No one was born a leader. It is a learned skill. And incremental improvements towards more effective leadership is the way to level up your game as a role model for your direct reports and not only them.
Continuous improvement must be a way of life for you that you also apply to your business and expect your subordinates to also embrace wholeheartedly. That is the only way to ensure that you are growing as a person, your business is expanding and that you have a team capable of sustaining all this constant positive change.
But how do you achieve this?
Well that’s the tough part. It requires something that most people lack: perseverance. Taking action sporadically is a recipe for small results, puny dreams and wasting time.
For a person desiring to become a true leader the path is clear, even if it is hard. He embraces the hardship and pushes forward, rising again and again from its ashes like a phoenix. A constant reforging of the mind is required to grasp the principles of leadership deeper and deeper with each year of extra experience.
That is why the most basic thing you can do to speed-up your learning process of becoming a better leader is to implement in your business a circular, recurring process that seeks improvement for its own sake. It looks like the eternal snake who is eating its tail and reforging itself in a never ending process. That is what you must implement and make sure is working at all times in your company. You might say it should be the bedrock on which the company is built.
This constant process is all about going periodically through each part of your organisation, department by department, looking at each one and identifying:
- What is working well and if it’s working because of you or despite you;
- What are its bottlenecks, and more importantly: are any of the bottlenecks due to you;
- How is your relationship with the department leader and what can you do to improve it;
- How is the relationship of your department leader with the other people inside the department. Can you make it more beneficial for everybody involved?
As you can see you are the person responsible for dragging and pushing your organisation forward. That is why you need to have radical honesty when it comes to yourself and your relationship with your company and each of its departments.
And you need to be even more honest when it comes to the ways you might be inadvertently smoldering the growth of your company either by micromanaging or by giving too much leeway when more hands on would be more beneficial.
It is hard, not not pleasant, but if you want to ensure constant growth on all levels you have to be a role model. Make it obvious that you are growing and that you expect that everybody around you should grow also. Invest in your people and they will reward you by helping you grow your company faster and at an exponential rate.