Do LESS Be MORE As A Leader

Do LESS: Be MORE: A LEADER

The Art of Leadership: do less and BE MORE

The challenge for leaders today is that expectations about leaders are so high. They are in charge, and that means that they must know everything that is going on, be able to wave magical wands to fix anything at a drop of a hat and have answers to unforeseen issues. This expectation puts unbelievable pressures on leaders, pulling them into operational doing inside the business rather than leading their business. 

Leaders to stay focused on leading, must therefore member the golden rule that any business is a group of people delivering something. If you want them to succeed then the leader must create the successful conditions for that success to happen. Leaders therefore must design and build the environment for success, and then make it sustainable, so the environment becomes a stable one to continue that success. 

Leaders need to therefore focus on their people leadership skills, not task or output.  

Leadership Vision 

For leaders to lead they must first identify their core purpose in leading, or as Simon Sinek calls their WHY, why are they running this business? What is their vision for their business, which defines them as a leader, who are they, what do they stand for and ultimately what difference do they intend to make. That clear and shared vision drives the purpose and establishes the direction of travel for everyone. Without a clear vision and purpose leaders are often left dealing with internal politics between differing factions pulling the organisation in differing directions. 

Creating balance between work, home and self is an important aspect of leaders. Avoiding being overdriven, having time to think and reflect is vital for leaders to be able to research opportunities, evaluate options and balance their work within their life. Taking on too much, juggling too many competing elements will lead to poor leadership decisions, personal pressures and often leads towards burnout.  Balancing your life is a key skill in being a effective leader.   

Two Key Skills in Stepping Back

The first key skill of all leaders (except the one-man band business) is that you need to make yourself redundant from all operations. This statement often shocks leaders I work with, but if you are in the business you cannot be working on it, and you cannot be leading it effectively. Do less within the business enables you to do more for the business.

If the business can operate fully without you then you can lead it effectively. This means ensuring you are not critical to how it works, from sales to delivery, from operations to overtime you must not be essential. That means empowering your people to run everything, with the autonomy and responsibility to deliver what the customers needs. The more you empower the simpler the business becomes, and the more rewarding it is for its employees. 

Empowering people and letting them fly in their role, frees leaders to walk the floor and see how their people are performing, removing the blockages of the flow (the smoothness of operations) is an important first leadership stage in what is called the servant leadership role. 

The second is in looking at developing people, from praising people for doing a good job, and challenging them to develop their own solutions to their problems. Called safe failing, it is allowing people the freedom to try solutions and see what works rather than having to wait for something to fail before it is escalated up to the leadership. While praising people is a positive human touch skill, challenging people to solve their own problems within safe boundaries is a real leadership skill. It takes trust and a changed mindset to encourage people to try to create solutions rather than always asking what to do.  

Challenging people to come up with solutions to improve their role, changes the dynamics of employees perceptions of their leaders. How many solutions have you tried is a great way of suggesting that they have not yet find the right solution, and even better might be to  point someone in the right way by offering them a resource to go to, or providing a mentor to support their development into a solution. 

Leaders work through their people, so how a leader positively influences them is the success of their leadership of that person. Developing a variety of ways to influence people is a key skill of leaders in today's world. having a variety of ways and tools to influence people requires leaders to keep learning how to influence people to drive and support them to do try and do new things. 

Leaders must therefore build an effective management team around them who can deliver that vision. Developing an effective team is vital if a leader is to succeed. 

Leadership Focusing on the Future

Leadership is about being future-focused, hence the requirement to create and sustain your inspiring vision as a leader.  Leaders are always looking forwards, assessing tomorrow's market, where and how it is changing and then engineering the business to exceed within tomorrow's business environment. 

Leaders are visionary architects, focusing on the big picture and the long-term future. It is for others, the management to do the building. Leaders create the problem, here is where we are going and why, now get us there. It is for the managers and Senior Leadership Team  (SLT) to develop the execution.   As your business grows and you have employees it has different needs of you. The proportion of your time spent on doing is likely to need to decrease as the business grows.

Many business owners find it difficult to let go of the control and to pass on the operational doing to others enabling everyone to learn and grow. Letting go means that you are sustainable and thriving in your own role as the leader and are able to create the conditions for others to thrive as your business grows.

When you create the time to lead you are able to stand back from being involved in doing and identify what the business needs to continue to be successful in the future. Thinking about the challenges ahead and orientating the business to take advantage (or avoid) of them is the ultimately role of a leader. 

