Is your leadership style creating the kind of environment that attracts, motivates, and enables the brightest and best people to pursue a great vision—or are you actually holding your company back?
Sometimes the business leader—the individual with the vision, energy, knowledge, and know-how—can actually be the biggest impediment to a company’s growth. It sounds crazy doesn’t it? How can it be that the person at the top (or the front), who should be leading the charge, is actually howling the company back?
Let’s face it: entrepreneurial types love a challenge. They don’t take “no” for an answer. They push and they work and they see things a little differently than other people do. It’s one reason they have business vision that others often don’t. But the reality of business is that it’s virtually impossible to take a company through dynamic growth on your own.
You need other people if you’re going to succeed. And beyond that, you need the best people, working at maximum capacity, if you want to scale up your business and take it to the next level. Not only do you need to attract the right employees, but you also need to be able to motivate them properly (Here’s a post that talks about what really motivates employees).
To lead a great company you have to do more than be intelligent, driven, hard-working, visionary, and motivated: You have to be a great leader! Even if you have all of those other things working for you, it won’t matter if you can’t get great people to follow you.
How are your leadership skills? Are you attracting (and keeping) the brightest and the best employees? Are you able to pass your vision on to them? Are you able to motivate them? Here’s something I can tell you for sure: It won’t happen on it’s own. It’s something you have to work at. If you’re not sure whether you’re moving your company forward or holding it back, perhaps we should talk about how to develop the leadership skills you need to scale up your business so that you can take things to the next level.