When you are facing changing scenarios like the Covid-19 pandemic, you may need to frequently not only review the context, but also shift some of your goals, and make sure you remind your team of the overall business goals. The Uncertainty Matrix is a tool I use with my consultancy clients and helps visualise the impact of the different decisions you may have to take depending on what scenario you face.
True, huge challenges like full lockdown or a global pandemic may not be forever. But the skill to consistently deliver the same easy-to-remember mission, to associate short-term business objectives with the global goals in the organisation, and be able to stop and see the big picture however uncertain the horizon may be.
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Nathan Manzaneque
Business Consultant at INSPIRE Consulting, ED at BTB Club.