Three Reasons Why Leadership Grows Your Business

As a small business owner, you may be up to your armpits in fixing a bushfire or working after hours keeping up with the bookkeeping.

You hear about people saying that a business needs leadership to guide it to success and maybe you think that’s fine for some but in the real world, it’s pretty much BS!

Where have you got the time?

And anyway you own and run a small business. At best you only have a handful of people working for you and they seem to be doing what they’re told!

Well, let me take a few minutes of your time and show you why Leadership will help you grow your business into the successful business you want – that successful business you dream about but maybe don’t really think you can build.

I’ll give you three reasons why Leadership grows your business.

But first, what’s the difference between Leadership and management?

It’s been described as the difference between the short-term organisation of action and providing a vision for longer-term goals.

I have prepared a video on the difference between Leadership and management.

 

 

So, to reiterate, management creates order in the business. It is good for meeting short-term targets.

Leadership creates change in your business – avoiding “just carrying on” – it looks for the end result, the vision of what the business can achieve, and therefore sets long-term goals.

There is no doubt you need management in a small business. But you also need forward-looking leadership.

If all a small business had was good management, you would do what you do well, but you will not grow because you’re not looking to make different things happen and scale up to your ultimate vision of what the business could be.

All that growth for the future would just be a dream while you concerned yourself and spent all your time looking at and managing the short term requirements.

There are a number of reasons why Leadership can actually grow your business beyond the more day-to-day organisation that management provides.

1. Leadership provides a vision and a strategic direction

Leadership provides a sense of purpose in the business.

Leadership in a business means that it can set a vision of what the ultimate goal is and get people to look forward. This provides strategic direction – thus ensuring that all employees and strategies are cohesively headed in the same direction.

Leadership helps the business when the inevitable rocky period comes because knowing the big picture, roadblocks become temporary and insignificant.

This means that it sets the context for the daily grind – this is why we work on these details because it helps us go down this long-term path. Knowing this helps everyone feel that they are striving towards the same, valuable goal.

The business is productive and efficient because everyone, in their daily tasks, is pulling in the same long-term direction, and anything unnecessary can be identified and removed.

2. Leadership creates a corporate culture or “how we do things around here.”

Corporate culture is the “feel” of the company and helps you to build your brand.

Perhaps the corporate culture is one of intense professionalism, or it might be about relaxed focus. Leadership sets the focus for this.

Imagine if a business had both rigid people and laid-back people – apart from constant friction, no one would agree on how to get things done.

The advantage of establishing a corporate culture is that it removes discord – because it attracts people who appreciate working in the same way. If the corporate culture seeps into the brand – how we do it around here becomes a powerful way to separate you from your competitors as it attracts the type of customers who are attracted to that type of culture.

The culture of the working environment is what helps keep the retention rate high, and the resulting improvement in productivity, experience and efficiency.

3. Leadership in the business keeps the business cohesive.

While this may be a direct result of the first two, it creates its own positive effects for the business.

Apart from pulling in the same direction and everyone doing things the way they “do it around here”, leadership also creates a set of common values and integrity in the business.

Not only does this create credibility in the market about your performance, the work actually syncs with those values and they are implemented in day-to-day work. This means that you encourage prioritisation of the things that matter to the business.

In turn, this leads to more customer loyalty and improved retention of customers.

All three of these reasons means that the business is productive, efficient, and profitable.

With the consistent application of plans and actions that are focused on achieving the vision, implemented in a way that maintains productivity and efficiency, the business will scale and grow.

Leadership is actually one of the Six Business Success Factors I have identified as critical to the growth of a small business.

I have studied the effects of what successful small business owners do throughout my 40 years’ experience working with them and distilled them into these Six Business Success factors:-

1. The Act of Leadership
2. The Practice of Planning
3. The Logic of Marketing
4. The Pursuit of Customer Fulfilment
5. The Attainment of Operational Efficiency
6. The Mastery of Finance

In fact, I have written a free report and roadmap called The Six Business Success Factors – The Small Business Owner’s Growth Guide.

In this free report, I describe what each of these Business Success Factors does for your small business, provide you with a roadmap to implement them into your business, and give you a short “audit” of where you stand in each of these Business Success factors.

You can get your free copy here.

And while you do that, why not go to my website at teikoh.com and see what other free but valuable tools and processes you can use to grow your business.

See you soon!

 

 

 

Cover image by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash