The effectiveness of a leader in the workplace isn’t about punctuality. It’s not about number of people. It’s about being able to provide value.
1) Get Supporters
You want to be champion of your idea. It doesn’t matter if the idea is about changing the strategic direction of the company or getting a new coffee machine in the lunch room. The more impactful the idea, the more people believe in it, the better chance you have on implementing it. That being said, the idea must be clear and attainable. As the champion of this idea, it is critical to meet with stakeholders that the project will impact and get their support. Listen to their concerns and address them. Often I’ve heard “we’ll this is a great idea, but more efficiency means people will lose their jobs”. You need to do your part to open the eyes of your soon-to-be supporters. Gained efficiency allows the existing skilled people to work on new things or increase the span of control.
Think through your ideas and think of how your audience will react before presenting your grandiose idea.
2) Manage Timelines
In order to have the largest impact on the organization – you need to be able to manager your people, the customers expectations and your own deliverables. The best method I’ve found is to set up smaller deadlines. The benefits of this is you can celebrate the smaller successes on the path to the larger goal. Additionally, if the project is going off-track, it allows corrective measure to be deployed. Worst case scenario – if you foresee the project missing the end timeline, you can inform the audience ASAP.
3) Calculate The Benefit
Whether you have refined the art of ROI / IRR calculations or you can tabulate the time savings from an idea you have – the strength of your ideas should always be tabulated in dollars. Goodwill is always difficult to calculate. Put yourself in the position of the decision makers. The bigger the impact, the bigger the cost savings, the more likely they will approve the idea.
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