Stepping up as a leader first requires you to trust yourself and secondly to trust others to deliver instead of doing it all yourself. Doing less and being more is a mindset which leaders must develop. As you build trust in the capability of the person you are empowering and as they become more confident in the task they are being empowered to do, your involvement will become less. This frees you up to grow as a leader and add more value to the business.

Growth Mindset

Having a growth mind-set is key to sustainable leadership. If you and your people don’t continue to grow as the business grows there will come a stage where the business has out grown your capabilities. So making time to be coached and to coach your people so that they develop and grow creating the space for you to grow is vital. 

As a leader you need to take people on the journey with you in such a way that they feel they have played their part and that the outcome is one of mutual success. Carrying people forward is a key part of what makes a leader successful, they must be able to create, share and carry people forward with their vision of where they are going and WHY.  Overcoming stagnation is a major challenge for leaders in shaping the future and making changes to achieve that future.  

Growth is not a single action, a one-moment activity. Leadership requires leaders to continually scan their market for new opportunities then assess them as to their potential for their business in terms of fit and Return On Investment (ROI) compared to other options.  To keep looking is a mindset, not a single action. Working out what an opportunity might look like to a business and if and when it should be researched requires leaders to keep scanning and develop ways of assessing, good fit criteria, cost to undertake and likelihood of success within their market, which comes with experience and by developing systems of assessing good ideas.   

Assessing opportunities requires leaders to develop a robust assessment process that buys in the team to the opportunity from a number of different angles. The growth mindset requires carrying people forward into making change within a company. So if they can see what change those opportunities might mean.   Bringing people with you in assessing an opportunity and modelling up what change will look like, its impact and how different departments and customers might respond. 

Change is emotional. It is often seen as a threat so people go into fight, flight or freeze modes, and many employees will resist change. Your job as a leader is to connect with them at an emotional level and help them to identify their own reasons as to why the change is necessary. Move everyone forward,  not just the laggards, but the whole body forward together, so that they can all see the trajectory that they need to follow.  Your role as a leader is to steer the ship not run round being a busy fool.

So as your business grows are you doing less and being more, if so you maybe on your way to be a successful leader.

Looking for mentoring support by Richard Gourlay then get in touch with Richard today here.

Business Planning: What Goes Wrong and How to Plan An Effective Business Plan

The first rule for everyone in business, or going into business, is that a business plan is essential. Essential to get started, from validating your idea through to accessing funding, the business plan is the fundamental building block of any business.     

So why do so many people struggle to write effective business plans which they should be using as the corner stone of their business? Why do so many business owners rely upon key ideas held in their head and winging it, even with some of their biggest decisions?  And why do so few business owners trust, use and live their business plans?

Now these are all fair questions which individually leave business plans and business planning not valued outside those essential, must do to get started roles. For many, that experience is exactly why business plans and business planning gets such a bad press by business owners once they get past the start line.

What Goes Wrong

Fundamentally business planning has become a tool to get funding, not as your manual to drive your business. This bad habit, of building a business plan just to get past go, has resulted in huge effort to start on the right foot, but is not valued in keeping on the right track.  

The second major factor with business planning is that business owners often plan the wrong things. Writing a business plan is seen as "filling in the template" following the process and jamming words into format. They focus on producing financial figures which add-up, not on identifying the important factors which drive business success, such as developing and validating the right business model, or identifying real future growth opportunities and how the business is going to succeed in that market.  

A third major factor is that business planning often lacks solid forward information, too often relying upon historical data, the accountants view of what has happened, rather than looking forward to where markets are going. You can see this in many businesses whose business plan over focuses on turnover and cost management, rather than describing their model, their market opportunity, how they are going to enter the market successfully and therefore who their target audience is and why.      

Successful Business Owners Use Tools To Plan Successfully

Business owners do not live their plan because they simply don't believe in them, despite the fact they wrote it, or heavily influenced its writing. Owners need to use business planning tools to develop their business model effectively, creating solid foundations. There are a host a tried and tested business planning tools to help business owners effectively research their plan. using these business planning tools provides real evidence that underpins a good business plan.

Possibly the most important difference between businesses which succeed and exceed expectations and those which do not fulfill anything like their full potential is often the lack of solid foundations within their plan. A lack of research regarding their market, its nature and future, undermines confidence and knowledge of who the customer is and why they should buy your product or service.

Business owners over focus on the product or service not on the market, the target customer or market entry. What business planners need to focus on is quantifying and qualifying their market knowledge using business planning tools, to enable them to know what to put into their business plan, that provides the right evidence adds weight to your argument and provides a rationale behind the assumptions you make.  

Successful Business Owners Benefit From Using Business Planning Tools

The right business planning tools, used in the right order will provide business owners with the tools and the processes to go through to build an effective business plan, which is both reliable and robust, a solid base for making informed decisions about your business plan.

