Aside from the proverbial death and taxes, most of life is uncertain. With uncertainty as a given, the question is then, how you prepare and lead your businesses through the challenges that will inevitably arrive tomorrow or the day thereafter.
Building a culture of leadership within small teams is difficult yet crucial and is led from the top. This can take a long time and can too easily be undone with the wrong approach or by employing the wrong fit for your team. To steer your business through these times, it is not only important to know what leadership is, it is as important to know what it is not.
Leadership is not:
- Having all the answers – Avoid the trap SME owners often fall into, thinking that because they are the owner, they need to have all the answers. That is simply not the case. Expertise and core competencies exist across all staff within a practice as well as externally with accountants, mentors etc. Draw on these skills to gather ideas and information; leverage the knowledge that exists close at hand because you will never know it all
- Telling people and staff what to do – Few, if any, people like being told what to do and how to do it most of the time. This results in micromanaging and ultimately in frustration and resentment which will lead to fracturing and disconnection of the team. It is a significant waste of time, your most precious and scarce resource
- About power and control – Dictatorships generally have only one long-term consequence and that is the downfall of the dictator. Staff churn will be high which in turn carries a financial cost, but more detrimental is the erosion of relationships with clients
- A popularity contest – Respect is far more important than popularity and difficult decisions will never be popular. The desire to be liked easily results in the wrong decisions being made for the wrong reasons. In the words of Jack Welch, “Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls.”
Leadership is:
