2. Be decisive in turbulence

Every leader encounters uncertainty, but the best leaders thrive in it. Often, an organization might slow down and dwell in indecisiveness when the unthinkable occurs. A good leader grabs hold of an incapacitated team by holding decision making authority to themselves to get over the bump and regain working order.

Collective decision making practices are becoming commonplace, and knowledge workers expect to have power in team decisions starting from entry level positions. But during a crisis, when are competing opinions, and the arguments become an endless loop, it is important a leader shows their capability of taking over. If you let things brew, they will eventually boil over. Uncertain situations escalate to bad times if you don’t seize control.

How do you do it? Give the ultimate decision, set a direction moving forward and establish boundaries if a future situation occurs impacting performance. Fingertip allows you to set up collaborative decisions where you have the final say. Set a deadline to the decision so arguments don’t have time to start repeating, clearly communicate the made decision and create objectives and tasks to get back to work.

3. Learn from failures

If you don’t make mistakes, have you taken any risks? Have you tried to put yourself in positions of uncertainty? High rewards are often only available through high risks, and this involves making the odd mistake every once in a while.

While we can’t avoid making mistakes, we should be able to take every ounce of learning available. Bad leaders repeat the same mistakes, good leaders learn from their mistakes, and great leaders also learn from mistakes of others.

Being able to acknowledge mistakes as opportunities to learn is a brilliant characteristic for any leader. But how can you actually make the most out of mistakes? Well, for starters you can consider: What did we expect to happen? What did we fail to take into account? What skills or knowledge were we lacking? What wrong assumptions did we make?

With a few simple questions, you can easily process the mistake and move on. Documenting the causes is easy with Fingertip. Use Fingertip as the system of record for past decisions, tasks and objectives, and come up with better ways to handle uncertain situations together. Learn and improve so you never make the same mistakes again.

4. Resolving conflicts

While we spend loads of time ensuring our teams have high cohesion and people get along, we can’t avoid conflicts in business. Values and opinions can’t – and shouldn’t – match a 100% in organizations, so conflicts are bound to happen.

What sets apart great leadership is how conflicts are resolved. Conflicts can induce change and, in many cases, progress. Escaping the conflict or going into full blown arguments hurts our companies, but a de-escalating approach where all opinions have equal opportunity to be told is usually extremely healthy for company culture. Mature conflict resolution also correlates with much valued psychological safety.

How do you resolve conflicts? For starters, level the playing field. Either act as an objective mediator or let people write down their thoughts (Fingertip can be very useful tool for that). Try and make people understand each others position. De-personalize and equalize the opinions since they are the conflicting issue. Understanding these opinions helps everyone involved to develop their own mindset and take others into account better in the future, improving future collaboration and customer experience as well.

6. Recognize and avoid burnout

7. Take feedback (and own it)

Leaders don’t shy away from criticism. They accept whatever comes their way, analyze the root cause and do all in their power to fix things.

As a leader, you will be watched by many. You can – and you should – use it as an advantage, and ask the people observing you for feedback. Whether a project succeeds or fails, requesting personal comments shows that you are willing to admit you aren’t perfect, and that you are willing to change to improve.

Fingertip utilizes a triple-loop learning model to give us more chances to reflect on personal performance. We can rate individual input with sliders during any process, every project closes with a chance to discuss what went well and what was lacking, and long-term statistics uncover our personal habits of decision making and leadership. To complement that, we should check the pulse individually with our close team members or project partners as well.

Turn your weaknesses into strengths by cultivating feedback from people around you. Start from yourself and apply the same to your entire organization.

8. Engage people in remote work

Leadership remotely can easily become a source of anxiety. Are my team members doing well? Are they getting the support they need? Are they getting anything done? There are also team factors: lack of informal communication and knowledge sharing, and the unrelatedness from being away from others.

What we can safely say, is that everyone deals with working remotely differently. To make team dynamics work, it is important for a leader to approach team members personally without requiring everyone to work the same way. Open and honest communication is a key factor. Creating informal encounters for example by allowing chit-chat in the beginning of video calls helps create the sense of togetherness that is extremely important in remote work.

It’s equally important to create momentum around critical, daily team processes. Applying digital leadership tools, like Fingertip, is a way to ensure things get done. They engage people in making collaborative decisions, setting goals, and having visibility to each other work queues, all adding up to building higher commitment. Fingertip creates an asynchronous channel to improve business communication wherever and whenever your remote team members are working.

10. Question your beliefs and recognize prejudice

11. Accept your own vulnerability

In the recent past, being a leader was all about being resilient, being able to deliver, and looking as though we make as few mistakes as possible. A leader was the rock everyone else could lean into in thick and thin. Nowadays, the environment has changed.

While hierarchies have become more lenient, also soft skills and psychological safety have been focus areas for organizations. Younger generations currently entering the workforce are looking for happier workplaces, and a clear connection has been made to being able to show one’s mistakes and vulnerabilities without fear of repercussions.

If a leader is hiding their vulnerabilities, they are messaging their team members that they shouldn’t have any either. This is often faked yet causes immense stress among workers. Good leaders acknowledge the mistakes they make and aren’t trying to always be the smartest person in the room.

Fingertip is a collaborative approach to leadership that utilizes the best knowledge in decision making and guides us to more transparent communication. It’s a hub for co-organization and leadership that documents the steps in our thinking, so we can reflect back and learn. Sharing our ideas early is scary while it exposes our vulnerabilities, but as an organization it makes us more honest, open and agile.

