Why change how you think about leadership?

Entrepreneurs are passionate, driven, and innovative folks. But we can be remarkably blind at times. Sometimes that’s what it takes to get things done. Whether you're a new business owner just starting out, or you’ve been leading the troops for 25 years, you focus on building, getting funding, hiring, making payroll, getting product out or services rendered - or launching the first or maybe tenth iteration of that app. You’re working hard, you’re tired, and you’re doing your best.

So, what would make you stop and consider how you lead? Maybe you're starting out in business or leadership, and you're more open to learning – hungry to figure out how to turn this ambition, this idea, this amazing invention - into a sustainable business. But for most others, maybe you would pause and consider how you're operating because you keep running into some of the challenges listed below over and over again until they start to drive you crazy… or until they affect your bottom line or the viability of your business or your ability to attract investors, employees, partners. At that point it might cross your mind that there is something YOU can do about these things. Maybe it's not just the way things are. Let’s look at some of the pain points that might prompt you to want to develop your leadership skills.

Challenges we might face that hurt:

• High turnover of staff – the best of them keep leaving. You may think it is a generational problem, but it probably isn’t.

• Errors and inefficiencies – orders are late, and have errors, for example. Projects and outcomes are delayed. You are just not moving fast or smoothly enough. It’s bumpy!

• Siloing – there's an overall lack of collaboration and coordination between teams. Work gets duplicated or doesn’t even get done because everyone thinks someone else is doing it. Important matters have many eyes on them, but somehow errors still happen.

• There is a chronic lack of communication between employees or between you and employees, there are misunderstandings, and conflicts. It feels irritating and petty and by the time you get home at the end of the day you are fed up with having to manage people.

• There is resistance to changes and directives. People just don’t respond with alacrity or enthusiasm to the growth and change within your organization.

• You are growing too slowly, or your R&D is too slow, or containers with product you are desperate for take too long to clear customs. The pace of development is too slow and infuriating for you to hit the market with the speed needed in this moment of dynamic change and opportunity.

I believe these things are resolvable with some soul searching on the part of you, the leader. I say this because I’ve been there and had many of these same problems. It’s not that your business concept is inherently flawed, or that the people you hire are not capable. Chances are, it’s how you are thinking about leadership. It is not easy to hear - but problems in organizations are almost always due to how the leaders are leading. In every single organization I have worked with, including my own, I have found this to be true. Government agencies, businesses, and charitable organizations – the thriving of the organization and the effectiveness of its processes can almost always be measured by the quality of its leadership. Leaders set the tone and shape the culture, and thus the long-term success and sustainability of the organization.

Leadership is not about being the smartest or most dominant voice; it’s about creating clarity and trust in your organization so that people can do their best work. It is about how you inspire others with your vision and how you align people and tasks to those bigger goals. It is also how you recruit, hire train, communicate, and build your organization. It’s the values that shape how you work with your suppliers, your competitors, your investors.

It’s a lot of pressure, and you will grow – whether you like it or not. And as you experience the joys and tribulations of building a business or any kind of organization, your success will absolutely depend on how willing you are to learn.

Good leadership begins with self-awareness. It is probably the most important asset of a business leader, whether you are a founder on fire in a fast-moving tech start-up, a mid-career owner of a family business, or the ED of a non-profit.

Self-awareness means you know and care about your strengths and weaknesses and are willing to learn how to work with them. It means you take responsibility for errors made by anybody, because it’s your job to figure out why they happened and prevent them from happening again. Self-aware leaders are always pursuing learning and optimizing – developing their skills, benefitting from experiences, and growing big enough to see their blind spots and do something about them.

Self-awareness will prompt that fast-moving founder to put the necessary processes and structures in place for a healthy workplace culture so that the company is poised to scale. Self-awareness will help the family business owner engage and retain the smart, passionate employees needed to weather the tariff storms. And it will help the ED of the agency serving victims of domestic violence figure out how to stop the ever-increasing rate of exhaustion and burn-out in her organization.

Self-awareness has a partner in humility. Humility is actually a kindness to oneself. You as a leader do not need to be all powerful, all knowing and have all the answers. Humility is an acceptance that we are not and do not have to be superhuman because as good leaders – we are open to the help of others.

So, what is the big deal – what might change?

In case you are skeptical about all this (critical skills are important, after all)..

Good leadership and leadership development have been shown to increase revenue and profitability, and improve business outcomes. This 2019 study using data from thousands of leaders around the world, found that the quality of leadership can strongly affect revenues both positively and negatively, and that it has a measurable and consequential effect on employee retention and engagement, and productivity. The stats are fascinating. Another study from 2023 across 14 industries reported that every dollar spent on leader development resulted in an average ROI of seven dollars. But sadly, the 2023 Mckinsey's The State of Organizations 2023 found that only 25% of employees  see their leaders as inspirational and fit for purpose. Their conclusion was that (in) today’s turbulent environment, leaders may be tempted to stick with the approaches that have worked for them in the past—regardless of whether they are still fit for purpose—rather than rethinking and changing the way they lead. But the costs of leaders remaining in the familiar zone can be high.

In my own company, as I focused on learning and growing as a leader, the whole organization benefitted. The more adept I became at fostering a healthy company culture, the more effectively teams worked together. Operations ran more smoothly, and we were able to approach problem-solving with creativity and optimism. We responded with resilience to the inevitable everyday disasters and delays. Frankly it became a better place to work – for me and everyone. People felt engaged and excited about the work we were doing and understood our goals and strategies. It created an astonishing amount of momentum for the whole business, because we all brought so much creativity to what we were doing.

You may not be 100% committed to the idea that it is you that needs to change but you don’t need to be to create positive changes in your organization. You just need to be inspired (perhaps by what is hurting you) to try something new. In some future blogs, I am going to suggest a few very specific tools that I found to be extremely helpful. They are small but powerful actions that - when practiced, can be highly effective in creating changes in how you lead. Stay tuned!