Would you like to work in a business where you can thrive? To bring your best to the table every day, working beside the best, and finishing each day knowing your contribution is meaningful? If you do, then seek out a business that knows how to compete.
Active Knowledge Question
As a business leader, are you able to attract and retain the best talent who work at their best, and that is simply who you are as a business?
The Best There Is
The best working with the best at their best at all levels of your business. Is this an impossible dream? The one you wouldn’t even bother to dream because it is so far from reality?
I think, in many cases, leaders have come to expect ‘average’as the best they can gain from the people who work with and within their businesses. And that probably includes some of their leadership team.
It’s not what they want, it just is what they have been conditioned to accept. In fact, it’s not what anyone wants. Everybody would like to work in a business in which they can thrive. To be able to give their all, to belong to a community who do the same, and to grow every day.
As individuals, we all would like to wake up to workdays that will present us with:
- The certainty of a fulfilling role and secure job.
- The uncertainty of the challenges the day will present as we strive to do better.
- The reward of being able to make a contribution to a worthwhile outcome.
- The companionship of belonging to a community who seek to experience the same.
- A knowledge that you belong to an organisation that does something meaningful.
It is these elements that will allow your business to attract the best people, who are then committed to making your business an amazing success. These elements are not impossible to create. They simply require understanding and discipline.
Every single person is capable of giving their best if allowed to. If you get this right, the best people will become the many at all levels of your business.
Why Average Won’t Cut It
In today’s competitive landscape, every business needs its people invested in their business if they are to have any hope of being competitively fit.
This is the compelling reason why every leader should no longer accept ‘average’ as the default level of participation in their business.
Being competitively fit means being able to out-compete everyone else in your chosen market without even having to look over your shoulder. Being fit enough to simply focus on the needs of your customers. To be able to recognise opportunities and changes and always take customer value to another level.
And that requires that you activate the core of your competitiveness. And in any business, no matter what you do, that core is the combined talent and effort of everyone who works with and within your business.
There is a competitive engine within your business that determines the ceiling to its success. It’s what will allow you to engage with everyone in your business in a manner, and at a level, that will draw their best to the forefront.
It starts though with your business knowing what it means to compete and what success looks like.
Businesses That Compete
Many leaders believe that the prime purpose for which their business exists is to profit their shareholders. And, therefore, their focus is on maximising profits. This is a mistake.
I think we would all recognise the name Usain Bolt, now retired, he was until recently a reigning Olympic sprinter and world-record holder across various distances.
What do you think has allowed Bolt to achieve such success? Do you think it was chasing medals? Or was there something else in him that drove him to train and compete at a level, over an extended period of time, that allowed those medals to be one of the outcomes of his efforts?
Here is one of his quotes: ‘Worrying gets you nowhere. If you turn up worrying about how you’re going to perform, you’ve already lost. Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.’
‘Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.’ This is the definition of what it is to compete. And in business, it is no different.
Businesses are made to compete, and profit is simply one of the outcomes if you compete well.
But make profit your focus, and suddenly self-interest, politics and short-termism will become the dominant traits in your business. And any possibility of creating a business that attracts and retains the best, who work at their best, goes right out the door.
Make profit your motive, and everyone is suddenly only interested in what they can personally get out of it – and why shouldn’t they because that’s what leadership is doing having made profit their first motive.
We have all but forgotten how great it is to lead and work in businesses that compete.
The thrill and challenge of doing better every day. Of actually going to work with a purpose greater than yourself and working with the best, at their best.
Businesses that compete:
- Deliver greater customer value every day, it’s the cornerstone of who they are.
- Continually seek and find new opportunities.
- Have leaders who thrive in and are fulfilled by the business.
- Their employees feel great pride and passion in their work, and the opportunities it provides them.
- And their customers are committed followers and supporters.
- As for profit – they’re highly profitable, they throw off free cash flow, and their capital value is compounding.
And all of this because they know how to compete.
Businesses that compete are focused on being the best they can be, and building their capability to always win. Profit is an outcome – it is not the motive.
They understand there is an engine that drives the capacity of their business to compete.
This engine sets the floor and ceiling to your success and holds the answers to a business’s performance and any performance problems.
It requires thinking strategically, building real growth, and creating decisive competitiveness. But it starts with understanding your competitive engine.
What Is Success?
Have you noticed that the word ‘vocation’ doesn’t seem to be used much anymore? People no longer seek a vocation or even necessarily a career. It’s all about stepping-stones until something better comes along or they have ‘learnt’ everything they can from their existing role. Work has become about what you can take, and not what you can give.
Making your business one that competes, changes that dynamic and begins to create an environment in which people join your business so they can give. And through giving they grow and thrive.
But this also requires speaking into what success is really all about. The way your business defines success is based on your business’s motive. If your motive is profit-first, then personal success is likely to be defined by money, position, authority and benefits – the personal equivalents of a business’s profit.
Leaders set the definition of success and, therefore, determine the culture of success that exists in their businesses. It must be a definition that empowers competitiveness as a business and not individual gain.
The right definition of success is one which will allow everyone in your business to come to work each day and give their best, while working beside others who are doing the same across all levels of your business. Success is not limited to the selfish few but open to everyone who gives their best.
The best will not work for a business that does not have the right culture towards success. They simply leave and go somewhere else where they can give their best. If your competitive engine is firing correctly with worthy leaders, the right definition of success will emerge and be sustained.
If success is not about wealth, power and position, then what view of success can be embedded in your business that allows many to succeed? What is the right definition? Here’s my definition of success:
Success is the fuel of life, but it does not come through chance. It’s earned through hard work. It’s the reward for the thought and effort a person puts in. It energises and enlivens us.
Without success, our lives can become dull and then dead. Without success as a catalyst in our lives, we will not and cannot reach our potential.
Striving for success is an enabler. It draws our best to the surface and allows us to see what we are really capable of achieving.
Success comes from within. Only we can make ourselves successful through our beliefs, thoughts and actions. Success cannot be given to you by others.
Success is a renewable resource. We can generate it every moment of every day and can bring an abundance to our lives that we never thought possible.
It’s a definition that empowers individuals to pursue their own success. And through this success, to give more of themselves to your business, as your business enables them to be successful.
Create a business that knows how to compete, and you will create the environment in which people can individually excel and succeed and you will find a queue of the best talent in your industry waiting to be welcomed in.
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
