Last updated 8 December 2022 ·
As a business leader, it’s important to continuously refine your leadership skills in the ever-changing context of your organisation. Introducing OKRs, objectives and key results and cascading these amongst your senior leadership and management teams will introduce many benefits and present new challenges.
Employee engagement levels can be influenced by how employees view leadership within your organisation. Your wider team will look to you as you lead by example; therefore, how you lead yourself becomes more prominent and under the spotlight. Poor leadership will result in you not making the most of yourself.
Here are three actions you can take immediately to keep you on top of your game and ensure you are leading yourself and the business in the right direction.
Action One
As the business leader, you need to be looking towards the future. Having a clear vision is essential, and when you have that clear vision, it’s often beneficial to elicit some outside support.
The action here is to approach three people outside of your business with whom you could form an accountability group, offering guidance to one another and creating an ongoing support network. These people will provide a fresh pair of eyes and enable you to reach your vision more quickly.
Once you have identified your three-person accountability/support network, share your vision, objectives and key results with them and ask for their feedback.
Action Two
No doubt, in the past, you have tried and tested many things to get to where you are now. Some may have gone well and led to outstanding results; others may have been best forgotten. Did you take note of your actions that led to positive outcomes?
The action here is to think creatively about some things you have done on occasion but have yet to complete consistently. Consider something that has led to positive results but may have been overlooked amongst your ever-increasing workload.
For me, direct mail had in the past produced a good result, but to be honest, I didn’t take the time to evaluate this and continue this activity consistently. I recently worked out how much a sales letter I sent out six months ago had produced for my business, and I was surprised by the result.
What about your business? What have you done to achieve a good result, but the focus shifted on to something else too quickly? Check out our blog focusing on high-performance habits - six steps to self-discipline and better results here.
Action Three
Here it’s all about comfort zone!
What are you doing week in and week out within your business that you feel comfortable about? We all have a comfort zone from which we operate most of the time. The thing is, significant developments in business success come from working outside of that comfort zone.
The action here is to push yourself and do something outside your comfort zone within the next seven days that will lead to a successful result.
This could be attending a new networking event, speaking to a group of prospects, or having that difficult conversation with a member of your leadership team.
By now, you should:
- Understand the importance of leading yourself as well as others.
- Have approached three people in your network to form an accountability/support group.
- Have considered what you have done well in the past that you could reintroduce for positive results moving forward.
- Be planning how you can push yourself out of your comfort zone each week to ensure you keep growing and developing as a person.
Final thought
Implementing OKRs will cause significant business change, so ensuring everyone is kept informed and engaged with the change is essential. As a leader, it’s important to keep developing yourself to better the business and ensure everything is moving in the right direction.
If you want further guidance on writing OKRs for the different levels within your business, download our OKR Builder™ today! It includes step-by-step advice on how to write compelling OKRs that cascade seamlessly throughout all levels of a business.
For more information on OKR examples, check out our comprehensive guide here.
