What is the greatest leadership challenge you face this year? - SmartBrief

All Articles Leadership What is the greatest leadership challenge you face this year?

What is the greatest leadership challenge you face this year?

1 min read

Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.

Last week, we asked: What is the greatest leadership challenge you face this year?

  • Helping our business recover and thrive in a challenging economy: 24.85%
  • Retaining the members of my team and helping them develop further: 17.36%
  • Building my skills as a leader: 17.60%
  • Dealing with new regulations, taxes and economic uncertainty: 19.38%
  • Growing our high-performing business and maintaining performance: 20.81%

Challenges abound. Clearly, all of you face a variety of challenges. Whether it’s improving your business, your team or yourself, overcoming these challenges will require focus, prioritization and dedication.  Your challenge as a leader is keeping your priority list short and executing quickly and efficiently against the highest priority items.  Be wary of saying “yes” too often, as that will dilute your efforts and, ultimately, you’ll answer this question the same way next year as you did this year because you didn’t make the progress you desired.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and author of “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”