We define leadership in terms of productivity. As a business leader, how well you lead is synonymous with how productive you are and how you employ resources at your disposal.
Business leaders too, have repetitive labor and menial tasks to perform each day but many can lose focus when they prioritize these tasks higher than others. Business leaders can only drive productivity when they spend more time on tasks that contribute to their business’ future success.
To achieve this, you must make a list of your goals or high value tasks to accomplish each day. Sometimes, a list serves as the best motivation and a means of keeping you on track throughout the day. Similarly, having a list of to-do tasks is not all. You must also be sure of where to take a headstart each morning.
Tackling the hardest tasks first and focusing more on the value driven ones ensure that you are driving your business success further each day. Productivity wouldn’t stagnate if every professional adopted this simple strategy.
This tip may sound very repetitive and outdated, but there is no substitute for time management skills. One major reason why most individuals, even people who are not business leaders, suffer is that they do not make the most out of their time.
As a leader, your foremost responsibility is prioritizing tasks and allot reasonable time to complete them. Setting deadlines for yourself is important because it helps you stay on track and not waste time unnecessarily.
As beneficial as time management is, honing this skill is not easy. Here is how you can practice it:
Do not micromanage and multitask. Delegate more often so that not only do you lessen your load but also give an opportunity to your team members to excel in their roles.
Accept your strengths and the fact that you cannot wear all the heads, even if you are a leader. Great leaders recognize their strengths and expand on them only while letting their juniors take charge of other responsibilities. This will save time, ensure that every aspect of business operations is speeding up, and productivity is at its best.
Disorganized people are a waste. Strive to organize yourself on technological, physical, and emotional levels. Business leaders cannot afford to lose information, data, and files.
Plan your week. When you plan for the next seven working days, you maximize innovation in the organization, allow yourself ample time to line up things and meet everything on your schedule punctually.
Business leaders need to learn the art of saying no to things that are not essential or a priority. Anything that does not fulfill your larger objectives or distracts you from work should not be a part of your life at all
Essentialism is the key to making the best possible investment of your energy and time. This empowers you to work at the highest productivity point by doing only what is important.
To be a productive leader, you must never stop learning. Even from a business perspective, continuous learning and research will update you on the latest technology and market trends.
You must make it a culture within your organization, in fact, where it is a compulsion for people to learn continuously. There are also several E-Learning facilities such as Learning Management Systems or LSM, where business leaders can select from a variety of options to enhance their own skills and those of their employees.
Business leaders are also responsible for being productivity icons for their team members. It is a culture of productivity in an organization that defines success. Fortunately, it takes only a few simple practices to inculcate within oneself to maximize productivity and be an ideal leader.