Top 4 Priorities For New And Promoted Leaders

If you’ve been promoted into an executive or leadership role from middle management, congratulations! Your focus has changed from departments, teams, and subordinates to markets, customers, competitors, positioning, operations, communications, goals, efficiency, and tools.

As you become more intimately familiar with your existing organizational strategy, it’s a good time to assess how well your organization is positioned to execute and contribute to making necessary changes. Here are four top priorities for new and promoted leaders to consider.

Everyone in your organization should have access to the organizational strategy in writing and understand what it is and how it has evolved. A properly written strategy should account for everyone in the organization, including their purpose as it relates to the strategy and the specific functions they are responsible for to achieve strategic goals. Business leaders and executives must ensure organizational clarity.

As McKinsey found in a survey, leaders who give their employees the ability to make their own decisions are 85% more likely to improve the quality of decisions in their organization. Of course, they can only offer this kind of responsibility to their employees if everyone fully understands the corporate goals.

The goal of strategy execution is to implement your strategic goals to align your organization. Take the following steps:

• Identify the gap between the status quo and your strategic goals and develop an action plan to close it, also known as the roadmap. This describes where you are right now in relation to your strategy and the milestones you must reach to achieve your objectives.
• Ensure your roadmap has specific objectives and key results that are clear and actionable for every team and individual in the organization. Setting these objectives is a collaborative process for company leaders that results in specific goals and ways to create alignment and track progress.
• Ensure that everyone has the resources they need to achieve the goals, including personnel and technology support, ongoing training, and professional development.
• Measure your success with highly specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that track every department and function so you know you're on the right path.

In many businesses, administrative tasks and back-office functions, such as payroll and people management tools, pose a significant challenge to growth. The ability to scale can hinder growth if your business still struggles to manage multiple information systems. Your departments and teams may rely on manual processes due to a lack of appropriate systems or systems. As a result, your employees develop and continue following processes using spreadsheets and other applications across numerous disconnected systems, which introduce risks, including work redundancy, human errors, and data inconsistencies.

Cloud-based technology is your organization’s key to replacing outmoded methods of getting things done. Giving your employees a single source of truth is crucial to cutting down how long any task takes, removing human error, and toppling silos in your company.

With technological advancements in cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SMBs can now automate or streamline many of their most burdensome and time-consuming processes. The best ERP solutions and applications deliver information to whoever needs to see it, have built-in business process frameworks to enhance efficiency, and are delivered in the cloud for economies of scale.

With cloud-based ERP, other applications can be added as your business grows and needs them. Each module is brought into a single system and one source of data truth. This enables your organization to standardize and automate its processes according to industry best practices throughout your organization. While sophisticated technologies may have seemed out of reach for SMBs in the past, they are now more accessible to you, and they are easier to deploy.

Whether you need to revise strategy, make slight adjustments in executing, or improve systems and progress tracking, these fundamental steps can help you transition easily into your executive responsibilities while your organization drives confidently forward.