When building a Leadership Rhythm that impacts your leadership life and your team’s experience, your efforts must be strategic. Leaders who haphazardly go after their weekly schedule tend to deliver inconsistent development, communication, expectations, priorities, and varying levels of accountability and recognition. It can be done much better with a formal practice of building out behaviors that your team and you can count on.
We suggest consistently blocking time to analyze your data and your team’s behavior. Keep your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) as narrow as possible, focusing on the top three to five that are the most controllable and contribute to achieving your purpose. Reviewing your results through the lens of gap analysis is critical to executing religiously so you can see patterns of behavior that can be corrected or enhanced based on whether or not you are meeting expectations.
Start by looking at where you are meeting expectations. Ask yourself these questions:
Why are we winning here?
What behaviors are in place?
What needs to be replicated and repeated?
Then look at where you are not meeting expectations and ask yourself these questions:
Why are we not winning here?
What behaviors are not in place?
What Performance Gaps need to be closed?
Once you’ve done this initial analysis, you can look at the individuals involved to see their behavioral patterns and ask yourself these questions:
Who is winning?
What are their behaviors?
Who is not winning?
What are their behaviors?
Finally, look at your own behaviors, ask these questions, and build your action plan accordingly:
What am I doing now to create the wins?
What am I doing now to create the misses?
What behaviors do I need to replicate, repeat, and enhance the wins?
What Root Solutions can I apply to close any Performance Gaps?
Action planning must begin with a process of analysis, which must include looking at the results and the behaviors that produced them. Observe your team where you can and look for high and low-performance indicators. Develop these consistent methods into your Leadership Rhythm to create predictability, minimize stress and confusion, and build a solid foundation of execution.