Last month we began a series on how to ACT with POWER, the third step in our Leader in You Framework.
Within our ACT with POWER framework, there are 5 critical actions that powerful leaders do to move forward on important issues and initiatives.
Over the past 4 weeks, we’ve talked about:
P = You consider and engage your team in exploring the Possibilities inherent in the obstacles and challenges you face.
O = You take Ownership and Share why the effort or success matters to you and explore why it would matter to your team.
W = You create We-Focused shared goals with the people you’re leading for how to move the effort forward.
E = You Enable Action. This means you work with your team to detail out the who, what, when, where, and how.
Today we’re covering the R which stands for Review and Refine (not rest and relax as you might have hoped!).
When you intentionally set time aside to review and refine your work, you’re giving yourself and your team time to assess what’s working and what’s not working.
Often, people who are new to leadership, think they can step in and lead once and be done. But in fact, leadership is a way of being in the world, an ongoing process of pausing, assessing what’s going on inside of you and inside of them, and then acting with power . . . and then doing it all again.
We mentioned in the last post, Enabling Action, that leadership is all about action but action for action’s sake, is not very effective.
Action needs to be in service of the goals for the organization, department, or team. Which is why the fifth action step is R – review and refine – so that you can determine what’s working, what’s not working, and how to refine your and your team’s efforts to be in the greatest service of the goals.
It is this step that distinguishes leadership from cheerleading. Many people get caught in believing that if they say nice things to the people they’re working with, they somehow will know exactly what’s needed to succeed.
Yet, what we’ve learned is that leaders must identify the ways that the team has contributed to success, efforts that have missed the mark, and how to focus future efforts to continue to make a difference.
your job is to get a group of people working together
to get traction on multiple goals.
This simple framework will support you in taking action that creates alignment within your team, engagement in creating success, and the ability to adjust using lessons learned.
This week, spend some time exploring how you can ACT with POWER, focusing on increasing your use of the R; reviewing and refining your efforts.
Next week we’ll do a case study that ties all 5 steps together so that you can see an example of what it looks like to ACT with POWER in leadership.
Your allies in success,
– Linda, Stephanie, and Heather
a motivated and future-focused team.