Are you taking the lead in your business?

The ability to create, harness and develop the power of your team and to continue encouraging new ideas and solutions from them is challenging. It is also extremely rewarding – not only financially (through increased productivity and retention) but also it will create great individual self worth and a fantastic loyal culture within your business.

Encourage your employees to identify problems and provide solutions. Your business shouldn’t be autocratic and rely solely on you to do it all; ask the employees to come up with more than one solution to the problem (creating options) and a recommended course of action and implementation. This can be achieved very successfully in group “problem solving meetings”.

A significant factor in team creation is that they empower a great deal of the decision making authority to their employees. This in turn reflects on the “ownership” of the process and the vested interest that the results of the decision will yield. Empowering a group, team or individual promotes responsibility and an innate human condition to deliver a favourable outcome, and to be recognised for that.

Increasing productivity and results from employees will only come from challenged, empowered, excited and rewarded teams of people.

“He that is over cautious will accomplish little.”
Schiller, William Tell

To retain a competitive advantage and enhance your business success in the future, business owners and managers need to be more assertive with leadership abilities. You must learn to work more for your staff and not the other way round.

Leading by example is an absolute fundamental competency of a successful leader; demonstrating to your staff confidence, integrity and the standards you expect to be maintained through your own actions. (Remember, they speak louder than words.) An inspiring leader has a clear vision of how things can be done better and can relay this through the appropriate communication channels. Be it regular structured meetings, informal gatherings, memos, emails, management dissemination or any other appropriate communication channel, so ensuring all participants of the vision are clear with their path, excited about the future and keen to execute the plan.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”
Dr. Laurence Peter.

Develop and instill confidence in your workforce. Let them manage and be responsible for executing parts of the plan, having guidelines and controls in place to measure and track the outcomes. This allows you to focus on the strategic issues and see the big picture, you don’t need to manage every detail; but instead inspire the great talent (ideally) you have surrounded yourself with to be trusted to execute and deliver the plan

“Strategic leadership requires one other skill. It is a readiness to look personally foolish: a readiness to discuss half baked ideas, since most fully baked ideas start out in that form; a total honesty; a readiness to admit you got it wrong.”
Sir John Hoskyns

Change is a constant reality in business and it needs to be embraced. The new ideas that initiate change are the cornerstone of successful businesses. Encouraging a culture of ideas and innovation will reward a business many times over its’ life. Having a free flow of ideas and the forum to communicate them will then provide the platform to really take your business to the next level. Someone, somewhere has a great idea, a better idea; encourage it, refine it, test it, implement it and importantly, follow it up.

Your follow through on good ideas formed into sound business strategy will most certainly determine the level of success of your business.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Charles H. Duell, commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899.

Your level of success is only limited by yourself.