As a business leader, it can often feel like you are carrying everyone’s workload and it can leave you thinking how great it would be if they could all just work together.
Active Knowledge Question:
What is your approach to unifying your team in a single direction? Is it yielding the contribution you hoped for?
The Role Of Leadership
Do you often come to work and find that you need to – yet again – get everyone on the same page to follow the direction that’s been set? Is it a continuing theme which absorbs too much of your time and energy?
Imagine the success your business could achieve if everyone could just work together in an aligned manner and with some momentum.
Well, the prime task of leadership (you) is direction, alignment and focus. Essentially to:
- Set the direction for the business in fulfilment of its purpose and goals, and to hold everyone true to that path.
- Align all your people, dollars, resources, systems, processes, and rewards consistent with that direction.
- Motivate and inspire everyone in pursuit of that goal.
Therefore, as a leader, your focus must be on achieving the highest level of commitment and energy that you can from your people and the business.
The three basic steps to achieving this are:
Step One: Start With Your Leaders
No matter how large or small your business, the true strength of leadership rests in centripetal leadership, which may be held by formal and informal leaders.
In simple terms, your leadership team – formal and informal – must be 110% on-board with the direction you have set for your business. If their support is only a veneer, then you will be fighting an uphill battle with them – and that is wasted energy.
I believe there are three aspects to winning the support of your leadership team:
- Select only worthy leaders, which means your leadership team is chosen on merit based principally on character. If they do not have the right character traits, then do not appoint them or remove them if they are already in place.
- Involve them heavily in the strategy formation process, so that their input has been incorporated into the direction set.
- Enforce discipline so that leaders who fail to follow through or do not hold the right character traits are pulled into line or stood aside from their leadership role. (By the right character traits, I mean humility and gratitude as a core, and the strengths of courage, discipline, sincerity, humanity, and wisdom.)
During the strategy formation process, you want to create an environment which has everyone leaning into the conversation, not sitting back. You want them thinking, analysing, arguing, understanding, discovering, agreeing and deciding to act. If you are unsure how to create such a process, then my guide, Strategy Play – Crafting Undefeatable Business Strategies will assist.
Step Two: Motive Is Critical
The motive for which everyone comes to work – both your leaders and team – is critical to achieving the commitment and energy you need for your business to compete to its highest capability.
You must craft and speak to this motive and not allow it to be unspoken.
Think of it this way, allowing a motive to be unspoken is the same as employing people to work in your business at all levels without asking them why they have chosen to seek employment in your business.
The question is simple: What is your motive for coming to work each day?
If someone comes to work each day simply for the money, they are not contributing their best. Money just doesn’t do that and it creates all the wrong outcomes if it is the prime incentive for performance.
At a leadership level, if someone is seeking a promotion, you must ask the same question. Why do you want to be a leader in this business? If it is about gaining experience, more money, or more opportunity, then you must pause and consider whether they will be a worthy leader.
A worthy leader puts the customer, the employees, and the business first, and themselves somewhere further down the line.
Self-interest as a motive can be the Achilles heel of your business and can hinder your ability to win the support you need.
So what is the motive that you should seek to create?
A motive that will draw in everyone’s greatest contribution. A motive to compete. To stand together as a team and say: We are here as a business to out-compete everyone else in our market and to deliver the greatest value to our customers every day. It means leading your team to work at their best, and ensuring you have set up the business so they can.
Pride in one’s work and the ability to belong, contribute and grow is the greatest motivation any business can provide.
Step Three: Make It Righteous
Make the reason for your business’s existence righteous. In other words, something that everyone working for the business can relate to and feels good about.
This is ‘purpose’. Basically, can everyone feel good about what your business does? And is this the focus that you constantly speak to? When you talk about direction and seek to muster everyone’s energy is this the language that you use?
Take, for example, Steve Job’s take on Apple’s purpose as a business: ‘To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.’
Now, compare it to how this was defined in Apple’s 2017 annual report: ‘Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.’ Apple’s purpose statement has moved from visionary and challenging to functional and, possibly, even looking back to past successes.
How would you describe what your business does? Does it encourage your people to step forward and contribute?
Working Together
If you are tired of carrying the weight of the business yourself, then your focus should be to win the commitment and energy of everyone in your business.
The three steps to do this are:
- Engage only worthy leaders.
- Set the right motive for those working in your business.
- Focus the business on doing something for its customers that is beneficial and rewarding.
We’re here to Compete.
Does your business know how to Compete?
Join the Entrepreneurs+ Community to learn how.
All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
