A Leadership Framework to Keep Me Sane

Leadership demands tackling complex problems and situations without immediate, tangible, quantifiable results. It demands a constant balance between delivering your goals, keeping teams happy, planning for the future, aligning with business goals, and so on. Leadership expectations will stretch you thin and make you crave for a thirty hour day!

Unless you build a framework to help you tackle your challenges.

In my case, my framework is made up of three Ps: People, Priorities, Process. These three Ps, in those particular order, help me diagnose most of my challenges and design solutions, remediations as and when needed.

The post below provides quick, handy details about this framework with easy actionable pointers.

PEOPLE

This is the foundation of my framework. Without an iota of doubt, my success as a leader is directly proportional and amplified by the people I work with. People have a disproportionate amount of impact on the success of any organization — and as a leader its only fair to focus on your biggest value add.

Provide psychological safety. There is a ton of research that indicates psychological safety as the number one ingredient of a successful team. A leader’s job is to foster open communication and build an environment for interpersonal risk taking.

Provide constant, clear feedback. Clear, direct and timely feedback is the critical fuel for your team’s acceleration. A leader’s job is to observe behaviors and either nudge towards course-corrections or encourage the positives. Check this out for more on how to deliver feedback.

Show path to achieve personal goals. Everyone has personal goals and ambitions in their careers. If you do not provide a path for people to achieve what they want, or build the skills they need - someone else will. Make your team’s current job a huge learning experience! It comes with a huge pay-off.

Right team, right role. Jim Collins has beautifully put the importance of having the right people on the bus. In addition to keeping a high talent bar, a leader’s job is to identify strengths in people and map them to fitting roles/teams. Don’t worry about org boundaries. Mapping talent to right opportunities is in…