The success of a business not only depends on the quality of employees but it requires good leadership. As a business leader, you need to have someone else who sees things from a different perspective. Being isolated at the top means that you will miss out on important advice that your juniors or other experts may have for you. Leadership has a lot of challenges, especially if you decide to take the whole responsibility of decision-making. Being too overconfident may lead to uninformed or poor decision making.
Taking the right advice from others
Collaborating with other stakeholders can help ease the burden of business leadership, and it will help you have many options to your disposal. So, how do you identify good advice from bad?
- Ensure the person giving you advice knows the business Knowing a business involves more than just having a degree; it requires experience.
- Make sure they are offering something beyond the ordinary. The people offering you support must have an outside perspective to encourage creativity and innovation.
- Understand the advisers’ point of view. It’s good to know the outcome that the suggestions being raised will bring to your company.
- Make sure there are rules governing the support’s conduct. Having a code of ethics safeguards you as a leader in case the outcome is different from what the suggestions indicated.
- Will the suggestions raise the return on investment? The support provided should aim at raising financial and non-financial returns.
Putting advice to good use
After verifying these facts, the next important step is ensuring that the suggestions provided are brought to good use. At this point the leader is supposed to make decisions while considering the advice provided by other parties. It’s normal for business leaders to question any outside perspective, but it’s important to give each idea equal chances. Before making any decision, the leaders need to validate how genuine or workable the ideas presented by support provides are. Some of the problems that are likely to arise when working with advisers include:
- Replacing the leader as the overall decision maker. Support providers may go beyond their mandate and end up making most of the decisions. The nature of a business completely changes when it comes to interacting with clients when such problems arise.
- Legal liability being passed to the leader. If the leader is involved in negotiating the suggestions made by the advisers, they are likely to be held liable if things go wrong.
- Unclear reasoning. The people offering advice may fail to offer clarifications for their reasoning.
- There might be poor communication between the support and the leader(s).
- Deviating from the main issue. There are instances when the discussions go out of topic, and the problem ends up escalating.
These problems can be avoided by employing professional advisers. Such experts use drafted procedures that help in limiting errors during leadership advisory.