What is at the front of Leadership Training?

 Today, we might think that low cost training is the most important because of the way the economy has gone down. We may even think that there is something to all these faddish leadership principles like Six Sigma, Lean Sigma, and FiSH principle leadership and decision making processes. But they all bottom line to outlining a problem and making key decisions - honest decisions - for your business or your life! 

So let's discuss what that means... and if you have an opinion, I would love to hear  it!

My professional experience has shown me that there is a process to making good decisions in business.

1) Gathering good information. This part begins with deciding what you want to look like in actions and performance at the end of the process. As Stephen Covey says, "Begin with the end in mind." Discuss and write down what things are most important to your business to do well. Ask yourself what kind of services you want to offer. Describe how you would want to feel as the client receiving those services. Get a real idea of how you want to be perceived. Then you can imagine how to get there. That is where your "team" comes in.  

2) Harnessing the power of good people. Even if you work alone, you always have a team! There are all kinds of people in your life who are willing to offer their opinions. Friends and family may be your team, but they sometimes are too negative because they want to protect you and take away all the perceived pain of the challenges of business. But you also have accountants and lawyers, other people in your similar lines of business who are not necessarily competition for your niche, and other business owners in lines of business that compliment your own. Each of these people can become your friends and part of your "planning team" to achieve good results. Of course, if you have employees, these are the members of your core team! And you can augment them as necessary with these others as well.

Take in all ideas! No idea is a bad one at first. Then you can combine and whittle down all the ideas to create something in the end that achieves all your goals. That is the key! Don't undermine the creative process with negativity and discounting ideas at the beginning. But as a leader you must take into account the feasibility of all the parts of each idea, and how to implement them in the real world. You will have to account for cost, time, technology, manpower, marketing, branding, and much more, but you can combine solutions to create the best synergistic solutions.  

3)Looking at the big picture. Understand the actions you want to take and the effects they will produce. In the Army, we called this "Effects Based Planning" and it created a line of thinking that made our leaders consider goals that did not just mean seizing some land or capturing a person. It made us consider what effects that land or that person would have on the area, the people, politics, the environment, etc. And we had to analyze which of these effects fell in line with our true overall objectives before we included any courses of action into our operations.

The same goes for business planning. There has to be an overall baseline goal that guides our decisions. If the effects of a course of action lead us ultimately to our "End Goals" then the action should be considered. If it doesn't lead us there, it should be thrown out or modified. That kind of clarity will put everyone on the same page, and ideas can flow that support those end goals.

4) This process is the same in life. Some people seem to have it together while others are always trying to find their way. It is easy to make decisions when you know what you want your life to look like! Anything that doesn't fit in that picture in your mind can be gladly and easily avoided while the things that contribute to your goals can be done every day. Planning is planning whether it is for your business or your life!

Remember to include fun!

All of this sounds very interesting and logical, but where is the fun?! In your team you will have some people who look at the planning process as FUN in itself! Those people are so valuable to a team because they will do the best job of organizing and keeping people on track with evaluations and reviews of the plan long term. 

But the idea creation process should be fun to mostly everyone because you are deciding your business' fate and deciding how to increase your productivity and revenue. That will mean more business and higher paychecks in the long run - and that will be fun for the majority of people in your business! Steady work and increasing revenue for years to come sounds like valuable fun in this economy don't you think?

I hope this has been helpful, and I welcome your comments! Please tell me what you think at keith@amazingleadership.com or directly on the website www.amazingleaderhip.com, click on "Forum" and go to "Leading Change" to leave comments on this article there.