In the fourth and final part of this little miniseries of behaviours related to excellent and brilliant leadership, I want to touch on the principle of governance.
Behaviour 4 is my most favourite behaviour to talk about in terms of these, and I use this all as a basis for much of the business education that I provide (I was discussing this with a group in Vietnam this week, and as this blog post, I will just be returning to the United Kingdom).
The fourth behaviour is delivering reliably, and it is the most effective superpower you can have as a leader in business to gain sustainable and measurable growth in your business in all areas.
I believe this is my most favourite of the behaviours and the one that I try to concentrate on the most because it is the one that I am least good at.
Governance is so critically important in business, and governance includes compliance, meeting structures, cadence of business development, and the overall security of your business. If you begin to understand the principles of governance in business, and you can set up lines of command and responsibility, together with appropriate, effective and dynamic meeting structures, together with minutes, action points, and a forward pathway, you can achieve the most extraordinary success in the development of your business at any size and any level.
I was always poor at this, poor at turning up on time, poor at reading my notes before I went, and poor at providing notes afterwards.
After 17 years of working in school governance at quite high levels, including assisting in the governance and direction of a 60 million pounds schools organisation, I have gained a love for governance and a respect for this that has benefited our business enormously.
A few practical examples of this are as follows:
Number 1 - turn up on time for any meeting that you have.
Number 2 - never assume that you have to use the entire length of the meeting; be effective and proactive. Stop the meeting when it's finished.
Number 3 - do not read papers which have been produced for a meeting that people should have read before; assume that they have read them.
Number 4 - always, always have an agenda which is time-limited.
Number 5 - never allow the item ‘any other business’; it's a trap
Number 6 - create action points for every meeting and disseminate them to the people who have met. Make sure you start the following meeting with a red, amber, green strategy to show how far you are with those action points.
Next point, never discuss the green action points; they're done. Next point, always discuss the red and the barriers to getting them done; either dump them or get them done. Next point, have an appropriate meeting structure with a good cadence and a meeting that is never longer than it needs to be.
This is some evidence of what good governance looks like; after that, you can start to delegate to people different tasks that can be done brilliantly, think about clinical governance and how your clinic runs fantastically well and safely for the benefit of your patients. Think about human resources governance in terms of contracting policies, procedures, sickness pay and measuring the satisfaction and health of your team.
Think about IT governance and how you protect data; all of these things can be set up using the structure above, with the person at the top merely directing the work that is carried out or the direction of the work that is carried out.
Most importantly though, be who you say you are going to be, set values and set a vision and stick to those, deliver those reliably.
Turn up on time when you say you will turn up and be the person that you say you will be.
Meld these into the previous three behaviours, and you will see the growth of your business catapult.
Learn to be a leader because what we need is leaders.
Leave a comment