How Do The Best Leaders Manage Their time, Their Environment

What Traits Do Leaders Have, and How Do They Use Them to Maximize

Their Potential? 

This is the fifth part of a five-part series that started  four posts ago.  If you want to really understand all of this, go back and read the first four parts. that appear in the September 19, September 26, October 3, and October 10 editions. 

This series is a summary of the 20 Leadership Traits and Talents that the Gallup organization has discovered through thousands of interviews with Leaders at all levels.

Part 5 of 5:  Management

 

How Do the Best Leaders Manage
Their Time, Their Environment,
and Their Results?

 

Discipline

Leaders with Discipline:

• Are orderly and systematic in their approach to work.
• Are well organized, timely, and efficient.
• Like structure and may routinely add it to their lives.
• Typically display good follow-through and completion of tasks.

Discipline:  The need to structure one’s time and environment.

 

Performance Orientation

Leaders with Performance Orientation:

• Quantify the results expected, i.e., have specific ways to measure progress.
• Utilize scores and measurements to lend objectivity to their assessment of people.
• Focus on results more than the process to achieve them.
• Create clear expectations and provide feedback on performance.

Performance Orientation:  An attitude of being results oriented—the need to measure achievement.

 

Arranger

Leaders with Arranger:

• Are flexible in their approach to work.
• Seek to optimize the contributions people make.
• Consider alternative methods and work arrangements to increase productivity.
• Know how to work the system to make things happen.

Arranger:  The ability to coordinate people and their activities so that work gets done efficiently.

 

Operational

Leaders with Operational:

• Have a capacity for administering systems to help people be effective.
• Identify who best can handle responsibility or challenge for particular assignments.
• Quickly identify problems, define solutions, and move forward.
• Manage to keep the workflow smooth in operations.

Operational:  The capacity for administering the systems, which help people be more effective.

 

Strategic Thinking

Leaders with Strategic Thinking:

• Imagine paths to the future . . . test out best route.
• Develop alternative routes by questioning “What if?”
• Are proactive in their thinking; don’t wait for problems to arise.

Strategic Thinking:  The ability to do “what if” thinking as the Leader imagines and creates the paths to future goals.

 

I hope that this five-part series gave you a better understanding of the 20 Leadership Traits and Talents that make us who we are.  No one has all twenty . . . and actually some of us have just a few   . . . but like anything, it is what you do with what you have that matters.

 For the next post I will give you a list of what Gallup calls Talent Absolutes and Talent Preferences.  These, too, I think you will find interesting and thought-provoking, as you go about understanding your own leadership talents.   . . . Lee