Winner Take Most

The above average performing companies in a field will get most of the results and profits.

The average performing companies will get average results and profits.

The below average performing companies will get little results and profits and much struggle.

Do what you must to be above average.

You are responsible for all that money

Your gross revenue – 32% of it goes here, 28% goes there, 7% to this, 5% to that, 3% to the other thing, 11% to them, 8% to…

You, the leader, are the steward of all the money that comes into your business. (If not you, then who?) You are responsible for it and what happens to it.  

Watch it.  Make it work.

Managers people love

To get the most out of people, they have to like their jobs. For them to like their jobs, they have to like their immediate supervisor/manager. To like their manager, the manager must care about both the result the group is trying to achieve, and the people on the team.

People know if you care about them.  You listen, you teach, you encourage, you believe in them, you challenge them to do and be more, you recognize them, and you smile at them.

Are your managers ones that their teams love?

When to lead, and when not to.

If you have a five person operation, you need to lead.  Those four people need to understand what the goals of the organization are, and what their jobs are, and you need to communicate, train, and support them as to exactly what they should do.

But this changes when you have 50 people.  You’ve recruited the best people you can find.  How can you know what each employee is supposed to be doing – all those functions and the intricacies of how they’re done, when you have 7 departments now?  If you haven’t changed your leadership style since you were a five person shop, you will be the bottleneck and limiting factor. You couldn’t possibly know the best way for eveyone to do their jobs and manage them the way you used to.  

If you maintain a command and control leadership style, where you need to approve everything and authorize every move, and be the source of all new ideas that get implemented, you will hit the wall. You will be working a lot and be maxed out.  Your best employees will leave, and you’ll have lost the opportunity to have great specialized minds really help.

Instead, you need to know when and where you must let go and let others lead. Maybe you should hang on to this function or that one.  But maybe you should let go of this one or that one too.  Letting go allows you to focus your time and energy on creating value in other ways.

You have to let employees who are smarter than you and better than you in a given area take control of their domains without your interference. Sure, communicate the vision, make sure all the pieces fit together, and measure results. But get yourself out of the middle when you have exceeded your limit of skill or capacity.  

Sooner is better than later.

How to know you are a leader

You are a leader if, and only if, people choose to follow you.

Would people follow you if you were not the boss? If you didn’t pay them?

Who are the leaders around you?  How can you tap their leadership ability?

Problem employee or…

Problem employee or problem with a good employee? You need to know the difference. Even good people make mistakes or go through rough patches.  

Do you really want to lose a good person you have so much invested in and go through all the trouble of replacing them, or do you want to help them work through it?

You're the King

Your name is on the sign.  You have the power to fire people.  So nobody is going to come into your office and say “What the heck are you doing?! You’re messing up man! You aren’t doing the right job here. We need to redesign this business. I’m taking over.”

Many business owners have taken their business as far as their inherent talents, egos, desires and fears will allow.  If we don’t want to get stuck, we need to reinvent ourselves.

Good or bad – the world, the marketplace, is giving you what you deserve right now.  You aren’t getting better results, because you aren’t doing the things that cause those better results.  In order to get better (different) results, you have to do something different.  You have to be a new person.

Are you willing to let the old you go, get out of your comfort zone and be that new person?

Prioritization

Prioritization is a master skill of the most successful leaders.  The idea is they work on the most valuable things, and let the less valuable go undone or be delegated to others.  

How can you make $300 an hour, by doing work you could get someone else to do for $20 an hour?  Simply refuse to do any work that doesn’t pay at least as much as your annual income goal.

“But no work pays that much in my company” you say…that’s right, not yet.  There is one job IF DONE CORRECTLY, that would.  It’s called Leader.  A leader leverages his time and focus.  He builds the team that gets the results with customers.  He recruits, trains and motivates these team members and gives them the key processes, systems and tools to get their jobs done well.

For your employees, it’s about doing things right.  For the leader, it’s less about doing things right, and all about doing the right things. Prioritize what you do with your time, and only do the highest value tasks.

Get the whole story

When someone comes to you and reports a problem – someone did something wrong – you can’t go out there and start getting on someone and “fixing it” yet. You have to go ask questions. Get the story from others’ points of view. Understand what all parties were thinking. Understand that some involved have biases and their own interest to promote through this event.  

Don’t react quickly. Seek to understand first.

To set things right, you have to see things right.

Don't fail to communicate

A leader must talk to his/her team.  Tell them where you are going, what is important, what you are trying to be, and what you expect from them.

If you don’t tell them, they don’t know.

Communicate often.