Using the right business planning tools, to research and inform your business plan, also provides confidence to business owners and senior management to trust your business plan. If you trust your business plan you are more likely to deliver it.

Using the right evidence, the right analysis and logical conclusions then business plans built upon effective use of logical step-by-step business planning tools provide business owners with a clear and robust plan with clear focus for their efforts. Using business planning tools makes business planning a value-added process built upon solid foundations, with clear insights about what's driving the market and why your business will be successful. 

Like to know more about business planning tools to build your business plan more successfully then click this link: business planning tools         
      
Here's some other thoughts about why you should be using Business Planning Tools to build your business plan on solid foundations why to use Business Planning Tools to build your business plan.            

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Cowden is a strategic planning and implementation business which works with business owners to grow and develop their business, based in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland with the tools to successfully build business plans, contact us to learn more: click herehttp://www.cowdenconsulting.co.uk.

Why GREAT LEADERSHIP is all about VISION

Why GREAT LEADERSHIP is all about VISION: Do you have a vision for your business here are some ideas worth considering.

 

Vision, is as we all know is the most important leadership trait for a successful leader to have and present. That means they have to have a clear strategic vision for their business. Great leaders may be charismatic, they maybe forceful they may even be likeable, but for them to be successful they must have and be able to communicate and inspire others through their vision.

According to Right Management consultancy‟s survey of 1,439 chief executives and senior HR people from 707 organisations across the globe found that the outstanding trait of successful leadership is the ability to create and communicate a VISION was the most important characteristic for success. The score of 92% demonstrates just how important a characteristic this is across such a large number of very senior people in business.

Business VISION

The Right Management consultancy http://www.right.com, which is owned by the Manpower group: http://www.manpower.com survey provides clear confirmation to everyone in leadership positions that the single most important factor for success is that of creating and communicating a clear vision to their people.

“Without a clear vision no leader can succeed today in business”

Leader v Manager

The key difference between a leader and a manager is often simply summarised in that a leader sets direction while a manager ensures the delivery of the plan, or elements of it. This simplified statement is a good starting point in explaining how these two differing roles can be clearly defined.

The research, which is heavily influenced by companies from North America, revealed that leaders evolve from a wide variety of backgrounds, experience and job functions within companies across a wide range of industries. Western corporate CEOs are most likely to come from Operations and Finance, with more specialised areas providing a less likely route to becoming a chief executive. This suggests that leaders are people who understand the internal systems of the business and the underlying numbers which drive its success.

Failing Chief Executives

Conversely, the top factors that contribute to the failure of chief executives include a wide-range of factors, which include both soft skills factors as well as the obvious failure to achieve acceptable results. The leading reason cited for failing chief executives is the failure to build relationships or team culture, reflects today‟s‟ importance of talent management.

Leadership Culture

Leadership Culture

The reflection that science is now more important than the science is evident: “Leadership development today is more science than art,” said Sue Roffey-Jones, practice leader at Right Management. “In today‟s business environment leadership development needs to be grounded in real work and focused on the critical competencies required for success in Chief executive level roles.” Key Skills

The importance of being financial and operationally literate to the CEO role is also becoming more evident: “We would assume that people are promoted to CEO from operations and finance because they are perceived to have developed competencies that are important for the CEO role,” said Roffey-Jones. “However, given what research has revealed to be the critical competencies for a CEO, how would a company develop leaders who have demonstrated a track record of creating a strategic vision‟ and "inspiring others and maintaining leadership responsibility‟ when these roles are more likely to be the fairly exclusive domain of the CEO?”

Succession Planning

The importance of succession and smooth transition is becoming more important. With the exception of the sudden changes, such as BP‟s sudden need to be seen to change direction in response to events, companies today are investing time and effort in succession planning. Good well planned succession planning ensures long-term shareholder value and the ability of avoiding the football management culture of change.

Executives, board members and business leaders all recognise that talent management plans, including succession management have become essential for sustained performance in today‟s organisations. Creating, finding and developing talent is now not only about identifying tomorrow's people but also ensuring they are contributing to developing tomorrow's business, buying in and helping create the vision of tomorrow. 


If you want to develop your company's position then there needs to be a vision for it, where it is going and why. If your look for some advice on developing your company, its marketing, its sustainable competitive advantage then contact us at Cowden Consulting to see how we can assist you, or read more about us in this blog or at Cowden Consulting.

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Cowden is a strategic planning and implementation business which works in partnership with customers to grow and develop their business, based in #Dumfries and #Galloway, Scotland covering the UK. contact us to learn more.