Driving Results Key Focus for Leaders as New Year Begins
A new year. A new set of annual targets and goals. Leaders around the world are spending this week thinking about how to achieve their goals and drive desired results for their organizations.
Great leaders drive results by focusing on four skills and behaviors:
- Communicating as a leader.
- Ensuring individual and team accountability.
- Developing clear and concise strategy statements.
- Leveraging cross-functional and cross-cultural collaboration.
One of my core leadership beliefs is that leaders can be found at all levels of an organization. Leadership is not something confined to the upper ranks of management or the top tiers of an organization chart.
Likewise, strategy is not something done only at the corporate or strategic business unit level. Any leader can have a strategy, such as:
- A customer retention strategy.
- A service quality strategy.
- An innovation strategy.
- A new product strategy.
- A cost-reduction strategy.
- A leadership development strategy.
- A team development strategy.
However, setting a strategy or a vision for your workgroup is never sufficient in itself. Far too many strategies fail to achieve their intended outcomes. I’ll share with you in a future post some of the main reasons why strategic plans fail. But now, let’s start the year off more optimistically and positively. Here are eight of my favorite quotes on leading for results found in my book Great Leadership Words of Wisdom:
It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement. Socrates
A year from now you may wish you had started today. Karen Lamb
Great Leadership Words of Wisdom
Goals. There’s no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There’s no telling what you can do when you believe in them. There’s no telling what will happen when you act upon them. Jim Rohn
Done is better than perfect. Sheryl Sandberg
The most important key to achieving great success is to decide upon your goal and launch, get started, take action, move. John Wooden
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals. Henry Ford
Spend 80 percent of your time focusing on the opportunities of tomorrow rather than the problems of yesterday. Brian Tracy
Culture drives great results. Jack Welch
Perhaps one of more of these quotes can be your leadership theme as you lead your team for results this year.
This article is partially excerpted from the book Great Leadership Words of Wisdom: Over 1000 quotations on great leadership from global business leaders, statesmen, athletes, coaches, sages, and philosophers. The book is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats.
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