http://www.creditunionstrategy.com/

One of the challenges we face when we try to develop the leaders in our organizations is how to teach them to make decisions. Many times the decision making process is well defined and well in place and the responsibilities are already aligned with other people. So when we start looking at future leaders, it’s hard to identify ways to give them decision making experience so they can build their decision making muscle and become effective at it. These three tips can help you do just that.

Tip 1: Define and communicate decision limits. Identify clear, specific and well understood limits. Where’s the watermark in the organization? How far can you go, given your position, in making a decision? And at what level do you need to get someone else to come in and share their insights regarding the decision? If you put this in place so people know how far their authority extends, they’ll be more willing to step up and take it.

Tip 2: Learn from the poor decision experiences of the past. Too many times in our organizations we don’t give people a chance to fail, but instead punish the bad decision. That’s not the way to approach it. What we need to do is manage the risks associated with the bad decision and seek to develop the decision making skills of our future leaders by letting them try something and letting it not work. And instead of punishing, take the time to learn from it.

Tip 3: Evaluate and review decision outcomes. Make this part of your culture — something you do every day. Whenever a decision is made and an outcome is realized, pull the group of people together who were involved and talk about the decision. Ask three questions: What Worked? What didn’t? What will we do next time? If you do this on a daily basis, you free people up to participate in the decision-making process. You remove some of that fear that’s inherent in making a decision and you take the risk off the decision maker and put it on the whole team. Now the team knows that instead of punishing bad decisions, you’re going to take the time to step back, review, and evaluate what happened as the result of that decision and strive to make better decisions moving forward.

If you apply these three tips for better decision making, you’ll be much more effective in developing your future leaders and you’ll strengthen your entire credit union team.

For more leadership development tips and strategies visit http://www.CreditUnionStrategy.com

Duration : 0:3:3

Recommended Reading

• The Key Elements of Effective Leadership Strategies
• Successful Leaders Enable Their Employees By Providing Leadership Strategies For Free!
• Employee Centered Leadership Mastermind Groups Promote Growth
• The Most Effective Combo For Company Profits; Business Management Together With Leadership Strategies
• Genuine Leaders Gratefully Accept The Burden of Total Accountability
• Do You Know These Five Virtually Unknown Traits Of Effective Leadership Strategies?
• Increase Your Influence As A Leader

Technorati Tags: Credit Union, credit union strategy, creditunionstrategy.com, dr michael hudson, Effective Leadership Skills, leadership development, michael hudson

What is a leader? Many wish to be a leader but few understand what it takes to be a leader. These are just a few of the many abilities you must have to grow into a leader that can influence and lead others.

1. A crystal clear vision
2. Execute tasks
3. Be objective
4. Be loyal

Vision and action go hand in hand. A leader has to be able to see beyond today’s obstacles, set long term goals and be able to still stay in the moment to accomplish today’s tasks.

Vision without action and action without vision will leave you lost. You have to have a clear vision to sail your ship into the open sea. Execution is the ability to follow through and carry out the decision long after the excitement is long gone.

Usually leaders make quick decisions, stick to them, and are slow to change them. This is not to say leaders never change course. Everyone has the choice to change course.

Leaders change course not out of fear, but out of intuition or insight. New challenges come in the way, and a great leader sees it coming and changes course…being proactive not reactive. Objectivity is being able to see things as they are.

Being able to see who their team is and being able to see their own shortcomings. Knowing that their own shortcomings do not define who they are…knowing that they need to work on themselves. They are their own best student.

They are self correctors and don’t deal in the blame game. Being loyal to yourself…your vision, the journey and your team. No room for guilt or fear..true leaders never use guilt or fear to control their team.

Loyalty is found in love, trust and empowering others. Be loyal,serve others, support them to their success. I believe that success is within the reach of all the desire it. Leadership develops daily not in a day. Make a habit of investing in your leadership skills daily, the process doesn’t happen overnight. To lead tomorrow you must learn today. Successful Leaders Are Learners,

Recommended Reading

• The Key Elements of Effective Leadership Strategies
• Successful Leaders Enable Their Employees By Providing Leadership Strategies For Free!
• Employee Centered Leadership Mastermind Groups Promote Growth
• The Most Effective Combo For Company Profits; Business Management Together With Leadership Strategies
• Genuine Leaders Gratefully Accept The Burden of Total Accountability
• Do You Know These Five Virtually Unknown Traits Of Effective Leadership Strategies?
• Increase Your Influence As A Leader

Technorati Tags: Leadership Ability, leadership 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.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ewan_M_Gardiner

Recommended Reading

• The Key Elements of Effective Leadership Strategies
• Do You Need a Structured Business Leadership Management Development Training Procedure?
• Leadership and Business Management Are Vital To Main Street Business Success
• Successful Small Business Internet Marketing Is About Attracting The Right People When They Are Ready to Buy
• What’s Most Important About Leadership and Business Management Training?
• Should You Budget For a Formalized Business Leadership Management Strategy?
• Increase Your Influence As A Leader

Technorati Tags: Business Improvement, leadership development

It’s in the interaction of those speaking encounters, multiplied daily, month in and month out, year in and year out, that you become a successful leader or not.

If those encounters are defined by Leadership Talks instead of presentations/speeches, the effectiveness of your leadership will be dramatically increased, not only in your job but in your career.

Here’s why:

Read “Turbo Charge Your Career With The Most Powerful Leadership Tool Of All: The Leadership Talk“

Recommended Reading

• The Key Elements of Effective Leadership Strategies
• Successful Leaders Enable Their Employees By Providing Leadership Strategies For Free!
• Employee Centered Leadership Mastermind Groups Promote Growth
• The Most Effective Combo For Company Profits; Business Management Together With Leadership Strategies
• Genuine Leaders Gratefully Accept The Burden of Total Accountability
• Do You Know These Five Virtually Unknown Traits Of Effective Leadership Strategies?
• Increase Your Influence As A Leader

Technorati Tags: leadership development, leadership speech, Leadership Talk, strategic leadership

Your response will have ramifications far beyond your immediate circumstances. One of the best ways to respond comes from Shakespeare’s Henry V.

The stirring speech of Shakespeare’s Henry before the battle of Agincourt contains many leadership nuggets. But commentators who recount the speech usually overlook a particularly valuable one.

They focus on the speech’s “band of brothers” aspects but neglect the fact that Henry also said that if any of his soldiers would rather not fight, he’d give them passport and “crowns for convoy” back to England.

A Rare Leadership Skill: Dealing With People Who Want Out

Recommended Reading

• The Key Elements of Effective Leadership Strategies
• Successful Leaders Enable Their Employees By Providing Leadership Strategies For Free!
• Employee Centered Leadership Mastermind Groups Promote Growth
• The Most Effective Combo For Company Profits; Business Management Together With Leadership Strategies
• Genuine Leaders Gratefully Accept The Burden of Total Accountability
• Do You Know These Five Virtually Unknown Traits Of Effective Leadership Strategies?
• Increase Your Influence As A Leader

Technorati Tags: leadership development, Leadership Strategies, strategic leadership