“Leadership” workshop for my business owner group 4943. Three hours plus a dinner is not enough time to be with this amazing and talented individual, leadership coach, father and Vistage Worldwide speaker. See if a few of my take-aways from his book “Leadership Between the Sheets” and his workshop, “Better Leaders, Better Teams, Less Stress” resonate and challenge you to want to take a deeper drive in improving your leadership with a greater work/life balance. We both ask a lot of questions. There are a few in this article that might interest you as you develop you and your leadership team.
The most important role of the business owner or CEO is to set the vision. Do you find your leadership team will argue before seeking to understand? Clarity and thinking less is more. Does your mission statement align with your core vales and company culture? How are you investing in yourself? Your employees? How much are you spending/budgeting on your personal growth and development or the growth of your people. Looking around the corner with 12 to 16 sets of eyes enables our members to get it right more often than not. Are you really setting yourself up for success?
What is the right rate of change for your company? Did you know that if you grew your top line sales less than 2% monthly for 24 months, you would double your top line revenue. Is that a sustainable growth rate? Jack Welch believed that if his internal rate of change was less than the external rate of change of his company or division, he was in trouble.
Bob shared OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) which is a practice used by our USAF fighter pilots. Google for yourself, it’s an interesting mind set. Are your decisions life or death for you and your company, they are for a fighter pilot.
Bob writes and talks about Dan Barnett, a Vistage Speaker and his workshop “What is Your Make or Break”. How do you make money, what must happen first for everything else to line up? Do you know what your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly key indicators are and are you measuring your most important KPI’s? Do you have clarity in where you are going and what success looks like.
Authors over the years have shared that a business owner has 3 area’s that deserve his or her attention. Product, Marketing(Sales) and Financial discipline yet there is probably no one on this planet that has the personal skills to produce, sell and
Bob shared the importance and much needed focus today on human capital. It’s especially true in Austin. It appears, we are all looking for talent in our onboarding efforts. Hiring top talent that has been successful or done what you need to have done to fill the void is a must vs. settling for less. Setting measureable expectations, and holding each other accountable is one of our greatest challenges today. A great company has their employees doing one level above their pay grade or position in the company. Make your leadership team indespenseable.
In closing, how do we facilitate the growth of highly independent, high control people, who are ambivalent in many cases about deep learning.
Austin Vistage | Ed Stillman 