Leading from the Front

A man is respected in the society by the way he behaves and lives his life. More so it counts for a man leading a company or group. A leader anywhere is taken as a role model and the followers fallows him simply imitating his style. Hence to be a leader you have to analyze yourselves and make sure of what you want and how you want the things to be done. St your own goals and then go about fallowing the principles, implement them with your employees. Here are a few examples on how you can lead from the front.

Punctuality:

Everything in a business requires time schedule like orders being met on schedule, prompt customer care, making resources available on time to process the order, etc. and everything simply starts from your office. You start your work at 9 AM in the morning and you want all your employees to be present on time. Your presence in not required always and you do not come on time. What happens is that your employee thinks how he is going to find if I am late by a few minutes. Be punctual and inform your secretary that you will be late if you are going to come late for some reason. This will make every one to fallow and you will see 100% attendance on dot. Every one will make a note that the boss things to be done on time and will maintain schedule.

Hard work:

You want as a manager wants every body to work hard and give their 100%. If you are lazy, and sit in the office for few hours and go home to take rest it is not going to make your subordinates to give their 100% for the growth of your company. I am not telling you that you keep working with them. You can do things like moving around the work place and watch them doing their work and give them few tips like how they do the same job in a better way. Ask them the time schedule and make them understand that you know what you want and things like that will make your employees you work hard and in turn work hard to achieve the goals.

Receptiveness:

Do not always thing that you are the smartest person and know everything. Everybody in the workplace has their competence in some areas be receptive to the ideas wherever it comes from. It can make your goal easier to achieve. It may not always be useful. But it will give them a feeling that they are contributing something and will always on the look out for new ideas and how they can do things better.

Being Polite:

You can be polite in refusal too. Do not always shout and show you are the leader. If their demand or requests are unreasonable tell them politely and explain how the demand is not reasonable. Say for example a worker wants leave on a day when you have an urgent work to be completed, instead of telling a straight no, try telling that the work is important and without him it will become difficult for you to complete the said work, you will make him happy even without the leave sanctioned.

Helping & Understanding:

Try and know your employees as individual, their strengths, their weaknesses, their goals, their aspirations and most importantly their family. Try and fulfill their requirements wherever possible. Give them emotional support. If you are praised for what you have achieved, do not forget to tell them that the praise is because of their unstinted support and hard work.

By these qualities what you can achieve is that your employees are always loyal to you, giving their full co-operation to achieve your goals. You can stop attrition and get good references for getting good new hands.

Defining Leadership

The conception of leadership is that the leader is to command a group whether it is employees in organization or a member of a team, give orders and see the work done. Your ability to command and run a business or a team is understood as the only quality of a leader. What you need for being a good commander is a strong mental power and your ability to tell the employees stubbornly that you want your orders to be fallowed and completed in a particular time frame. Your work will be done as you said and still you will see that you are not doing as good as your competition are doing. Your finance will call you and tell that the cost of your man hour is much more than your competition.

What went wrong and how?

A manager by his qualification and experience is competent in a particular area like Finance, Purchase, Sales or Maintenance. A good overall leader should know everything a bit and understand how it works in a company for the interest of every one and the growth of the company. I am not telling that you go to university and study each subject. You must understand that your job as the leader is not only to give orders but in the hierarchy of business management this is called Top Down method. A team on the whole consists of experts in different fields you will notice in a period of time that you have lots of followers who simply fallow your instructions and obey your orders. They will always go about their work spending time by thinking how you will like the result to be put to you instead of thinking how the order is going to help you in improving the sales or purchase or to overall growth of the company. Instead try and do the thing differently. Prepare a report what you want from the group to achieve your goal. Then call a meeting and discuss with every one individually and seek their advice and inputs and give them the limit you have to complete the job. The results will be astonishingly different. The same job which used takes a month or so will be completed by the same set of people within 15 to 20 days.

This is because people are more interested in pleasing their leader and if the leader is only interested in a set of people who always say “YES BOSS” and fallow the instructions does not always use their brain to do the work needed to be done and always tried to fallow the instructions given to them. Instead when you started giving importance to them and started seeking advice on how to go about in doing the work, each one of them has started putting their brain power to use.

Conclusion:

You will be good leader not just by commanding a group but by understanding individual, their ability, their knowledge and giving importance to their capacity to do their work on their own with a guidance and direction and not just by commanding.

The Boss & the Real Leader

Being the Boss and being a Leader is two different things. A boss can be anybody by virtue of having established a company or group. But a leader requires skills to run the company, group or anything for that matter. A leader can be a boss and the vice versa by virtue of his skills to run but a boss without skills cannot be called a leader.

A leader is he who assesses the requirement of the company, assess the inputs, requirements of man and machinery, and see where he can improve, and set a goal for himself and then go about achieving the same.

The areas one specializes in may be different like Purchase, Sales, Costing, Finance, HR or overall management of a company, but the general requirement of a manager or leader are one and the same.

Managing a business is simply directing, controlling and using the available resources to the optimum capacity of the said resources, whether it is money, machines, supply chain, tools and employees etc.

What is optimum or effective use of the resources?

Take a machine. It is designed to manufacture some thing at a particular rate per day. The supplier installs the machine and once connected to power it starts running and produces the assigned material and you are happy that you have started a business to produce and sell that material to earn a profit. But is not only that, but the machine also needs things to run at its optimum capacity. There parts that needs to be lubricated or greased regularly, need power at constant voltage, needs constant check up for wear and tear parts to be replaced etc. I you do not attend to their requirement it will not work properly. You may think of replacing with the new one but every machine needs regular attention and a factory manager or the leader is the one who fulfill the requirements and make it keep running to the optimum capacity.

It is no different with the workers and employees of the business. For example a worker in the factory comes and tells you that the machine which is running requires a change in the bearing as it sounds add but you ignore him and continue running the machine and it breaks down. You will have shut down the machine to repair as some other parts also go damaged because of running with a faulty bearing. If you have listened to the workers advice the machine would have been corrected without shutting down in few hours. The essence is that we do not listen to the employees and thing we know everything. This is one of the bad qualities of a Manager. The people working in the field know and can give ideas even though you may be a master in the subject. A leader is always on the look out for new ideas which comes only if you are a listener. One must understand that every one has their own skills and a leader is worth only if can nourish the particular skills and make use for the benefit of the company.