What inspires leadership in others? Is there a recipe to create leaders or are people simply born leaders? From experience leaders learn to lead, from family, past experience, as they follow others they learn from and great leaders pass on better traits to those that interact with. While some may posses natural born leadership skills, most have to work at being a better leader every day.

I recently attended a summit for leaders lead by Paul Timms of the Institute of Coaches in Sydney and one thing appeared to be common, not every leader simply started out with all the confidence and charisma of leaders like Paul. Every leader has one common thread, passion, they’re passionate about what they do or have life experience that they can show with others. People like to follow others that can help them overcome a challenge or achieve the success they’re looking for in a particular field.

Do you have to be a big and bold leader to lead? The answer is NO you dont. Leadership comes in many shapes, sizes, outfits and forms.

Knowledge is power

Absorbing new information and learning is just one part of being a leader. Knowledge really is power and it gives you the ability to see a clearer way forward to navigate through the challenges that every small business goes through. To be a good leader you first have to learn how to lead, while you might not have to physically do all the tasks a business requires, having knowledge about the topics, issues and best practices has real power.

Lead and let go

To lead you have to let go. There’s simply no point in leading from the front all the time you need to push (gently) from behind more often than dragging the horse to water. The old saying is true, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink”. There are times when you want to be out front and times when you want to lead and let go. As I watch our company evolve I see a few common themes in our leaders coming through. They all want to be better today than they were yesterday. They like to take on new challenges and they’re willing to try by learning new things at the drop of a hat (a startup businesses mantra).

Goals help quantify

Every week we set goals, we add monetary values to these goals so its clear if you set a goal to buy a new watch, go on a dream vacation, or buy your loved one that special gift, setting down a price clearly quantifies what is needed to achieve that goal. When you set a goal, get started right away on that goal, if you take action immediately your goals will start to come to life. There are generally two types of goals, needs and wants, or I like to call them survive and thrive goals. If you set more goals that are designed to ensure you survive the better chance you have of achieving your thrive goals.

Let’s face it most people write down their goals on a Monday and never achieve them. Review your goals after each week and fine tune those goals to reflect the level of success you’re achieving. You also have to be held accountable. What we do is assign a person each week to hold the other person accountable. They check in with them during the week on their goals and they offer a hand to help that person achieve their goals, and vice versa. Team work builds better leaders.

No wrong answers

We like to do round table constructive idea building, well in our case a round table means Google Hangouts, because we have offices in multiple locations. We look to share new ideas that come to mind for a new project, creative marketing idea or brand story development. As a creative company our business requires new ideas to bubble to the top so that we can offer clients the inspiration their brands need to grow new audiences. Putting forward an idea can be uncomfortable for some and embarrassing for others. When you encourage a “No Wrong Answers” forum you really can find some incredibly inspirational ideas.

This concept does take time with new employees. They have to build a trust factor to get over the embarrassment of someone laughing at a really outrageously silly idea, its just an idea. Probably the easiest way to do this is to start with all the fun, silly, playful ideas and then weave through other ideas as they come forward. If you create a way for people to express themselves without being held accountable, then new ideas really will bubble to the top.

Responsibility looms

In every business leaders find out pretty quickly that when they are placed in charge of a new division, a team, or a campaign, that there are deadlines and fiscal responsibilities to meet. If an employee's pay packet was online the line for a campaign deadline being missed do you think they would pay extra attention to doing everything they could to meet that deadline? While we of course don't have a policy like that we do have a step by step mentoring process to ensure that a little responsibility is added at a little at a time before bigger responsibilities are offered.

Give credit frequently

It's easy to say “great work” when you see great work. Every little step along the way amounts to the total body of work and giving credit often shows employees that you care. The way we build culture at our company is with leaders in mind and how you treat people equally. Leaders know that rewards even as small as a pizza party for reaching 5000 twitter followers or a celebration of achievements both personal and private all help to give the credit where the credit is due. This simplest and most rewarding form of credit is a simple thank you.

Learn along the way

Always be learning new things. When you build a business on training and certifications you give your business the best chance to learn new things and create stronger more insightful, knowledgeable leaders.

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About the Author

 

About Adam Mole

Adam is the proprietor of start up BPO company Transeo and has been working with offshore and outsourcing services for more than 20 years. Adam is passionate about small business. He likes to write about his experiences in sales and startup business ventures. In his spare time you'll find him on one of Sydney's south coast beaches surfing and smiling. Email Adam at adam.mole@transeo.com.au and follow Adam on Twitter @adam_transeo.