Business Management

Leadership Principles for your Business Success

Effective business leadership demands a captain of the ship, not just someone who's standing by the helm. Leadership is active, not passive.

Cool-headed, farseeing, visionary, courageous - whichever adjectives you choose, leadership is a winning combination of personal traits and the ability to think and act as a leader, a person who directs the activities of others for the good of all. 

But you can't be a leader just by saying you are. Business leadership, like leadership of any kind, needs to be worked at. 

Here are a few principles that merit consideration:

1. Create a Vision

Vision is essential to good leadership. Vision provides direction and without direction, there’s not much point to all that planning; your small business will still flail about. Create a Vision Statement for your business. You may wish to become the “Preferred” supplier in your field. To become the Preferred supplier in addition to offering high-quality, reliable products and services, you must provide a great customer experience. Preferred suppliers create a competitive advantage by servicing their customers better than their competition.

2. Plan proactively

The core of business leadership is being proactive rather than reactive. Sure, leaders are good in crises - but that doesn't mean they sit around letting crises develop. Leadership involves identifying potential problems and solving them before they reach crisis proportions. Good leaders analyze and plan and adapt their plans to new circumstances and opportunities.

3. Embrace a culture of continuous improvement

Share with your employees that your expectation is for them to continuously improve their part of the business. Ensure they have the needed resources to do their jobs and don’t micromanage them.

If your company doesn’t continually improve, it will fall behind its competition. Even though continuous improvement is led by the CEO and other senior leaders, it is driven by employees at every level within the company. 

4. Staffing

Businesses are as successful as the people working in it. Great leaders who created successful companies have one thing in common: they surround themselves with talented, courageous, loyal people. Hire people with good critical judgements who are unafraid of making decisions. Once you have recruited them, invest in their development through training, coaching and fair compensation.

Learning to be a leader isn't easy because it takes a conscious commitment and consistent effort to develop one's business leadership skills. The advantage for the business however can be immeasurable.

Please let me know your thoughts: gerry@polarisgroupmc.com