Inspiring Leaders To Make a Difference

 Every great ocean, sea, lake, pond or puddle starts with a single drop.

 20 Things A Great Leader Ensures

I wanted to change the world.

When I was young, I wanted to change the world,

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found, I couldn’t change the nation; I began to focus on my town.

I couldn’t change the town, so I tried to change my business.

Now, as an older person, I realise the only thing I can change is myself,

Suddenly I realise that if long ago I had changed myself,

I could have made an impact on my business.

My business and I could have made an impact on our town,

Then my nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

Wendy’s Version.

Original Written by an unknown Monk around 1100 A.D.

Meeting demands

Have you ever worked for a great leader who is both encouraging and challenges you both at the same time? That is the situation I found myself in 2011. Six months into this job and it was time for my first appraisal. Like most people, I was nervous because you never know how they are going to go, but my employer quickly put me at ease, and it was a productive time.

Towards the end, he said to me, “I don’t know how you are going to do it, but I want to be in The Sunday Times top 100 best small businesses to work for.” This is a published list that UK companies can get onto and it is run by The Sunday Times. I eagerly took on the challenge, but when I did my research and found out what it was going to take, well let’s just say that I had serious doubts about the feasibility of it.

Much of it had to do with how our employees saw our company and most of them were not happy working for us. We had a fractured company based over 14 sites, and their only support was through me. How could we ever get the 3 Star “Extraordinary” rating required to be even considered for the list?

This wasn’t a matter of changing a few known things. I had to start from scratch and figure out why they were unhappy and then come up with a solution that would not only solve the problem, but do it in such a way that our employees would tell others that we were the best to work for. There were times it felt like an impossible task.

BUT…

If there is one thing I have learned over my years of experience, it’s that if you are willing to tackle a project head on and believe in your employees, anything is possible. So, I started by figuring out where the problem was and for that I designed a Happiness Survey. From that survey, I learned two things:

-Most of the employees were not happy with their managers and how they were treated.

- Communication across the entire company was poor. People felt disconnected and unappreciated for their hard work.

Now that I knew the problems, I could come up with solutions to help position us to be on that coveted list. Over the next six months, I implemented activities that would improve both areas.

I started with a weekly newsletter called Briefly Connected. We collected news from around the practices – I got people to send me interesting stories, shared people’s birthdays and anniversaries and highlighted different people in this weekly e-bulletin and that became quite popular.

To connect people more, I organised a company-wide conference where all employees came together for an entire weekend, where they received training and a special Awards Dinner which had a focus on recognition.

As I looked at the managers, I realised that this was an important area that would need a lot of focus. They were all excellent at their job but required training in management. As a result of this, I designed a leadership program for each manager in the practice as we recognised that people were unhappy with their managers and the way they were managed. Every two months we got the managers together, performed leadership and management training with them and gave them support so that they knew what to do when they went back to their teams.

Guess What?

When I had the employees do another Happiness Survey six months later, the results had greatly improved. So much so I felt we were in a position where we could actually move forward and go for the top 100 list and that year we made #48 and have been on that list, every year since.

 A Great Leader Makes All the Difference

           While there are many contributing factors to a successful company, one of the main ones is the excellence of the leader, because they set the pace for everything that happens.

How can you tell a good leader? A great leader is someone who shares responsibility for running the business with the team. They give regular feedback on all aspects of the business. They look for areas where they can support, develop and do further training on areas that are needed, while always encouraging their team to go the extra mile.

They care about their employees and their lives. One leader I know, knew all of his employee’s names, their partners’ and kid’s names as well. He remembered little things about them, so when he went in to visit people, he would ask them about their family life, everyone felt like they really knew him. People appreciated that he took the time to remember things about them and the initiatives he put in place, so in turn worked harder to make the company great.

Today’s Leaders

The majority of leaders these days can be selfish and focus on their own position in the business and where they are going and expect everyone to do what they need them to do. I have known leaders, who expect everyone to work their socks off, so they can reap the rewards.

A friend of mine had an experience where her boss had to reach a certain sales goal by the end of the year and promised that if it was reached there would be a specific reward given. My friend and the other employee worked day and night to reach that goal, and in the final few hours of the year, they did it. They were so happy and eagerly awaited their reward, but it never came. The boss got his reward and recognition, but this was never reciprocated.

