7 Leadership Skills to Help Your Business Grow

with guest Dan Martell #MakingBank S4E14

As your business starts to grow, you will learn different strategies of helping your business succeed. Good leadership is key to a flourishing business. When you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t just manage your business, you need to lead your team.

How do you become a strong leader? What does it take to become a successful entrepreneur and leader at the same time? In this article, you will the top leadership skills that you must possess to ensure your whole team buys into your growth plan and help you get to success.

Vision

As leader you need to create realistic goals of where you business should be going. It’s okay to dream big. A lot of starters usually have big dreams but don’t dream too much only to make everything so hard to reach. Start with small steps.

A clear vision provides direction where your team is going. It helps you set priorities and provide guidelines so your whole team knows what needs to achieved and when. Your vision must go in harmony with your corporate culture and philosophy. Make them measurable.

Start with questions like: How do you want your business 5 years from now? How much sales do you want to earn for the first quarter? How do you want to market your products? How much are you willing to pay for your team members today? If you want to increase it after a few months, how much would you allocate for it?

Communication

It’s important to communicate with your team members. A great way to communicate is to have a weekly or monthly meeting. As a leader you need to communicate the status of your business and plan with your team how you can work together to be successful.

Meetings are also great avenues to set and measure your goals. For example, for the first meeting, you can talk about your goals for the first week and plan on how to measure them. In the second week, you can meet again and see whether or not your plant went well.

Communicating with your team members also helps resolve internal issues. It can be technical or subjective. For example, your team members may fight over which idea to follow so you are going to settle this fight as it can bring your business down.

Coaching

As a leader, you need to coach your team how to properly do things. You need your team to work doing that same way or same type of thing according to your company rules.

Instead of simply giving the command, you train them. Coach them to an outcome. You can start by asking them questions that get them clear on their outcomes. Get involved and appreciate every simple lesson that your team learns.

The same goes for your clients. If you start working with clients, you don’t just get the work done. You also need to coach them how they are done and how you can get to their desired outcome. Coaching also means education and transparency.

Recommendation

Recommendation is an important aspect of growing your company. It involves being able to present more than one solution for a problem. Say for example, your company undergoes a certain issue. Instead of merely commanding your team, you need to have three proposals on how to resolve such issue.

Meet with your team and weigh which of the presented recommendations would work best at a given scenario. If you’re a parent, you would learn that one of the rules is to make kids not require you. You can use the same approach to your business. Thus as a leader your goal should be not to be required by your executive team. You need recommendations and planning on how to resolve a certain issue.

Teamwork

The biggest challenge for business owners is letting go. As you become leader, you need to be able to start trusting the leg work to your team. You may have started the business but there will be time that you need to step away and let your team take responsibility.

Train your team. Support them in whatever expertise they may have and let them do the work for you. However, be more flexible with your approach. If you need to coach someone about how you prefer things to be done then do it.

The reason for letting go is that there may not be enough time for you to handle everything. You can’t own all the hard work as it may affect the overall performance of your business. As a leader you need to trust your team and support them in many ways that you can.

Motivation

As a leader, you need to be self-motivated. You can’t let one failure define you as a leader. If you fall down once, you can rebuild another business and create a new plan. Once it’s up, you can spread the same level of motivation to your team.

When you’re motivated, it is easy to keep the vision alive. It is also one way of showing your team what you’re capable of. Motivation yields strength. When you’re strong and self-motivated, you will most likely overcome any challenges that come your way.

Integrity

It is important to be honest as a leader. If you’re honest, you can set an example to your team and everyone will follow. Integrity should also be part of your core values. There are many ways you can apply integrity such as in your team meeting, reporting, setting goals, and dealing with other team members.

Sometimes, honesty means being upfront to the. If one of your team lacks skills, you can talk to that person and give him the proper training. Honesty is also an ethical behavior. An honest leader will have honest followers.

Clients also prefer to deal with honest businesses as much as customers want to buy products from brands that make honesty as part of their core values.