Your Choice: A Journey of Fighting Fires or Lighting Up the Score Board? (Part II)

Top 10 ways to promote proactive leadership, moving your operation away from a reactionary business to more of a proactive operation

Reactive leadership has a time and a place, and sometimes has longer seasons than we would like. It can be quite necessary in periods of stabilization, turnaround situations, or unexpected volume spikes. But reactive situations should be just that, a season, a period of time, handling a specific challenge, not an ongoing way of business. Many operations do work in reactive mode continuously, and that’s not sustainable. Reactive leadership and operations often lead to all the outcomes and subpar results that you don’t want, like associate and customer attrition, margin reduction, quality slips, and maybe even shuttering the business.

As we look to foster a more proactive approach, let’s start with defining reactive compared to proactive leadership, which sit at different ends of the leadership and management spectrums.

What is reactionary leadership?

1. Taking on the issues as they come, with extreme laissez-faire business management

2. Kick the can down the road

3. Bracing for impact of issues or breaking points

4. Ignoring signs of poor performance with associates, products, clients, and services

5. Reduced profit due to unnecessary costs, and costs not adding value

6. Full defensive stance

7. Figuring out the issue right now, with no long term root cause analysis

8. Lack of people development

9. Hiring only at points of desperation

10. Lacking vision, only firefighting, with a short-term view on today, not the future

What is Proactive leadership?

1. Seeking out the problems, challenges, high cost, and high impact opportunities, or areas for improvement

2. Continuous improvement

3. Lean, six sigma, 5-why…

4. Risk mitigation from a value-add lens

5. Big picture mindset

6. Excellence enables earnings (EEE)

7. Path to SSP (Sustainable Strategic Partnership)

8. Income reflects effort and value

9. Offensive aggressor, going after opportunities and business, not letting the market and clients dictate your future solely

10. Make more decisions looking 3, 5 , 10 years out, not just this hour, Friday, or next week

What does a proactive leadership and management approach do for you?

It changes everything. If you can step away for two weeks and the business still runs, you may have a business, a team, and likely a more stabilized business, and not just a job for yourself. I don’t just mean your own business, I also mean at the (sometimes senior manager) director level and up at a larger company. It’s tough because protectionism creeps in, but to most a great culture and environment, you can’t be worried about your job, and treating it as a placeholder. So many organizations don’t see this. Associates don’t want to share ideas, promote the growth of those reporting to them, building up others, limiting endless self-promotion…We want to build great companies, not mini-empires with fake moats, right?

Build a business, not a job - this mentality allows you to scale yourself and your business. If you have this mindset and find how to foster it, you’ll also do tousled a favor for the future. Whether it be a team, group, department, division, or a business, to take yourself, and business, and scale them to the next level. The protectionism mindset protects jobs, and prevents growth. The unlock happens when you and your team embrace working yourself out of job and taking the next level job. Not in a predatory competitive kind of way, but from a growth perspective. This is a must in a positive sum, collective growth culture, where the organization serves its people, clients, and the collective community, not only the bottom line.

Elevate your team, elevate yourself.

How I learned proactive leadership and management

1. Fear of failure or losing

2. Protecting our turf, from a competitive landscape perspective

3. Growing opportunity for myself and others

4. Curiosity, thinking about what will and could happen, not just what’s in front of me

5. High accountability for results and pressure for performance

6. Much of my proactive style came from paranoia about the worst that could go wrong early in my career, forcing me to think- Plan for the worst, and hope for the best…which actually forces you to do everything in your power to ensure the best possible outcomes and results

How do you change the culture to be more proactive?

Position your team at the forefront of your focus to deliver for your client

• People development

• Smart resourcing

• Link the work to the opportunity and objectives

• Share and drive the vision and roadmap

Position your team to focus on your client

• Customer obsession

• Culture of accountability with client centric work

• Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. Cut out all fluff, crap, process without value

• Talk about the critical client work. Repeat, repeat, repeat

Considerations for promoting proactive leadership

• Tools and resources

• Dashboard

• Performance monitoring (ask questions, get curious)

• Empowerment

• Framework for leadership

• Vision and roadmap

Work on your business, elevate and develop your people, retain your customers, and build for five to ten years out, not just your decision making for today.

Hopefully, this added a little value to your business or your career. Thank you for reading. Please repost or share with someone who may benefit from this edition.

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