I am working with my local high school to help introduce business to an English class filled with juniors. They are taking the motifs from the novel they are reading and applying it to real world case studies about work. The students bring a very bold black & white view to their understanding of the cases. They have a refreshing approach that removes the “gray areas” we apply as adults.

It got me to wondering if the “gray areas”, the “situation calls for”, and the “you don’t understand the unique position” are all really learned traits. Something that we as adults do that either helps us avoid making a decision or taking a stand.

What I like about watching these juniors apply their motifs is that they take a stand, a very bold stand and defend it against their peers’. These soon to be future adults do it without the slightest whim about the “politics in the room” or “watering it down” so as not to offend. Nope. They throw it out there.

Isn’t taking a stand a strong part of leadership?

So if you are leader and you are reading this blog (thank you!), what is it that you stand for in your business? Your personal life? Your Community?

When you start your own business you are the go to person.  You have the vision, you have the drive, and you seek out vendors that can do for you what you cannot do for yourself.  You delegate through contracting.

When your business expands and grows you hire employees to fill key roles.  These roles are the delegation of decisions and roles that you cannot complete by yourself.  That is why you hired them, correct?

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom – Charles Peguy

Leader, Tyrant, or Both?

The breakdown for most business leaders and owners begins when they don’t give-up control when they delegate.  Sure they say that they are delegating and giving their employees a chance to be innovative, then in next breath the do the following:

• Overrule every decision by the person whom they delegated the task to.
• Constantly “hover over” the person and interrogating every action being taken.
• Create unrealistic expectations for the person they delegated the task to so they can jump in and “rescue” the project.

If you look at the past business leaders you have worked for I am sure you can find a few more examples where they cut the legs out from their employees.  The question you need to ask yourself is: Are you like them?

Delegate Or Roll The Dice

Are you the dreaded and often feared micromanager?

The first rule of management is delegation. Don’t try and do everything yourself because you can’t. – Anthea Turner

How Great Leaders Delegate

If you are like the dread micromanager, please stop right now! If you are not one, then by all means you can avoid becoming one by following the steps below.

Great leaders delegate with a premise that makes their employees rise to the challenges and take pride in their abilities.  It starts with treating each of the equally as individuals.  This means helping their employees play to their strengths.  When a  a business owner/great leader delegates a task they already have in their mind who is the best fit to carry it through.   Great leaders succeed in delegation by:

• Providing clear instructions to their employees.
• Describing clear expectations for the task.
• Allowing their employees to make decisions.
• Providing clear deadlines for task completion.
• Setting up their employees for success through playing to their strengths.

Great leaders/business owners follow-up their delegated tasks by inspecting what they expect and nothing more.

Now there are some that would argue that they are called micromanagers but that they are really just inspecting what they expect from their employees.  The difference is that great leaders are inspecting the expectations that they clearly described to their employees.  The micromanager inspects every step in the process because inherently they do not trust the employee to succeed.

Great leaders trust and believe that their employees are going to succeed until proven differently.  When failure does occur, great leaders look to themselves first to see if they did not provide clear expectations, direction, and the tools necessary for the delegated task to be completed successfully.  Great leaders know that the buck stops with them.  Micromanagers always assign blame.

Strive in becoming a great leader.  Delegate decisions as best you can to the lowest level so you can lead your business.  Set clear expectations and believe in your employees.  Inspect what you expect and nothing more.

What have you witnessed as the difference between great leaders and micromanagers?

Steps To Success

This time of year – beyond the holiday shopping and slow down in business – is when most business leaders, executives, and owners start to plan.  They reach into the filing cabinet or search their computers and dust off last year’s business plan.  It is that annual ritual of reading what they thought they would do this year (and didn’t) and write out what they will do for next year (and most likely forget about.)

“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.” — Sun Tzu

So if you are going through that torture or exercise, how do you measure your progress?  Do you tie the momentum of your plan to milestones?  Or is there a better way?

What Is The Difference?

Milestones are really measurements along a particular path.  Think about the name for a second.  It really means a stone that measures the length of a mile.

Discussing Decision Points In The Plan

A decision point is a place in your plan where you have to make a decision.  Duh!

You might say that the milestone is a measurement for a decision.  It can be.  Usually the decision is either one of two possibilities: Continue on the current path or kick some butt for missing the milestone.

A decision point is reached from actually war gaming or testing your business plan.  As you write out the marvelous achievements you plan to make in 2011, making you a household name, you need to test them against reality or possibilities.

An example would be making certain sales goals or marketing conversion goals.  If using milestones to measure your plan’s progress, you would most likely say that you are going to do x by y time and have that = the milestone.  A decision point would be to look at factors before, during, and after the milestone.  A decision point is a series of what if’s:

• What if you reach x sales before y time?
• What if you fail to reach x sale before y time?
• What if you exceed x sales at z time?
• What if the market collapses before y time?
• What if a new competitor enters after y time?

