| Lead with a Clear Sense of Vision
As the leader you need to be able to look to the future, identify your company’s destination and translate that into clear objectives. Your vision becomes the company’s destiny. And that destination should be quite awesome and worth the effort.
You need to clarify your destination often, with all of your people, so that everyone knows where you’re headed. Everyone should understand the part they play in achieving it and how important their role is in helping the organization get there.
Success Behaviors: look, listen, and learn.
Encourage and Inspire People to Aspire
Serve and act as a positive role model and offer encouragement to people. Let them know they have potential, and you are to here to help them achieve their fullest potential.
Make certain people are recognized for their efforts and that they feel appreciated. Make them feel that they are an important part of the organization.
Success Behaviors: energetic with a sense of urgency, enthusiastic and even keeled.
Acumen for Business
Understand your business. Know where you need to be with costs, services offered, and customer satisfaction. Build your people to maximize their capacity, mark financial milestones, and make tough decisions in a timely manner. Know the options and have a plan in place.
Success Behaviors: achievement oriented, always prepared and on time, awareness of your marketplace conditions.
Develop Others and Self
You and your team need to be learning and growing, all the time. Our industry’s technology has about a 3-to-5-year lifespan. Are you keeping up? World Class Organizations spend around 4% of revenue on training and developing their people. What is your budget? If it’s less than 2%, probably you’re running at a learning deficit.
Are you making the time needed for improvement? What was the last lesson you learned? Book you read, CD you listened to? What programs are in place to help your team members to better themselves? What one skill do you need to develop that would help you the most?
What one behavior should you practice/adjust to help you the most?
Success Behaviors:
- Develop enduring, positive relationships
- Develop and promote an environment/culture of collaboration, coordination, communication, cooperation, camaraderie, and celebration
- Designate a coach/mentor and seek and take good counsel
- Determine the key skills and behaviors you need to improve upon and take action!
Ethics, Values and Integrity: Build Trust
Understand that at the core of every successful organization there’s a set of uncompromising core values or “non-negotiables”. They are defined by the organization; and they become the very fabric of the company’s culture. These values serve as the organization’s ethical and moral compass in all of their dealings with employees and clients. With a well-defined (and lived-by) set of ethics, values and integrity, there will be a strong sense of trust within the organization. And that trust is the foundation upon which everything builds.
Success Behaviors: Everyone is treated with dignity; and every day serve as an example through words and actions.
Results and Action Oriented
Seek ways to improve in all areas of the organization. Know which milestones need the most attention; find ways to improve and assure results in targeted areas. Don’t be afraid of the “p” (profit) word. Always have a set of priorities that focus on the now and on the future. Commit to SMART goals.
Success Behaviors: Realistic and relevant goals are written down and understood by all. Results in key areas are tracked. Roles are clearly defined.
Serves Others
Great leaders understand it’s not all about them, but about others. They pursue the success of their people and clients as if it were there own. They give of themselves for the betterment of others. So, be confident, competent and yet serve with humility. Treat all people with dignity. Be generous with what you have been given, and give back with your time and resources.
It really boils down to these three things. A leader must be able to demonstrate:
integrity/trustworthiness, humility and generosity.
These qualities will serve as the building blocks for long-term, enduring relationships. Which in fact is what great leadership is all about!
Success Behaviors: Say, Thank You, often and mean it. Set a tone of service. Serve as an example. Serve others, as you would like to be served. Share successes with everyone.
Remember: It all starts and ends with the leader.
I can assure you that if you consistently practice these seven leaders’ best practices, you will indeed harvest the potential of your organization, your clients, your people and you!
Please feel free to contact Ed or Bill and find out how this Lesson From the Garden can impact your organization in so many positive ways. |
