Leadership isn’t just about leading your team through the hard times; it’s also about capitalizing on your team’s successes and pushing them to achieve more than they believe possible of themselves. As your team grows together and becomes more comfortable with one another, you want to help them figure out ways that they can all work better in tandem, streamlining processes to help them work ‘smarter not harder.’ Here are a few leadership tips for boosting your team’s — and your own — productivity.

Always be prepared.

  • Arrive at every meeting, gathering, and call fully prepared and ready to go. As a leader, other people are going to be looking to you for answers and guidance, and if your presentation is scattered all over or if you haven’t prepared to answer the questions people might have, you’re going to waste a lot of time trying to gather your thoughts and pull your information together. Make sure that you’re well-prepared so that you can help your team become well-prepared as well.

Stay organized.

  • For the same reason you want to be prepared, you want to make sure everything you need is organized and ready to go when you need it. You shouldn’t have to be shuffling through papers and rummaging through your desk to find the most important documents for your day. Staying on top of things will leave you more time to do the things that are important, rather than wasting valuable time on pointless tasks.

Start your day early.

  • Ben Franklin once said, “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” and it’s easy to see why this simple formula for success works if you break it down and analyze it. If you’re starting every day by rolling out of bed at the last possible moment, you’re not allotting yourself enough time to fully prepare for the day ahead of you. Want to be truly successful? Start out your day early, like 5:00am early, and use those extra hours to reflect on the day and mentally and physically prepare yourself for what you need to do. The extra time allows you to be prepared and organize yourself so that you can increase your productivity.