Leadership of the boss for company success.
If your projects aren’t making good progress, it’s time to change a few things.
If your topics are important projects that bring about some change in the company, I have a few tips for you.
Today on the topic of leadership by the boss & the right incentives
Change projects are always led to success by strong, committed leaders. These people overcome the initial rejections of those involved through sensible arguments, clear requirements and methodology, but also by involving employees in the process. Leadership here naturally means both targeted company management and personnel management.
But when is human resource management actually good? That is not an easy question to answer. Human resource management also has the purpose of using employees in a targeted manner for the company’s purpose. That sounds very objective and impersonal and of course it shouldn’t be, on the contrary. In management work, it is important to take into account a wide variety of people and personalities. Because what one person considers to be good management may not be the same for the next. Let us first look at what constitutes bad management by the company manager:
- Inadequate or inaccurate communication
- Disregard for employees
- A working environment and/or a corporate culture (always shaped by the boss) that demotivates
- Unfair practices (favoritism, nepotism, discrimination, etc.)
- Micromanagement, too little freedom, no creative freedom
- Incompetence of superiors or colleagues
- Lack of clarity and lack of responsibility
Back to good leadership in important projects that are intended to bring about changes in the company. If such a project has been successfully launched, the project management usually has to be prepared for problems. Because in the middle of the process, confusion often arises that are not always easy to resolve. But experienced implementation professionals remain persistent at this point, unravel knots and fight their way through with the help of the project’s supporters until the clear vision of the project shines through again and is visible to everyone.
And this is where we see what good leadership is all about. Good leaders understand that employees need different leadership approaches depending on their experience, character and type, as well as their cultural background. They switch easily between these approaches in the team. Eccentric leadership sets clear expectations and goals and provides the necessary freedom for individual employees or teams to move. With this approach, the first successes develop quickly. The employees are motivated, work more freely, and become faster. As I explained in my last article on the snail’s pace in management , speed is an essential success factor in project implementation.
One dysfunctional person can permanently block an entire team
If teams do not work well together, if individual employees repeatedly oppose each other, then this is usually due to faulty leadership behavior. It is the manager’s job to address team sensitivities early on and to establish the right way of dealing with things, responsibilities and rules. If such efforts are not made, or if they are too timid or too irregular, a team will not find peace and will not be very effective.
The best way to address leadership mistakes in everyday life is to draw attention to them directly. An independent third party who provides feedback in private (which is not always easy to digest) can quickly contribute to new perceptions and changes in the leader’s behavior.
Once you have managed to build a good, high-performing team, you want to maintain that status for as long as possible. Remember: personnel changes can have significant effects. For example, a dysfunctional person in the team can permanently block the entire team.
In order to maintain performance, you have to actively work with people and on the company or team culture. This is real work and should be rewarded as such. Real leadership responsibility means that a large part of the work has to be invested in it. Really good leadership is not something you can do on the side. If you want really good leadership, you have to order really good leadership and anchor it in the incentive system. The right incentives are not only necessary for well-performing teams, they are also fundamental to the success of change projects.
50% of politics in companies is due to inadequate target agreements, the rest is due to poor leadership.
Normally, existing incentive systems in organizations aim to maintain the status quo or to optimize it. Real change projects, however, challenge the status quo and often even eliminate it. If incentive systems are not adapted, employees are incentivized to maintain the old status and resist change!
Furthermore, many incentive and target agreements are output and activity-based and do not require concrete results or effects that clearly advance the company. The importance and impact of incentive systems is systematically underestimated.
