Leading ain't rock and roll

As people are put in positions where they need to demonstrate leadership, have you noticed how they can change. Suddenly, its all about the the latest glitzy thing or about continually touring around.

Investing in the latest tech' or taking the business and workers on a journey are not wrong or bad but, they should come as the cream on the cake.

The priority for the leader should be establishing and maintaining firm foundations. Getting and maintaining this is not sexy, its not exciting, it is definitely not rock and roll. But, behind every rock and roll star is a musician who has spent hour after hour perfecting chords, arpeggios and routines as well as building relationships with music labels and music lovers. For you and I in business, I think the list below is a pretty good place to start from to build our foundations:

1. Clear description of the business purpose and vision
2. Staff have all the skills and knowledge to deliver the processes to meet the business purpose and consistently train new members of staff
3. How do we know you are winning
4. Supply of meaningful data that indicates how the business is performing, in real time
5. Robust system to capture, review and act on near misses and incidents and defects
6. Feedback method to from your customers and your staff
7. Management walkabouts to see for yourself

When in a leadership role, take every opportunity to be visible on the shop floor and take the opportunity to re emphasise the business purpose and vision. Let everyone know how the business is doing make it a shared issue. Describe what you are doing to make the performance of your business better in response to what your customers and staff are saying.

Football has developed since it first began as a sport in mediaeval times. Look at how the beautiful game is run. Every person has a clearly defined role. The environment played on is carefully managed. The game is fully supervised and everyone plays to a well known set of rules (that are amended on an annual basis). Every team knows what winning looks like and their performance is closely monitored in league tables.

Without these things, the game would return to what it looked like in mediaeval times when a match lasted for days and people died!