How to See the Future as a Leader: Like You Have a Crystal Ball!

A leader must wear many hats.

Sometimes a leader must be a ruler who makes the final judgement. Sometimes a leader needs to keep the team calm. And sometimes, a leader must be the one to solve arguments and disputes.

One of the most important jobs of an effective leader of all though, is to effectively see the future. In other words, a leader must be able to anticipate what is just around the corner and predict what challenges and changes will face their organization. This is absolutely crucial, because it is what will allow them to create a more resilient business and to weather any storm. Moreover, it is what will allow them to take advantage of changes in the market and truly flourish rather than just survive.

So how do you do it?

Financial Modeling

One answer is to use financial modelling. This is an accounting from strategy that can be useful in all manner of leadership roles, even including leading the household!

The idea is essentially that youíre going to look at the situation your business is in financially and then try to predict how that might change. To do this, you will look at your overheads and your income. How many customers do you have? How much of your sales is profit? What else are you spending money on? How long until you pay off your loans?

This then allows you to make a graph, your financial model, and you can use that in order to plot the future predictions for your earnings. This might be a sharp incline, or it might be a steady plateaux. It may be that it takes a while for you to breakeven.

Either way though, this information now allows you to budget for the future, knowing how much spare cash youíll have at any given time. Moreovoer, it lets you create imaginary scenarios ñ seeing how your business would survive an increase in rent for example. If the answer is ëit wouldnítí, then you need to change your numbers or set out contingency plans!

Resilience

Resilience means that a business is able to stand up to all kinds of changes. There are many ways you can make your business more resilient but the best include increasing the number of products or revenue streams you have, having money saved in the bank and paying off all outstanding loans and debts.

How to Motivate and Inspire Your Team

Want to motivate your team and get them to work better and faster?

Then you should just offer them bonuses for working harder and faster right? Or introduce the threat of punishment for those who take too long?

Wrong!

When you introduce penalties and rewards, you encourage faster, sloppier work that is more likely to lead to mistakes. Whatís more, is that you encourage people to step on each other to get to the top. And you stifle creativity!

So what do you do instead?

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

The problem is that both of these solutions involve extrinsic motivation. That means that the motivation is coming from elsewhere; that the activity is not rewarding in itself. This means that the team will simply want to finish fast and go home!

Conversely though, if you can make it so that the activity itself is rewarding, then youíll find they naturally work harder of their own volition.

So how do you create this change?

Ownership

One solution is to give your team some degree of ownership over what they are doing and to give them credit for their rewards. A good way to do that? To put their name on what they create!

There is a big reason behind why this works and that is that it gives them a sense of pride in their work. That in turn makes the work rewarding, this is their project. If it goes well, then they can brag about it. And if they can brag about it, then it will benefit them.

At the same time, itís also important to give your team some degree of control over what they are doing. That means making sure that they can make decisions if they need to and take the necessary responsibility that comes with that. Once again, this makes the project feel more like it is really ëtheirsí and it makes them much happier to work longer hours as a result.

Of course there are other ways you can make work fun too! Introducing lots of breaks, changing the working environment and even gamifying certain aspects can all make a big difference to the way that your team work and behave. so give it a go!

The Biggest Tip

But the biggest tip of all? Make sure you have the right people on your team in the first place. Some people just wonít find what youíre doing exciting. And theyíre the wrong people for your organization!

How to Give Correct Instructions

The way you give instructions is going to be one of the most important defining features of you as a leader. Because ultimately, this is what will make up the majority of your job! As a leader, you are going to be spending most of your day-to-day asking people to do things and then checking they are done correctly.

But in order to do this well, you need to know how to give instructions and how to ensure the best outcome. Here is what you need to do.

Be Clear and Precise

The first and most important thing you need to do, is to be clear and precise. The reason for this is that you need to be able to prevent mistakes and misunderstandings. If you give unclear instructions, then that will lead to your team either needing to ask for more information and clarification from you or to them making mistakes that lead to big problems and possibly lose you money.

This means that the good leader is also a good communicator by default. If you’re not a good communicator, train yourself to be!

Explain the Why

What’s even more important though, is that you explain the why in what you are asking people to do. In fact, better yet is to ask people to achieve a certain result, tell them why and give no instruction on how.

This first of all makes you a more hands-off leader and less of a micromanager. People like this because it gives more work satisfaction and makes them feel trusted.

Moreover though, explaining the what and why more than the how is going to allow your team to be flexible where necessary.

Letís say for example that you tell your staff they need to print 500 fliers and deliver them around the neighbourhood. What happens if then the printers break? Or if the roads are snowed off? Now your team will either be stuck, or theyíll come to you to ask for direction.

Instead, tell your team they need to get 500 adverts out in the local area. This now opens up many contingency plans and other options. They could maybe outsource the flier creation to a printing company for instance, or they might use email instead or advertise in the town hall.

Either way, they have now achieved the same thing quicker and with more satisfaction because they havenít had to ask your permission for every slight deviation in the plan!