Six Critical Leadership Activities: Actualizing

The following list identifies six activities that I consider “critical” to successful leadership. These activities have helped me become and remain a more effective and efficient leader here at Remote DBA Experts.

1. Strategize
2. Align
3. Energize
4. Enable
5. Actualize
6. Recognize

In my last post, I defined what I meant by Enabling and described what it entails.  In this post, I will do the same with the next Critical Leadership Activity: Actualizing.  If you’ve been keeping up with this blog series, I have mentioned that Actualizing and Recognizing were activities I used to give better meaning to the process of ensuring execution.

What does Actualizing mean?

Actualizing means both getting things done and making sure things happen.  It is both a personal and a leadership activity. Actualizing is making sure that the key responsibilities of your role as a leader get executed.  When you do, you can lead by example.  If you do not do what you are supposed to do, you will have less integrity to ask others to do their part.

What does Actualizing entail?

Actualizing entails identification, prioritization and organization of critical role responsibilities, tasks, and action items for self and others.  In the context of this post, I will focus on actualizing the things that will make the biggest impact on accomplishing your aims.  Aim Accomplishment Strategies produce action plans that contain the action items necessary to get your aim accomplished.  To actualize your aim, you must make sure the plan is executed.  Everyone who has to take action needs to be held accountable for their part of the plan.  Very often, aim strategies and related plans are developed and launched, but mechanisms to ensure execution are not put in place to track progress.  People then get distracted or busy and fail to follow-through, or they do so off schedule.   Leaders must set a process to ensure execution.  There are several mechanisms to help do this.  Regular meetings and reports are most commonly used. There are a number of software packages that can also be used to track project and schedule progress.

Lack of good follow-up and accountability can kill accomplishment.  When people do not do what they committed to do per plan, there probably was a failure in one of the early-on activity stages.  People who did not get the importance of the aim, strategy or action items will have less impetus to do what they are supposed to do.  People who were not energized or lost their “energy” somehow, will also lose their impetus.  Lastly, if people were not properly enabled with resources or capabilities, they will also have a harder time following-through.  One of my tendencies is to set out too many things to accomplish at the same timeJ.  This tends to confuse people and causes poor follow-through as well.  Lack of clarity can be a constraint to accomplishment.  I try hard to use the vital few (80/20) principle to keep me and my team from trying too much at once.  It helps!

When things are not getting done, look first at the early-on stages and make sure people are aligned, engaged and enabled.  If they are, look at the mechanisms in place (or missing) to track progress and hold them accountable.  My experience has been that fully aligned, energized, and enabled people need little prodding to do what they are supposed to do.  That is the power of clarity, motivational force, and enablers!  Keep an eye on them and you won’t need a big hammer to get things to happen.

Are you and your team following-through?

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO