Your team and how you lead them is the beating heart of your business and you have to treat it as such.
The key is to be interested vs. interesting. When you do that, your team will feel a sense of belonging. People will take belonging over money all day, every day – this has been proven time and time again.
What’s your definition of leadership? I’ve come across many business leaders that think it’s about power. Other people think it’s about doing a lot of things and show their team that they could do it all. Leadership isn’t about any of that.
In my decades of experience helping startups, big corporations and non-profits, leadership is all about one’s ability to EMPOWER other leaders around them.
I can walk into any business and recognize the quality of the leadership based on the quality of the leaders surrounding the leader.
You have to be willing to bring in people that are better than you in many different ways.
If you’re committed to empowering other leaders around you, you have to build a culture around that. How?
Learn how to empower others and get the most out of your team from experts who have helped hundreds of business owners do just that.
Build a Culture of Cooperation
- Brightness of the future. Your team has to look forward to something. People need an inspiring vision to work toward. They also need brightness of the future in their career. Are they learning and developing? Is there room for growth within the business?
- Frequency of interaction. If there’s someone on your team that you barely speak to and leave them to their own devices, it can often be misconstrued as a lack of interest or lack of care. Their passion may dissipate with that approach. As a leader, you need to be in regular positive communication with your team.
- Ability to be provokable. Don’t be a wimp! To get a result or shift something, you and your team must be provokable. This doesn’t mean you should go around irritating and angering your team – it simply means that you and members of the team are able to respectfully and powerfully speak their minds when things aren’t going to plan or results aren’t being achieved as promised, to then allow positive changes to be made.
The ultimate aim of a culture is to create the magic sauce, to create synergy, which means that the sum of your team is greater than its parts. 1 + 1 = 3. You want a championship team that can do far more than it looks like it could on paper.
Some Keys to Synergy
- Build a culture where people feel like they can be heard: Be willing to listen actively. Sometimes absolute gems on a team won’t speak for fear of being ridiculed or making mistakes. As a leader, you have to show people that it’s safe to speak up.
- Be flexible with each other
- Tell the truth with compassion
- Agree to agree. It’s not about compromise but finding resolutions.
- Hire the right person for the right role who wants to go in the right direction with the business. Look at the mix, capacity and skills of your current team and hire to enhance all of that.
- Outline the rules of the game and expectations. Make sure your team is in alignment and agrees with how the business operates.
Build a Culture of Responsibility
You want your team to play above the line (take responsibility), rather than below the line (justify, excuse, deny, shame). That means that as a leader, you have to own everything that happens in your business, why and how it happened and what to do to make corrections.
If you want a deep dive into Team and Leadership strategy and the other 8 strategies, sign up for my FREE live webinar (this knowledge has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs EXPLODE their business growth)…
Emulate Your Heroes
Who do you admire and respect as leaders? They can be within your business or industry or outside of that. Authors, teachers, politicians, artists, family members, sports stars, entrepreneurs and more. Whoever it is, pick three people and write down what you admire about them. You’ll find that they share some similar characteristics. Develop those characteristics and then practice emulating them.
You may not always get it right but you’ll keep getting better and better as a leader the more you do it. There are people with natural leadership abilities but even if it doesn’t come naturally to you, it’s something that can be developed.
Build a Rhythm to Get Results
There is a leadership rhythm that needs to be built into every business in order to get results.
For example, in one of our businesses, we do a two-day offsite with our team to come up with our goals and key strategies (all 9 points) for the year. We do that as a team to get aligned on what needs to happen in every key area of the business.
We also hold a one-day once a quarter, a half-day once a month, a one-hour meeting once a week, and 10-min daily huddles in the morning. That’s something that works for that particular business but you’ll have to map out a rhythm that works for your team.
I can’t stress this enough – your team cannot be treated the way most businesses treat their teams. I’ve met so many business leaders that say their team is the problem.
“Our team is a nightmare.”
“Managing this team is like managing an adult day care centre!”
That is NOT the way to look at your team – you need to treat them like the beating heart of the business. Once you do that, their performance and behaviour will pay dividends for the business.
Develop a foolproof Team and Leadership strategy!
