With your company’s purpose and mission well established, the next stage is commercial success and stability through excellent performance – and leadership plays an enormous part is achieving this.
Skill is obviously a vital ingredient in effective leadership, and overall commercial success – but without the ‘Will To Win’, there’s no way of actually utilising these skills in the best possible way, bringing together a team and motivating them to put their skills to effective use. Good leadership involves having an instinctive finger on the pulse of the businesses, knowing which areas need a performance push, executive leadership training, and managing employees appropriately.
Altering Attitudes; Coaxing Out Of Comfort Zones
In a book on happiness and fulfillment, Harvard professor Shawn Achor stated that a productive and wilful mindset can make you 37% better at sales and a whopping 31% more productive. It therefore follows that a winning formula to achieve performance excellence on your initial objectives and missions is not only to have the necessary skills, but also a combination of this and a will to win.
With this in mind, attitudes have to be changed, and the only way to achieve this is by having leaders venture out of their comfort zones – we all have them, and they’re made up of a collaboration of our various attitudes and ideas. Comfort zones can frequently be self-limiting, avoid us taking risks or stepping into the unknown, or challenging our expectations of both ourselves and our teams.
Ultimately, these attitudes dictate the way we work so to achieve the right mindset, these comfort zones have to be challenged and attitudes have to change. On the road to success, it is the role of leaders to unlock the potential of their teams and utilise the skills within – but as leaders, we have to unlock our own potential as well to be able to establish the culture and set the direction which leads to a strong team.
Leading By Example To Achieve Goal Success
A good leadership team is inspirational – that much is known to be true amongst the most successful of team leaders and management professionals, and there are a whole measure of ways to inspire your team. Leading by example is a fantastic place to start, narrowing the ‘us and them’ gap that employees may perceive to exist and creates a united team. Despite this being known, it’s often difficult to put into place and it’s easy for leaders to apply this inconsistently.
As a leader, you’re always being watched – not so much from those above you, such as senior management or CEOs, but by your team as well. If they see you failing to practice what you preach, even once or twice, then your carefully nurtured culture and environment can come crashing down, making it more difficult for you to pick up the pieces and put it back together again.
Leading by example goes a long way to creating the environment for the will to win – it garners that team spirit, motivation and trust which are vital leadership factors for performance excellence. In the long term, this ultimately leads to success and expansion based on employee motivation and customer satisfaction; your goals of stability and profitability are therefore more achievable and more sustainable.
This post is sponsored by Leadership Development Ltd, who offers leadership training and management courses for large, blue-chip clients.