Five things you can do to improve your leadership performance

This article first appeared on August 19, 2011

“It’s fine – all the gourmet stuff has mould on it,” exclaimed a friend’s boss recently.

“Not bacon!” my friend (the employee) countered.

Clearly there were some differences in what was deemed appropriate behaviour between leader and employee here.

I wrote an email to someone today discussing the various challenges of stepping up to a leadership role. In my mind, most people promoted into leadership roles go in fairly unprepared for the struggles they’ll face.

How do you find the happy medium between cost saving and safety (mmm… moldy bacon!)

How do you find the perfect balance of being friendly with those you manage without them losing respect for you as their leader if you’re too familiar?

How do you set an example for them to follow on the days when you feel like crawling under your desk and putting a huge sign on your door that says you’ve gone to Jamaica?

In my first staff management role (excruciatingly detailed in my book Advance to Go, Collect $1 Million) I was such a “brilliant” first time manager that all my staff (housemaids at the motel I was managing) up and quit on me within two weeks!

While I don’t think I’ve come close to perfecting the role of being a manager or leader within an organisation, each misstep I make (and we all make them) helps me refine and improve my technique.

Five things you can do to improve your leadership performance:

• Find a way for your team to give you feedback on how they think you’re doing (anonymous performance reviews work well in my experience and while they’re a little daunting the info received can be so valuable).
• Remember back to your previous leaders in the workplace. Who did you admire the most and why?
• Find a way to recognise your staff in a meaningful way – simply finding out what their favourite chocolate bar is might be a start.
• Take stock on what leadership training you’ve actually done – what your ongoing formal education plan for leadership is.
• Take a great leader out to lunch. Find someone you know has the respect of their team and take them out to lunch and probe them with all sorts of meaningful questions on what works for them (and what hasn’t in the past).

Kirsty Dunphey is the youngest ever Australian Telstra Young Business Woman of the Year, author of two books (her latest release is Retired at 27, If I Can do it Anyone Can) and a passionate entrepreneur who started her first business at age 15 and opened her own real estate agency at 21. Now Kirsty does lots of fun things which you can read about here. Her favourite current projects are Elephant Property, a boutique property management agency, Baby Teresa, a baby clothing line that donates an outfit to a baby in need for each one they sell andReallySold, which helps real estate agents stop writing boring, uninteresting ads.