How you can invest your time wisely-collected by Raveendran Nair
How can you invest your time wisely
How you can invest your time wisely to ‘think like a leader’?
First, understand what makes a leader. Emotional intelligence is what sets great leaders apart from the rest and is twice as important for jobs at all levels. A high IQ and technical ability are great skills to have, but emotional intelligence will help you monitor your feeling and those of others around you.
Next, involve your team in becoming the kind of leader they want you to be. You strive to do the best you can, yet your team is disengaged? The reason is that more often than not, we don’t truly understand what we’re doing wrong because we don’t ask our team. You could start by simply asking, “What’s the one thing you’d like me to stop doing?”
In a research conducted by Sunnie Giles, participants were asked to choose the 15 most important leadership competencies from a list of 74. It is not surprising that having strong ethics and providing a trusting environment to the team were ranked as the top leadership competencies to be an effective leader. A leader with high ethical standards relays fairness which helps instill confidence in the team, in turn building a team where everyone will honor the rules of the game.
Then, help your people develop. If you’re only thinking about your success and not helping your team develop, you’re not management material. You need to be able to maximize your teams’ contribution to the firm, but keep their development in mind too. The one thing that will set you apart as a great leader is when you ask yourself not how you can get the best out of your team but how you can get the best out of the team while helping them grow. Loyalty manifests itself in different ways. A sense of shared values is one of them. When your team knows that you are interested in their development, their commitment to you strengthens.
Also, strive to be more resilient. We are operating in tough times, so you need to build a sense of thriving and to be able spring back from difficult situations. While some leaders can handle incredible amounts of stress, others simply fall apart. Say you have built an incredible team but three of your best people leave. How will you prevent your team from losing momentum? Building resilience is the key to surviving in the face of ever-changing circumstances and high demands. Practice mindfulness and developing mental agility are two ways in which you can boost your resilience. At the end, it’s about how you recharge, not how you endure tough situations.
And never stop learning. Continuous learning is the best strategy to craft a sustainable career. Use these four tools to help you identify which skills you need to grow. If these seem like too many, use this 2×2 matrix to help you prioritize which skills to focus on now. Learning to learn isn’t just a decision. It’s a habit you need to inculcate. Disruptions in the modern economy, especially technology, don’t leave you with a choice but to stay on top of your game. The skills you learn today may be irrelevant tomorrow, so unless you make a habit of it, you’ll always be trying to catch up and will never be up-to-date.
Lastly, as work gets more complex, take the time to pause amidst the chaos, untangle, learn from your experiences, and create meaning. Spend at least 15 minutes at the end of the day to reflect on what you did and the lessons learned from it. If you’ve found yourself making excuses to take time out for self-reflection, use these simple steps to help you become more reflective. As Peter Drucker said: “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”
Courtesy-HBR Ascend
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