Leadership Stamina

According to the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Stamina means ‘the bodily or mental capacity to sustain a prolonged stressful effort or activity’. Leadership Stamina is something that a Leader needs to have to sustain the constant march towards the goals of the Organization. This is relevant in all times. Especially so in the current COVID times when it is not easy to sustain the morale of the organisation when your Team members are falling sick every other day. 

We are witnessing an unprecedented situation and probably (and hopefully) once in a life time situation in which everyone is struggling against a common enemy who is invisible. The rush of Obituaries in Social media, Newspapers tell the whole story. There are many tragedies that are happening in front of eyes. These stories are bound to haunt us for a long time to come. Sons and Daughters who are not able to bid a proper good bye to their mother or father, Colleagues who just saw their colleague disappear, Mothers who lost their sons prematurely, People who survived the Corona but succumbed to the post Corona complications. 

Leaders need to be very resilient now. They need to have a stamina with which they should be able to give a sustained Leadership to the teams around them. Let us look at some best practices towards this objective.

01. Set reasonable pace: A Leader who wants to run at ‘break neck’ speed will most definitely break his own neck and the Organisation’s too. I have seen many Leaders who get into this frenzy to improve something. It is normal to once in a while get into an urgency due to a Customer pressure. But if you are continuously in a status of frenzy, then you are burning out the whole organization. 

02. Team is the King: A Leader should ensure that the safety of the team is put ahead of any Business Objectives. When there is a Safety issue, Leader should always take care of the team. He has to prioritise the team even over the Customer. If there is no Committed team, the Customer cannot be served. The team will decide how much risk will be taken up.

03.  Constancy of purpose: A Leader should ensure that the improvement agenda worked out by the company is not changed too frequently. Many Leaders get swayed when they see some improvement that took place in a friend’s company or competitor organization. A Company can always learn from all organizations. But it should have its’ own Improvement agenda. It should not sway from that path. It is preferable for a company to have a medium term plan for Business excellence. The Business results and Excellence practices improvement should go hand in hand. 

04. Team Development: A Leader should always focus on the medium term development of his team. In my experience, only 2-3% of Leaders may be focused on development of their team over a period of time. A Leader should take up a 3-4 year development of his team. There will not be much use of a one off program for the Team members. Now, there is enough technology available to give team members a weekly learning agenda. Focusing on regular learning is much better for the team members. I recommend Weekly Learning hours for every team member. 

05. Series of Sprints and Celebrations: Break up the Business agenda into short term goals and encourage the team to put their full energy into sprinting towards the goals. Then celebrate after reaching a goal. The celebration is important to ensure that the Team catches its’ breath, feels good about the achievement and then moves to the next sprint. For example, if Quality of the Product is the focus in the company, then the team may take up the target of eliminating couple of perennial Product Quality problems. As soon as they eliminate them in couple of months, they should celebrate this progress. Then, the Team can take up the next Sprint goals. 

06. Learning environment: A Leader should encourage capturing the Learnings in the organization in a systematic manner. If the Team is handling Quality projects, the learnings should be captured in the Knowledge data bank. The R&D team should have periodic ‘Technical paper presentations’. Team members will enjoy these sessions. This is the time when they are ‘recovering’. If running behind the Project goals creates pressure, these learning sessions will help the team members to recover from this stress. 

07. Motivating environment: Reward the team members when they reach a milestone. The milestone need not be some big achievement. It can just be a significant first step. Leader needs to use the encouragement aptly. Someone who is climbing Everest needs to be encouraged for every step at a 6000 mtrs height. All the Leaders in the company need to be trained and sensitised towards this goal of creating a motivating environment. Very often Leaders resort to pushing the team members about what is ‘not done’ negating a lot of ‘what is done’. 

08. Creating a choice of Projects for Team members: When a Team member opts herself into a Project, the energy that she brings in is very high. When a Leader just appoints a person into a Project, the energy may not be at its’ peak. The feeling of ‘having choice’ of getting into a Project is very powerful. When Team members select their own projects, there can be tremendous energy in the project. There can be several questions about this approach. How can we allow the team members to select their own projects? there will be absolute chaos, how can the skills be available where they are needed and so on. But by taking a medium term approach, these issues can be resolved. Please trust Team members to take care of the Organization level goals too. They will appreciate the higher goals too. They may take some time to do this. But it will happen. 

09. Ownership at every level: All Manufacturing Companies have a strong organization with Leaders at several levels. It is essential to have ownership of Improvement agenda and Improvement initiatives at every level. To enable this, the Leader at the top has to leave the Initiatives so that they can be picked up by the Leaders at all levels. If the Top Leader is too macho and wanting to lead everything, then the Leaders at other levels may not take ownership. While the Leader at the top thinks he is doing a lot, he may be actually killing the enthusiasm of other leaders in the organization.

There can be more points that need to be considered. But, every Leader can benefit from the above Best Practices. 

Do you have a good Leadership Stamina?