After that experience, she felt demotivated, and the next time the employer promised a reward neither my friend nor the other employee even tried to work for it because they knew it was a lie.

 Leaders need to keep their word and show that they are investing back into the company to reward the people, which in turn motivates employees to do more.

Many company owners are great technicians. They understand what they do, what they make or what they build, but they lack other skills (such as people, marketing or financial skills) and often don’t recognise it. They try to do everything themselves and they don’t know how to do many of the tasks well. They are afraid to admit that they don’t know everything and they are often afraid to trust someone else to do this. They think that they are the only ones who can do it right. They have problems with delegation, and they don’t want to let go of that control.

When employees are not trusted, or allowed to think freely and contribute to the business, they don’t feel valued as a member of the team, and in return, they just come to work and go home again and are much less productive. They take more sick time and stress leave. They tend to be negative and drag other people down. This causes a high transfer rate of employees in and out, which is a huge cost to the business. All these things affect the overall profit and the viability of the business.

 20 Things Great Leaders Ensure

                       If you check out some of the best small to medium size businesses today, you will see that they are run by leaders who all exhibit similar qualities and consistently ensure that all of the company’s needs, including those of the employees, are met. Let’s look at twenty of the most common qualities of leaders:

 1. Vision

Great leaders have a clear vision of where they want the company to go and what they want the business to achieve. Along with that is the ability to communicate this to everyone in the company, so they understand how their roles in the business contribute to the overall success.

 2. Passion

It is important to be passionate about your business. To love what you do as a leader and to inspire everyone around you to feel passionate about it too.

 3. Transparency and Integrity

If you say you are going to do something, then you do it, no matter what. If you lose integrity with your employees, you will find that they will no longer go out of their way for you. Transparency about the performance of the company is also an important element.

4. Listener

Great leaders are good listeners and will act on what they hear. They need to be willing to do things like surveys and then be prepared to make changes. They can accept negative comments, learn some things about themselves and then change some things about the way that they behave.

Good listening skills include being aware of what is going on in the team, which means getting to know what is going on for people at work and outside of work, so when things aren’t going so well you can spot it. This means when poor performance is going on you can pick up on it quickly and do something about it.

5. Communicate

You need to have systems for communication in place. How does information such as policies, training, and recognition get conveyed in a way that everyone who needs to hear it does so. This is important for the productivity of the company, whether that’s setting up a Facebook group, using a LinkedIn group or having an internal newsletter. It is important to find a way that works for everybody, to make sure that they all get the same messages.

6. Believe that People Behave with Positive Intentions

A good leader believes that the people in their team do things with positive intentions. This cancels out a blame culture where it is everyone else’s fault when something goes wrong. Belief is powerful in that people will live up to what you believe in them. If you believe them to be good, hardworking employees, who occasionally make fixable mistakes they work towards that. If you believe the opposite, then they live to that too.

If you create an environment where you work with your employees to fix mistakes, without playing the blame game, you will find your employees are more willing to come to you with problems instead of hiding them, and the problems can then be resolved more quickly instead of being left.

7. Responsibility

Give people responsibility, then empower them to do their job and to let them get on with it. Give them a clear brief of what outcome you want to see. Let the person go away and do the job in the way that they want to do it and as long as the outcome is what is expected, how the job is performed shouldn’t really matter. This gives employees the freedom to develop things in their own way.

8. Reward and Recognise

A good leader should have a system of rewards and recognition. These can be quite difficult to implement because employers and managers tend to have their favourites. Therefore, any system has to be transparent, easy to understand, and be able to achieve that reward and recognition.

One place I worked at had a great reward system where we gave out everyone ‘Alfies.’ These were like pound notes, with a picture of Alfie, the owner’s dog on the front, and on the back of it, you wrote who you were giving it to and what they had done to help you and inspire you. You signed your name and gave it to someone to say thank you. At the end of the year, you could cash them in for money or vouchers or gifts.

The emphasis was on looking out for the good things that people had done and then telling them about it by saying, “Thank you,”. This helped to improve the culture because people were looking for the positive qualities in others.

