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How to achieve High Impact Leadership and why!

September 28, 2022 by Malcolm Gallagher Leave a Comment

Leadership today has changed from yesteryear. Today’s successful leaders know that their skill set needs to be different and include compassion and humanity if they are to retain an engaged team and grow a flourishing business. They also know they need to look inwardly at their emotional intelligence and outwardly to take their business forward with embedded purpose.

All of this cannot be done lightly, so the word-of-the-moment is IMPACT. In this BVTV Shorts blog, I want to give my SIX tasks I suggest you need to manage so you can be a High Impact Leader. Now I say tasks as, apart from inherent skills, today you cannot simply rely upon what you did before. To achieve HIGH impact, as opposed to average impact, you need to be 6 stars across the 6!

All of the six are derived from my BVTV interviews with global leadership experts and are part of our Hybrid Coaching and Performance Improvement Online Courses.

The six are in a suggested order of your performance development plan starting with:

Self-Awareness. Some may call this self-mastery or personal potential. Whichever you choose it is all about being in control of yourself and addressing any issues of self-doubt or confidence. It’s easier to say than to do as you have to be honest with yourself. Know your impact on others. Improve your EQ (Emotional Quotient). Are you seen as trustworthy? My IMAGES tool can help you. It’s in our Leadership Today coaching.
Governance. This encompasses many things but today’s new generation of workers like to see responsible management of resources and a genuine minimization of impact by a business on the environment. Another way of saying this is good stewardship. Our BizPulse Better Business Scorecard service aims to help you know and show your activity and impact.
Purpose. Today you need to clearly know and communicate the purpose of your business. To most businesses purpose has replaced mission. Carefully craft your Purpose, Vision and Values. You’ll find some great insights into developing Vision with my interviews with the author of the Vision Code, Dr. Oleg Konovalov. Click to link to one of them.
Communication. We’ve dedicated a whole BVTV Channel to help you master the art of Persuasive and Effective Communication. It’s BVTV 3. Your vision, your purpose, your intentions all have to be sold. Sadly too many leaders think this is just a matter of sending out an email, or newsletter and perhaps a pre-recorded video. You’d be surprised how many employees tune into my BVTV interviews to watch their boss and his or her performance! It’s knowing what to say and how to say it.
Engagement. Some like to call this teamwork and, whilst that is an important word, it perhaps doesn’t go far enough to accomplish consistent motivation. It can often foster a “them and us” situation is my personal thinking. I don’t mean that you, as a leader, have to be “one of the boys”, but you do need to master the skill of people engagement.
Consistency. How many times during my coaching career have I asked about a new company initiative to be told by team members that, like other such initiatives, it will be quickly replaced by another? Consistency of message and consistency of actions brings reassurance not just to your team but also customers, suppliers and influencers. Just reflect on what you think about politicians and U-turns to understand the need for consistency!

So that’s my HILT 6 – high impact leadership -for your consideration. Do let me know what you think about them. Have I missed any out that you think are imperative to be included?

If you accept that Leadership Today skills are needed and you want some expert help for yourself or team member then look at my Today’s Answers Collection or send me an email or book a free Zoom Chat

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Develop your Strategic Ability to win in these present times

September 27, 2022 by Malcolm Gallagher Leave a Comment

How’s your Strategic ability?

Business innovation and strategic planning are essential components of a business strategy to survive harsh economic climates. Does your business have the strategic flexibility to survive? Here’s the steps to building the strategic agility of your organisation.

What’s Strategic Agility?

Strategic Agility (SA) is the ability of a business to transform innovation into practical forms, to continually reinvent a business to meet certain financial situations and to rapidly adopt new business strategies.

Your business can never sit still, no matter how far ahead you are in your field. Everything degrades over time, and so you must strive continuously to hold your position. Any business must have innovation, and the strategic planning and flexibility to adapt to conditions and change whenever needed.

All modern well-known businesses have changed over the years. For a start, each one now has (or should have) an online presence.

Without SA, these changes would take a lot longer than they actually do. This is especially important today when world economies change with increasing regularity. Those that can react fastest last longest.

Change, growth and success

The best leaders are those that have learned to strategise and plan ahead for eventualities that might never happen. Good leaders have learned from years of experience in business that while Strategic Agility is fine, being prepared is finer.

They can formulate strategic plans for a number of potential consequences of situations such as booms, recessions, catastrophic loss of manufacturing capabilities and many more. However, solutions must be kept up to date with innovative thinking and strategic planning. When things happen, they are ready and their plan can be rapidly put into effect. Are you amongst them?

Here are 3 lessons:

Change is always imminent, so go with it and learn from it.
Growth and success comes from accepting change and being ready for it, and if you can learn from past mistakes then you will know that planning for change doesn’t always work – but is better than standing still.
Organising your business to be able to effect innovation rapidly, that is, ensuring it has good strategic agility, is one of those steps you can take to prepare for change.

Speed and flexibility

Strategic agility involves speed and flexibility as well as innovation. The ability to reinvent a business quickly when external conditions are rapidly changing could help it to maintain its market share and profitability under the direst conditions. This form of strategic agility requires vision and knowledge and the ability to put innovation into practice rapidly.

Innovation can involve creating new business rules to suit new conditions, and discarding the old ones.
Strategic agility can involve employing staff able to act speedily and flexibly to create new business strategies that will keep the business in a winning situation.

Thinking strategically for agility

Strategic Agility is down to thinking. A key component of maintaining SA is to think better.

