How the Right Leadership Strengthens Organizations

Every action you take as a leader reverberates across your whole organization. As a leader, you have a direct influence on how your company performs and your employees feel. With exemplary leadership and mindset, you can steer your business to face all kinds of challenges and recover swiftly from adversities.

Let’s look at these business leadership principles that help leaders tune their organizations to resilience.

Instilling a Sense of Accountability

As introduced by two former U.S. Navy SEALs, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, the concept of extreme ownership stresses the importance of accountability of each individual for everything that they do.  The principles of extreme ownership translate very well into the business setting.

Instilling ownership in employees is the first step to building a more resilient, aware, and motivated workforce. To propagate ownership, you need to show your employees the bigger picture. You need to explain how their work fits in with the company’s direction. In this way, your staff would be more willing to take the necessary level of responsibility.

The sense of ownership — the knowledge that all employee actions matter, i.e., every action is a building block of success — helps staff be more productive and accountable for the results of their work.

Employees should see that their actions contribute to achieving the overarching goal of the company. They should feel that they are an integral part of the team. As a result, they become more involved and actively collaborate with the rest of the team to solve problems.

Proper Staff Supervision and Management

As a leader, you should assume the role of a mentor who, first and foremost, supports the employees. Let them know that you trust them that they can do the job right.

The biggest mistake leaders can make is to micromanage staff.

It’s virtually impossible to single-handedly advise on strategies for different departments, let alone company branches in other locations. Micromanagement can lead to confusion and possibly an overload of tasks and responsibilities. Leaders need to delegate tasks and ditch the temptation to participate in every process.

Thus, leaders who think they have enough knowledge and experience to tackle every business process in the pipeline rarely build effective teams.

That’s why senior management should trust and support the employees responsible for different departments and business locations. As a result, these employees will be equipped with the front-line knowledge of the business environment to make accurate decisions.

Empowered employees with greater insight into what exactly is happening and how it’s affecting the immediate stakeholders and the community know what should be done. For example, with a sudden shortage of employees, they should maintain the production at the same level.

Reprioritizing Leadership Duties

Before the pandemic, fulfilling their duties toward shareholders was the main priority for board members. However, the crisis has underlined the critical role of companies in local communities. This urges board members to reprioritize their duties toward shareholders.

The sudden closure of many companies due to the Coronavirus crisis showed that society’s well-being depends on businesses’ performance. This is because companies and organizations employ a large scale. This is critical to local and national economies.

Consequently, to ensure stability, companies need to take active steps to help employees navigate the crisis. In other words, employees become a priority for the boards.

Board members have to be flexible and adaptive in attending to the new tasks resulting from stakeholder disruption. Depending on the situation of each stakeholder (e.g., employees, customers, shareholders, vendors) at a given time, the agenda for board meetings has to be tuned to the needs of that specific stakeholder group.

This flexibility and adaptive potential of the board have to become part of the company policy until a crisis stabilizes. In times of dynamic crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the decision-making process regarding the company’s short-term strategy has to be fast and efficient.

Remote Board Meetings and Annual General Meetings

To facilitate collaboration on policies and reports, boards can turn to tools that expedite the decision-making process and support adequate information flow.

Intuitive and secure software for organizing board meetings and annual general meetings can help board members navigate the fluctuating environment with the necessary level of confidence.

Furthermore, held remotely, a virtual annual general meeting (AGM) can help you communicate your new leadership strategies and ensure an engaging and inclusive debate and discussion on the pressing matters.

Strengthen Your Organization through Leadership and Technology

By empowering your staff and leveraging app technology, you can create a resilient and productive company that swiftly recovers from setbacks.

With the right insight from the front-line employees and streamlined collaboration with top management, you can make important decisions about the company’s strategy fast.

Finally, to communicate with shareholders securely and conveniently, consider implementing virtual AGM software for your annual general meetings.