9. Fair Compensation

Properly compensating your employees for the work they do should never be considered a cost but instead an investment with a great return on investment. If you want to build an amazing team of loyal, hard working people who want to make your company succeed, then be generous with wages and the benefits that you offer.

10. Deal with Conflicts

How do good leaders resolve conflict? They deal with them quickly. They don’t let things fester, and as a result they will go in and sort things out at the earliest opportunity. They also create a culture where people feel comfortable to come forward and talk about any issues.

11. Open to New Ideas

A great leader is open to employees coming forward with ideas and then taking some of those ideas and letting it be part of the vision of the company. Letting the employee work on the project where appropriate can also prove to be a powerful motivational tool

12. Be Yourself

Authenticity. You don’t have to be perfect. Admitting concerns and flaws and getting help from the team is a sign of strength, not weakness. Encourage your team to come up with solutions to problems.

13. Flexible

Be open minded and flexible. Y you have a 5-year plan, but you also need to be able to adapt this if the financial climate changes (such as the uncertainties around Brexit) . You also have to be open to adapting to technology that comes along.

14. Positivity

Create a culture of optimism by encouraging people to make the impossible possible. You set the tone for your company and its employees, so make it a good one.

 15. Commitment

When your employees know that you are committed to the success of the company and them personally, they will become committed to the company as well.

16. Training

Invest in training. First for yourself. Learn the practical elements of leading a team, but there is also that personal element where leaders need to learn to recognize their own behaviours: they way they communicate, their preferences and they really have to work on themselves first. Once you have changed yourself, you can develop a culture of personal growth and learning with your employees.

17. Being Honest About the Financial Data

Share the figures with your team. Getting people to understand what the top line is, what the bottom line needs to be and what activities are going to help the company to get there. Understanding where every penny in the pound goes and that sometimes at the end there is not much left over. To control costs and maximise fails so that there is money to send people for training and to do rewards.

18. Understand Work/Life Balance

Not expecting people to work day and night and putting systems in place so that they don’t have to. Respect people’s personal time and ensure they get it. Not expecting people to work extremely long hours, being on call and then work the next day. If it is required then ensure they are thanked and adequately compensated.

19. Well Being

Have a well-being policy. Set up a group to look at all aspects of this and what is needed and what is not. Have a stress policy, carry out a survey to assess how your team manages stress. How can you help your employees feel better about work and create a healthy environment for them to work in?

20. Dedication

Your dedication is what is going to make the company work. If the boss doesn’t care, then others won’t either. The tone must be set from the top and then allowed to flow down through the company.

The Best Starting Place

What a list! It may feel like a lot to live up to; the great thing is that you don’t have to implement this all at once. It can take place over time. One of the best places to start is being clear about the vision of the business.

When it is just you, it is easy to have a vision and work within it, but when you start to bring in other people, it becomes more complicated. Having a clear goal of where you want to go with your company is a good place to start and explaining this to your new team helps them to understand what you want to achieve. Next, consider what you want the team culture to look like and how do you want them to behave. The best time to design your ideal culture is before you have a team, but it is never too late to start.

One thing I strongly encourage you to do is to get the training and support you need to be a great leader. Very few people can successfully do it on their own and you are setting yourself up for failure if you think you can.

But what support is out there for leaders like you? Many training courses are designed for large companies with huge budgets and massive HR Departments to implement the ideas shared. What about small to medium sized businesses? Shouldn’t they be able to benefit from training designed to help them and their employees?

Wouldn’t it be great to work with someone who understands where you are as an employer and help YOU come with a custom plan that:

• First of all, helps you to identify the problems
• Second, looks at feasible solutions
• Thirdly, creates a custom solution that fits your budget

Well, you can. My company Lodestone Lounge was created for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. We specialise in helping you:

• With leadership coaching
• Attract & recruit the right people
• Provide the right environment for your team to develop
• Offer them the rights and protections they’re guaranteed by law
• Keep up to date with changes to legislation
• Have access to the latest and best HR advice through relevant websites and our in-house HR and legal team
• Provide your team with legal and relevant contracts of employment
• Write policies, procedures, and handbooks which work for your business and your team
• Have the HR software you need, tailored to your business, at your fingertips with our HR For You www.hrforyou.co.uk

Click www.lodestonelounge.com to find out how my company can help your company achieve its true potential.

The choice is yours.

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