Make your life easier by Mark Evans

Your future success, as a leader, is largely driven by the quality and engagement of the teams you run.

How will you best deploy the team's collective strengths, motivate them to push for success and create the environment for them to flourish?

Historically leaders lead from the front. All knowing and wise, they tell their people what to do. They have depth of knowledge and experience and make better decisions than their juniors. It is expected of them and feels right - to them at least.

But team members - as recipients of those directives - are not called on to think for themselves.

They have no sense of ownership or responsibility and are not being challenged in their work. It's not very satisfying. In fact, it's rather dull.
But change is afoot as businesses increasingly look to instil a coaching culture designed to create a more dynamic working environment.

To get there often requires a flexible and patient mindset and an investment in time and energy. But time and time again it proves to be a very worthwhile investment.

Your objective is for your team to have clear goals, well-defined mandates and flexibility in how they get there. They will be told 'what' they should achieve not 'how' to achieve it. You trust them to do the right thing. And just watch their sense of worth and job satisfaction grow.

And you - released from the need to micromanage - will gain time to focus on driving the success of your business.