Leadership Strategies For Business Development

At the management level of an organisation, it’s very easy to get sucked into a cycle and spend all your time fighting fires, just to maintain the status quo.

This comes completely at the expense of business development, an essential top-down process that requires management to drive it. In order to break this cycle, you must focus on the core principles required to develop your leadership.

The most crucial aspect of leadership is to have the structure and discipline required to bring your team forward with you. This structured leadership is entirely top-down, and requires rigid and strong management topography to execute.

The best current theories hold that the key principles behind this require focus on vision, involvement, measurement, and planning.

Developing vision is vital to organisational success in order to anticipate and plan for change, a key business driver. Many tools can be utilised to develop this vision, including multi-level strategy maps, problem definitions and output definition. Ultimately, however, a good management consultancy will be able to help you develop your own unique methods for anticipating the future.

Whilst vision enables one to peer into the future and understand what changes may occur to a business, this ability is worthless without the capacity to deal with these problems and turn crises into opportunities. For this reason managers must remain constantly involved in their teams, and avoid handing out decrees from on high to dictate solutions to staff. Whilst this may be tempting, it causes friction, resentment, and isolation.

Instead, managers should use activities such as mentoring, solution analysis and decision matrices in order to keep team members involved in the decision making process. Be careful not to become bogged down in these exercises however, or they will begin to feel self-serving to team members engaged in them. Again, bespoke solutions developed with the help of a good management consultancy, and a strong management style, are the key to success in this criteria.

But all of these ideas are impossible to implement without measuring their success and building on what works best. Good leadership development will lead you to reflect on past decisions with techniques such as scorecards, binary problem definitions and statistical validation. These techniques help link managerial or financial decisions to the effects they have on team dynamics and ultimately the success of a company.

Once a manager has broken the ‘fire fighting’ cycle and begun developing the business and his or her leadership style, he or she must plan for the future. This requires honest and frequent questioning of one’s own motives. High quality, top-down planning from management level must lead the way in this; another example of leading from the trenches instead of from a safe distance. There are scores of different planning tools, from which a good consultancy will be able to help you select the correct ones for your business, and help you to establish successful planning and review measures.

Ultimately any management development must be done with a careful view of the situation, which a strong consultancy will help you to develop. Always remember that change must be led from the top of a business, and you’ll stay on the road to success.

Ewan M Gardiner is a successful business leadership executive, specialising in business improvement.