If your business has worthy leaders at its helm and throughout its ranks, it would be a business that attracted the best of the best, who each gave everything they had every day to make the business an incredible success.
Active Knowledge Question:
Have you built the right cornerstone for worthy leadership to thrive in your business?
It starts with choosing your leaders upon their core character. And bearing in mind that your weakest leader will set the ceiling to the success of your business.
Over the past five weeks we have considered leadership from the eyes of a new leader and sought to provide guidance to where their focus should rest:
- Start with baby steps
- First build trust
- Character comes first
- There are critical traits
- Humility Is Your Core
And we closeout this ‘In Leadership’ series for new leaders with a review of the impact that worthy leaders will have on your business.
If you were to work with a worthy leader who possessed the core traits of humility and gratitude you would be working for someone who:
- Invests themselves in uplifting you and bringing your talents to the forefront.
- Places themselves last and seeks to serve the business and its customers first.
- Recognises and rewards your talents.
- Believes learning is important and creates a culture of continual learning.
- Listens to you and your ideas.
- Seeks to work with the best.
- Doesn’t take themselves too seriously.
- Takes failure in their stride and doesn’t seek to attribute blame to others.
- Seeks to win your trust and support.
- Has a positive attitude to life and comes to work with excitement for the day ahead.
- Views everything through the lens of opportunity.
- Gives thanks for their life.
It is this environment which will engage and activate the talent and energy of all those working within and with a business.
It must be remembered that when it comes to competitiveness, the key relationship a leader has is with their employees – not their shareholders, bankers, creditors or other stakeholders. Their prime responsibility is to their employees and it is against this relationship that the measures of trust, loyalty, and alike are made.
This is why character is so important in leadership and far more important than qualifications and experience.
On one level being a worthy leader can be seen as complex. But worthy leadership can also be quite simple. It is about who you are as a person and what motivates you.
Are you humble, grateful and focused on the strength traits? Are you making decisions for the right reasons? Are you building the ability of the business to compete?
It is these anchors, which allow leaders to say, ‘I am doing the right thing’, and know they have won the support of their people.
That makes leadership all worthwhile.
An entirely new level of performance.
Want to become a part of the Entrepreneurs+ Community and learn how to make your business competitively fit? Join now.
All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
