Overview: Organization allows leaders to become more efficient, waste less time and money, and reduce stress. A well-organized leader empowers and engages reports, boosts customer experience, and promotes a culture focused on organization throughout the company. Through organization, leaders can improve everyone’s quality of life.
“Organization isn’t about perfection. It’s about efficiency, reducing stress and clutter, saving time and money, and improving your overall quality of life.” – Christina Scalise.
Some consider organization to be a sign of self-respect. To leaders, organization carries a deeper meaning. The spark that triggers organization is the realization that something doesn’t work. Organized leadership shortens the road to goals and makes it smoother. Organization can make things happen. No one in a leadership position can ever underestimate its power and utility.
Leadership coaching understands leaders can’t forego organization in favor of delegation. Although we tend to think of leaders’ assistants rather than leaders themselves when we talk about organization, leaders can’t afford to hand off organization to someone else. In a company, organization is a trickle-down culture that begins at the top.
How does organization improve leadership?
Organization Facilitates Time Management
Time management is one of the subtler challenges of leadership. Critical thinking, quality work, and high quantities of work require time. Proper time management allows leaders to achieve their goals and reduce stress. Since organized leadership tends to trickle down through the ranks, better time management also improves the efficiency of the entire organization.
Good time management allows leaders to have more time for pondering and anticipating future trends, embracing change, and defeating resistance to it.
Organized Leadership Facilitates Prioritization
Leadership coaching sees delegation as a fundamental leadership skill. To delegate, leaders must be able to prioritize. They need to know how they can best invest time.
Organization helps leaders avoid jumping from one emergency to another and wasting time handling things reports could handle just as well, if not better.
Lagging organization leads to the need to micromanage. Micromanagement robs employees of initiative and the freedom to come up with solutions. As employees disengage, organizational productivity suffers.
Organization Helps Avoid Burnout
Executive coaching recognizes burnout as one of the factors that plagues leadership on every level. Burnout occurs when a multitude of tasks and stress factors overwhelm leaders.
Organization is about efficiency. A lack of organization makes everything tedious to accomplish. Leaders who go into battle without a plan will find that constant course correction and damage control exhausts them to the point of burnout.
Organization is the difference between being proactive and reactive. The proactive approach retains control and initiative over situations. The reactive approach tries to catch up with events, allowing outside factors to control everything.
Organization Helps Team Management
Team management is always part of the leadership equation. Executive coaching focuses on helping leaders find ways to engage and empower teams while helping members forward their careers, preferably in alignment with their company’s purpose.
Inefficiencies can spectacularly sabotage team management. A lack of organization makes it impossible for leaders to know who’s working on what and where they need to direct resources.
A team culture revolving around organization creates a superior customer experience. Eliminating inefficiencies in the customer experience pipeline can mean the difference between success and failure for leaders and organizations.
The Impacts Leaders Have on Team and Departmental Organization
Organizational and team cultures are always top-down affairs. Leaders model behaviors they expect from reports, make expectations clear, and reward those who strive for alignment.
That explains why departments are as organized as their leaders. Through organization, leaders can exert direct impacts on the end products of companies. That makes it clear organization is perhaps the best place for leaders to start their improvement initiatives.
Developing Organization Skills
Some people are organized by default. Others find it difficult to embrace the discipline organization requires. Leadership coaching can help leaders realize the profound impact of organization and defeat resistance to adopting more organized approaches to leadership.