To have any chance of being a successful leader, you have to look ahead and you have to make decisions about the order that you're going to do things.
The justification for this is that in a leadership role you are normally pretty busy.
To gain time, you need to have the ability to delegate.
Leaders who refuse to delegate, or delegate in a way that is guaranteed to make the person fail rarely attract good people around them.
If they do, then they do not stay.
One: Delegating effectively is a delicate job.
You must delegate rather than abdicate.
When you pass work onto other people it's imperative that you don't lose interest or fail to take responsibility.
Delegation means that you have to think carefully about what's to be delegated and who is going to do it.
It's not a question of simply looking around to find people that are not particularly busy and then giving them the tedious and monotonous parts of your job.
The objective of delegation is that both people benefit.
You are released for higher benefit work, and they have the opportunity to develop themselves further.
Two: Communication is at the very heart of effective leadership.
Good people relish good communication because it makes them feel secure.
Credibility and consistency in communication is essential for effective leadership.
A good example of this is shown when senior managers award themselves significant pay rises whilst urging everyone else to have restraint.
This sort of inconsistency wrecks relationships and creates considerable mistrust.
Most importantly, it is a very demotivating situation because of the dual standards.
Three: Leaders have to take decisions about the future, and in this process there is a degree of guesswork and risk-taking.
The secret is to accept the fact that there is a degree of risk taking and factor that into the decision making process.
This means that you assess the downside and minimize the effects.
In a changing environment the worst thing you can do is to take no risks.
Risks should be calculated because this is probably the least dangerous path that you can follow.
Four: The big challenge for leaders is to be the person that requires new skills and thinking patterns on a regular basis.
Every time a new skill is required, it must be passed on to somebody else in the team.
Because of the changing environment, leaders should actively encourage suggestions for new ways of doing things.
This is based on the premise that the people doing the job, know more about the job than anyone else.
For most people, the barrier of trying something new, is a fear of failure.
In reality, it's necessary to try new things and fail sometimes because this is part of the way that we learn.
The leader's responsibility is to ensure that learning takes place from failure rather than blame.