Remain objective.
The ability to remain objective and to change your conclusions when facing unsatisfactory evidence is a key behavior for you to develop. It is easy to feel cornered or defeated.
Don’t be too optimistic
Maintaining some ‘slack’ in your system, such as cash buffers, is very important to maintaining strategic agility. Buffers need to be strategically placed in just the right spot to ensure you are really maintaining protective capacity.
Velocity
The speed of your business processes are of paramount importance. For example, how rapidly do your onboard a new client? What about your product or service development processes? The speed at which you can turn around key processes in your business is critical, as it means you need to maintain far less inventory in buffers.
People management
Agility can’t be achieved if only senior managers are able to make decisions. Empowering people to make decisions and act themselves is a critical aspect of strategic agility. To enable this it is important that internal communication is optimized. To make decisions correctly people must understand the strategic objectives of the business. Therefore it’s vital that managers explain personally to employees what the objectives of the business are and how each employee can play their part in helping the company achieve those objectives.
Focus on leadership
Leadership skills analysis and training is essential. It is important that a range of TODAY’S leadership skills are developed if strategic agility is to be nurtured and become useful as a business asset. Without good leadership, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve meaningful results.

Find further thinking at the BVTV Performance & Results Channel

Search our Hybrid Coaching, Performance Improvement Courses and Supportive Membership Clubs for expert help.

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Is productivity your answer to the 2020’s?

November 28, 2019 by Malcolm Gallagher Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Achiever Blog with Malcolm Gallagher and my thoughts on Productivity.

I noticed the Tory election slogan this week as Unleash Britain’s Potential. I grinned a bit as it is very like the slogans and marketing material by Tony Robbins one of the world’s top self-help gurus. One of his great books is Awaken the Giant Within and he often talks about unleashing potential.

He also has the slogan of:

If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

I think that’s appropriate to all of us in business especially as we move into what I believe will be both an exciting and challenging new decade.

I’ve launched my new programme Make 2020 Great here at bizvision.co.uk and Make 2020 Great is my slogan for the 2020’s. It’s important after all the chaos to re-awaken and re-energize. Much like the resurfacing initiative of Andy Murray.

But back to the Tory slogan of unleash Britain’s potential. It seems that we are being promised that everything will be wonderful once we leave the EU. But you are not daft – you can see that there’s no Disney fairy dust to instantly change things even if it is pantomime season!

One of my clients, Chris Kennedy, is a digital genius and also a very forthright Labour-leaning political thinker.

He said to me that he believes the underlying problem in the UK isn’t a lack of leadership but instead its low wages and flexible labour markets. Chris says, regardless of the election or Brexit, the long term problems are wages are going to go up, there will be lower immigration, plus even longer working hours. He says wages can’t be lowered, taxes or interest rates can’t be increased.

Chris reckons we will face a mirror of the 1970’s. He adds that the opportunity will be for businesses who can increase their wages AND their margins.

I told you he was a deep thinker! But he is right, isn’t he?

In my mind, the solution to unleashing potential lies in first tackling increased productivity. I reckon the big issue for the 2020s will be increased productivity

And that’s where your post Brexit business opportunity lies. How can you increase productivity – perhaps through implementing technology? If you are a coach or consultant how can you help clients increase productivity?

So how do you improve productivity?

Well, you start by stop running away from a deep inward dive on productivity. Too many business leaders are frightened of possibly rocking the boat.

They will persevere with old systems, traditional processes because everyone feels comfortable with that – we’ve always done it that way syndrome

Meanwhile, competitors, from anywhere in the world, will be sailing by them.

Sorry but change has to happen. Disruption is happening all around – just look at the high street.

My approach is to start with what I call a Productivity Audit. I use a scorecard approach in my Productivity Deep Dive Sessions to identify problems and opportunities.

Now, you may not like facing the productivity question,– and certainly, many of your people may be the same or even obstructive – but if you don’t address it then the lure of the lights of 2020 may not be shining so bright for you.

Over to you! As always let me have your thoughts or comments or ideas. Please email me mg@bizvision.co.uk or comment below.

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5 tips to Postpone Procrastination

June 10, 2019 by Malcolm Gallagher Leave a Comment

In this blog post, I’m bringing you my 5 top tips to postpone procrastination. Yes, I said postponing rather than say overcoming because, until you have embedded them, you’ll forever be postponing.

In this fast-moving business age, Procrastination is a serious condition suffered by too many companies. And, unfortunately, it starts at the top! Does that resonate? Here are the 5 tips:

Stop waiting for the right urge. You don’t have to feel like doing something in order to get doing it. My suggestion is to just get working.
Avoid last minute stress. Too many people put things off until the last minute in the belief that they work best that way. I suggest all that is doing is just putting additional stress on you and everyone who works with you.
Do the difficult bit first. It’s easy to be tempted in doing the easy bits first but go for the difficult bit first and you’ll feel a better sense of accomplishment what will keep you motivated
Chunk the job. For many years I felt that I had to do a big job al at once. Inevitably distractions interrupted and I kept having to restart. Then I started chunking my big job into smaller ones and I accomplished more.
Don’t punish yourself. Far too many people punish themselves when starting a job late. They’ll do things like skip meals, take no breaks even fall asleep at their computer. Don’t do this it only makes matters worse. Don’t worry about the late start or, as someone once told me, forgive yourself and move on.

And a final warning about procrastination is the well-known saying “You may delay but time will not”. What will you do about these 5 top tips? Do you procrastinate or does a colleague?

If you have any other postponing procrastination tips then Please email mg@bizvision.co.uk or comment below.

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How to achieve High Impact Leadership and why!

Develop your Strategic Ability to win in these present times