Good leadership is important to every organisation for a variety of reasons, but it can be challenging for you as a senior member of staff to improve your leadership and give your staff the support they need, particularly if you’ve been in your role for some time.

For leaders who want to enhance their skills and create a better atmosphere for their staff members to boost productivity and improve employee satisfaction, here are some of our top tips.

Ask For Feedback
Improvement is impossible if you don’t know what areas you need to enhance, and it’s hard for leaders to evaluate themselves, so ask for feedback from team members and other senior staff. Ask them to be honest about what they think you could do to make their working lives more productive, then try to see if any of their suggestions can be implemented or if more research into the issues is required.

Start Hosting Performance Reviews
Performance reviews are important for your organisation and your team members, so if you’re not already doing them then you need to start. Make sure that you use this time to talk one-on-one with each member of your team and review how they are performing. By working closely with them in this way you can ensure that they are performing to the best of their abilities and, if they’re not, then review the situation and see what you can do to help them.

Listen More
Good leaders listen and try to understand the concerns of their staff, so this is a skill you need to cultivate in yourself if you want to improve your leadership. Remember to listen to staff not with the intent of replying, but with the intention of understanding their concerns. Take the time to process what each member of staff is saying so that you can give them the support they really need.

Mentor Team Members
Mentoring your team and giving them the support they need to grow as individuals is a great way to create better, more productive staff and a more collaborative internal culture for your business. For those business leaders who want to start mentoring their team members but don’t know how to start, there are great courses out there to give you a great grounding in sharing your professional insight with your team, such as this ILM level 7 coaching course, which you can learn more about here.

Keep Yourself Informed About Your Market
The corporate market is changing all the time, so while you might have strong knowledge of your sector from past experience and previous roles, if you don’t continue to cultivate this then you’ll fall behind. Make sure that you sign up to relevant newsletters, listen to podcasts and speak with your industry peers about the state of your sector so that you are ahead of emerging market developments and understand how your team and business could adapt around the latest changes. Not only will this help you to stay up to date with the latest developments in your industry, but also help you to stay passionate about your work, which is another important trait that every leader needs to have.

Set Yourself Goals
As a leader you will be setting your team targets to achieve in their work, but it can be easy for you to forget to set yourself goals too. Give yourself goals that are ambitious but achievable, then work hard to reach them. This will help you to organise your workload and grow as both a leader and an individual.

Learn To Delegate
When leading a team it can be easy for you to take on all the tasks yourself, but it’s important that you learn to delegate tasks to other team members so that your workload doesn’t become too heavy. If you do take on too much work, then you will end up performing poorly and not doing the best job that you can. Successful delegation is an important skill for any leader, and one that requires time to cultivate.

Get Stuck In
One of the most effective ways to improve your leadership is to take on more work so that you can understand what your team does and how the work they have to do could be made easier and more efficient. Organise your workload so that you take on as many small projects as possible, as this will allow you not only to lighten the workloads of team members but also give you first-hand experience of the role your team plays in the success of your organisation. Use your delegation skills to spread the workload and make sure that you’re doing a little of everything without getting too overworked.

The most important thing to remember when leading any team is to balance your professionalism with personality, so that team members both like and respect you. By following these tips, you should be able to enhance your leadership and continue to steer your team towards success for many years to come.