The importance of strong business leadership cannot be emphasized enough. Good leadership brings in a higher quality (and quantity) of talent to your business, along with mentorship, motivation, and incentive. A good leader is someone who people look up to, someone whom employees look up to, want to work for, and deliver their best work for.
Related:Today’s Leadership Styles: Which One’s Yours?
These next six steps outline the simple, yet sometimes arduous, task of developing the best leadership style for your company, and how to cultivate strong leadership throughout the chain of command.
1. Identify
Determine the best leadership style for your business. Businesses come and go, and there are often complicated and calculated reasons why they fail or succeed. It’s no secret that the most dominant, innovative, and effective businesses today attract top talent by their superior leadership and company benefits. Those businesses - the Googles and Nikes of the world - do what’s right for them, and they have stayed true to their foundation of differentiating factors deemed crucial to their culture. Identify a leadership model that your business can realistically follow and benefit from, and then remain loyal to it.
2. Prepare
Financial planning is critical to a successful business, and leaders should communicate honestly and often to employees about such plans. Make sure your business has cash on-hand so that you can reinvest in your day-to-day operations, which not only allows for growth of leadership positions in your company, but ensures a relevant cycle of bringing new methods, ideas, and technology to the table. Prior to your launch, you can meet with a company that specializes in
business finance solutions, capital loans, or equipment loans and determine your needs.
3. Implement
“Human behavior is wildly contagious.” This quote, from leadership consultant
Mark Crowley, speaks to the inherent truth that behavior is closely followed and imitated, whether it’s negative or positive. Negative behavior promotes negative patterns, and positive behavior equates positive patterns. The simple act of smiling encourages enthusiasm for the workplace, but it doesn’t hurt to have some financial perks as well to further motivate your employees. Again, this is where meeting with a financial planner or taking specific loans out will ease your workflow tensions as you grow and expand.
4. Balance
An enviable work-life balance itself lends a huge hand in attracting top talent. Top businesses don’t necessarily always follow traditional business models, and they heavily focus on employee satisfaction. For over a generation, job satisfaction scores have been on a rapid decline, and employee engagement is at an all-time low as well. Take advantage of this decline and institutionalize stand-out factors about your company that are realistic and advantageous to today’s employee work-life landscape.
5. Retain
If employees do not witness growth, it’s not likely they will want to grow with your business. Internal growth is just as important as fiscal growth. Make sure to reward high-performance employees and try your best to promote from within when possible.
6. Attract
Report after report shows millennials yearn to work for companies where they can discover their self-worth. They hope to make a difference to the world, and reputable leadership is one of the easiest ways to attract top candidates to your business, at least in the beginning. Having leaders who are well-rounded, educated, philanthropic; visionary leaders who think outside the box, with quality values - those are the leaders whose work ethic speak volumes to
job seekers. It’s easier for employees to identify and relate with leadership personnel when they not only admire their leaders on a professional level, but like them on a personal level as well. After all, wouldn’t you?
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