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HEADLINE ARTICLE
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Attention Leaders:
Tired of Being in Crisis Mode?
By Diana Keith
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Crisis situations
can define who you are as a leader. Even so, the ability to handle a
crisis is chickenfeed compared to the skills involved with preventing
one. This valuable expertise separates great leaders from their
counterparts and starts with Six Strategic Success Habits every
leader needs to know.
Why do some leaders
make it, yet others get left behind? Is leadership simply about your
capacity to handle or prevent a crisis? Absolutely not: there’s
another big reason to consider.
You Have No System
to Handle Change
The problems and
implications of not having a system to handle change are vast. You’re
always playing catching up, feel like the business is running you, and
are without enough time to focus on what’s important.
Let’s first look at
three common ways leaders react to change:
How do you handle
change? Which apply to you and your people?
Crisis Mode:
You are in and out of crisis mode, coasting without any kind of
system. You spend a lot of time putting out fires, and wondering why
the problem was not caught sooner.
Problem Focused:
You are concerned and usually implement short-term solutions or
band-aid problems. However, your solutions are not directed at the
root cause or eliminating future problems, so you often see them
resurface again.
Strategic-Success
Focused:
You have a focused vision, build on to what you know, and put it into
action. You evaluate, strategize, redirect, and then proceed.
The big difference
between the Strategic-Success Focused leader and the others is they
have already made change a habit. This leader has imprinted a clear
and effective system for predicting and managing change into their
business and team.
Strategic-Success
Focused leaders don’t have one crisis after another
Instead, they create
a system to handle change. This allows them to focus on what’s really
important, whether its driving revenue, creating new products or
services, mentoring others, or enjoying the lifestyle their position
has afforded them.
Why is this so
important?
Because without a
way to keep your business and team on track through an environment of
change, you’ll continue to waste a lot of time, money, and valuable
energy on reinventing the wheel anytime something unexpected comes
up.
Next, a cycle of
problems seems to begin. The first of which is, how do you end the
cycle? Where do you start?
Start with your
mindset.
The best way to
begin is to transform your mindset from that of crisis mode or problem
focused to more of a Strategic-Success Focus with the following Six
Success Habits:
Go ahead, mimic the
Strategic-Success Focused leader:
1. Make change a
habit.
Strategically plan
when it’s needed not just once a year. Use strategy as an ongoing
living tool to evaluate and redirect your resources for the greatest
impact.
2. Prepare for
change.
Hard-wire your
decision-making methods to extend beyond present circumstances and
forward into future considerations. Keep asking, what will happen
next, until you have a set of favorable possibilities. Predicting the
future is unlikely, although you can increase your decision-making
success rate with a strategic review of possible outcomes.
3.
Get excited by change.
Leave behind
stalling statements like Yeah but, and replace them with
pioneering phrases such as What if? Launch strategic change
from a position of partnership across all levels of the organization.
4.
Drive growth through change.
When you hear a good
idea that will lead to the results you’re after, implement it. When
you see something working in your business or department, ask how it
happened. Always be thinking about the next step.
5.
Create smart systems to handle change.
Automate and
simplify what’s working. If it’s not working, ask your subject matter
experts (employees) to create a system to streamline and update
changes so that routine work is highly efficient. This helps save time
and money, and redirects profits upwards. Money spent on doing routine
work a different way each time is being wasted.
6.
Imprint change as one of your most effective patterns of success.
As a leader, share
your vision with your people. Create a visionary memory system so vast
that knowledge and understanding are connected throughout your
organization and teams.
The Big Message
here is to acknowledge where you and your people are in regard to
change. Are you ahead of the game every time?
My suggestion:
Set a plan in motion to transform your business and team into one that
gets extraordinary results amidst change or any challenging backdrop.
Diana Keith, owner of M-Level Systems Consulting, has been using her
expertise to create high performance organizations and teams for
eighteen years. See her website
www.mlevelsystems.com for valuable resources and programs to get
amazing results through your people. Get Diana’s Free Strategy Guide
For Success
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