12. Take responsibility for your team

A leaders first priority should be their team. That’s why leaders who throw their teammates under the bus are sure to lose trust rather quickly. A leader is ultimately the last accountable that work gets done and taking the responsibility for the shortcomings of their team is a sign of leadership.

Of course, the reasons behind failures and mistakes should be addressed, but to higher-ups the leader takes the accountability and thanks their team for making the effort. They own the result, learn from it and work on delivering in the future.

Leaders who take responsibility contribute to a high psychological safety in their team members. They create followers, who will be more honest and open in the workplace, which helps speed up collaboration. People share their ideas more, and people contribute collectively more to leadership processes.

Fingertip makes it easy to share our progress with the rest of our team and increases communication in critical processes. It makes us recognize our mistakes earlier, and encourages to ask for help, improving the cohesion and trust across our teams. Above all, it creates responsibility and clear roles, making us all the owners of our teams’ performance.

14. Stay confident during setbacks

15. Always be learning

A leader has to accept that they are not the best at everything. Surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you is actually a great way to grow. “Never be the smartest person in a room, else you’re just wasting your time.” A true leader is always yearning to learn from those around them.

We all have heard that making mistakes is a good way to learn, but a great leader learns also from other people’s experiences. Learning itself is strengthened in action, with feedback from those exposed to our leadership. Fingertip offers a great, transparent documentation tool for leadership, where we can all learn from each other. It also allows us to get comments on our own performance faster, digitally.

In a triple loop learning model, those experiences and feedback make us reflect on three things: What do we value as a company, how they reflect on assumptions we make to operate daily, and how our every day activities translate to results? Critical assessment of all three is fundamental for organizational learning.

Learning allows us to address and change our behavior knowingly. Changing how we think and do things takes time, but after we assume those better practices as habits, they will soon be engrained in our company culture as well. A constantly learning organization is a successful one, and that’s why you should try to make learning an essential part of your culture.

16. Staying calm

18. Problem solving

Do you think problems are a pain in your ass? We certainly hope not, since good leaders feed on problems. Nothing beats the feeling of overcoming a hurdle or creating an elegant solution to a tormenting challenge.

Not every customer issue is a problem. Problem solving addresses only those tasks, where we don’t have a ready solution, and have opposing interests from various stakeholders. You must apply past knowledge and creativity, and probably do something new. Problems will also get worse unsolved and can thus be a source for anxiety in some.

A leader’s role as a catalysator of problem solving in their organization should not be understated. Sparring for a solution, encouraging trial and error, and celebrating a solved problem are some ways your people might learn to love the problem. And by loving the problem, you create a more elegant solution that caters to more of your clients’ needs, as well as happier employees.

Solve complex problems together using Fingertip, by bringing multiple people’s creative thinking around the same table. Document trial and error and improve learning to iterate to the best solution you can.

19. Being honest and consistent

Consistency is key, leading to habits and continuous work to be our best. For a leader, consistency can be hard. We all have on and off days and delivering bad news as consistently and honestly as the good ones is mentally exhausting.

But what it helps us achieve as an organization, in terms of building trust, resilience, reduced stress, and culture of honesty, makes the challenge worth it. It is fair for everyone and builds inclusion and commitment. Sharing the bad with the good puts us all in the same boat, creating accountability.

Transparency is becoming more popular, and leaders need to understand the impact of being honest in communication. Paired with consistency it helps your people come to you whatever challenges or problems they face, rather than sweeping them under the rug.

With honesty going both ways, we gain the best possible situational awareness to help us make the best decisions. If anyone is withholding or distorting information to look better themselves or to hide an inconvenient truth, the resulting conclusions and decisions can be disastrous.

Fingertip helps you be more consistent with systematic and symmetric business objects, that communicate your decisions, tasks, plans, goals, and meeting topics inside Microsoft Teams. It helps you be more honest with yourself and the team, and reduces total hours spent in mere communication, so you can focus more on what you do best.

20. Facilitate good communication

Knowledge work is all about creating information and value through collaboration. Collaboration, naturally, hinges on effective communication. One of leaders’ most difficult and most important tasks is to facilitate and provide means for exactly that.

Recent studies show, that diverse opinions enable better decisions, and more successful companies. Leader’s job is to ensure everyone’s knowledge and experiences are counted for when making strategic moves. It can be made simpler with playbooks and etiquette for meetings, as well as with asynchronous collaboration platforms that equalize the playing field for suggestions.

Examples also play a huge role. If a leader requires open communication, they should practice that themselves towards their team too. A leader’s task is also to ensure the conversation stays on topic, and the arguments are between differing opinions, not people.

Communication is essentially a part of an organization’s culture. That is not to say we can’t or shouldn’t make an effort to make it as fluent as we can. Simple rules, like “mute your mic when not talking”, or “reserve 10 minutes time for chit-chat”, can make a huge difference in the enjoyability and productivity of a meeting, and in the quality of decisions made.

One of Fingertip’s guiding principles is to facilitate varying opinions, ensuring all relevant experience is accounted for when making strategic decisions. It gives a platform to openly communicate ongoing projects, processes, and activities, to find the best solutions for our customers. It is a shared and equal playground for organizations to empower their employees to channel their knowledge to their best ability and become the best they can be.