You get the drift.  You can ask almost an infinity of different what if scenarios.  The key is exploring what your alternatives will be and therefore create decision points.

The decision points make you act!

“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.” — Sun Tzu

A Combination Helps

The use of milestones to measure progress combined with decision points is that it breathes life into your business plan.  It makes it a living part of your business and not some annual exercise.  When you combine decision points with your milestones for your business plan you create the ability to be nimble, take advantage of opportunities, and are ready for any setbacks that might occur.  It is you best attempt to see all sides of problem/opportunity.

How do you go about testing your business plan?

During a presentation on building talented business teams and better morale that I gave, a question was raised about who is ultimately responsible for morale.  One audience member had taken the position that it is the responsibility of the leader or leadership to set the tone.  Another audience member felt it was incumbent upon the employees to be responsible for their own morale.   The lines were quickly drawn and debate ensued!

Is it not – like most things in life – a little bit of both or is the responsibility for morale that clearly defined?

The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it’s usually lousy. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Being the presenter (and not wanting to be subjected to a good old fashioned tarred-&-feathering) I moderated the debate as opposed to taking a side.  Yet, this being my article, I think it is best to take a side.

Morale is the responsibility of the leader and leadership.

As humans – no matter what your ethnic, political, or religious background may be – we build ourselves into hierarchical structures.  From governments to corporations, the role of a leader is defined by title, position, and power.  Since we set ourselves up in such structures, those that are not the leaders tend to look to them for inspiration, guidance, and direction.

Morale is faith in the person at the top. — Anonymous

A Team Whose Morale Was Tested Frequently

Take a professional sports team – any league will do – that is hugely successful in the only area that counts: championships.  These teams, which could be described as being a collection of hired guns, have to function as a unit to achieve success.  No bankroll large enough can buy a championship.  These successful teams have coaches, captains, and unelected/unrecognized peer leaders amongst them.  It is that leadership council that rallies the rest of the team to perform, overcome obstacles, and claim victory on the field.  Without a leader who inspires and motivates then self-interest takes over and the teams fail to achieve.

If your business or team struggles with morale, as a leader it is your duty to look at yourself first.  Are you putting your self-interests, desires, worries, complaints, and problems before the team’s desires?  Do you wear your emotions so readily on your sleeve that the slightest setback can be seen miles away?  Does your team walk on eggshells around you?  Or will they rally to you no matter what?  Be honest.  You, as the leader, set the tone.

You know that to be true, for we can all intricately describe a bad leader.  We all know one when we see them.  Not only can they not strategize, plan, or execute, but also they have an impact on our emotions as followers.  We fear to be around them.  We dread their mood swings.  We seek shelter from their bad behavior.  All of which has a negative impact on morale.  Therefore, the leader is directly responsible for the morale of team.

Follow Me!

As an owner, leader, or manager it is you duty to do the following:

1.)  Realize that your decisions – even minor ones – can impact the morale of your team.

2.)  Seek to build a team that rallies to you and each other.  Build a culture of high standards.

3.)  The buck always stops with you.

These three simple steps, executed on a daily basis, will help you build a strong and high morale team.  Granted there is more to than just these three steps, but they are the beginning.  To achieve them, you must realize that morale starts and ends with you: the leader.

I am interested in knowing where you stand on this debate.  I have laid out a case and look forward to defending it.  Who do you believe is responsible for morale?

When I used to work in corporate America we used to have team building exercises during our meetings.  These exercises were considered to be so important by upper management that they were mandated into every meeting.  The goal was to bring the teams together so that they executed the plans with a sense of purpose; the team would rise or fall as a collective.

In my experience the team building exercises usually consisted of golf, bowling, or another event that was a “team event” in name only.  The sports chosen were usually embraced by an enthusiastic few leaving the others bored and unengaged.  The end result was a shared experience, but not one that built a strong team ready to seize opportunities and overcome obstacles.  Instead a team in name only was built.

The Secret Trait To Successful Business Teams

A Ball, A Hole, and You ≠ Team Sport?

Successful teams – in sports, business, the military, etc. – share one common trait or gene: they care about the other teammates’ success.  Individuals who are part of successful teams know that their goals, desires, and dreams can only be achieved if they help the rest of team meet succeed.  Everyone possess this gene/trait inside of himself or herself, it just has to be tapped.

How successful teams achieve this bond is through a shared collective experience.  This collective experience is one that demonstrates to the other teammates the strengths and weaknesses of the individual members.  Typically everyone starts at the same level of knowledge – there are no ringers – and the team faces unknown challenges that they must work together to overcome.  In the military it is the initial training and common shared misery of the mud, lack of sleep, and obstacle course.

3 Ways To Tap The Common Experience Gene

In business your team most likely is not going to go running through mud or climbing over obstacles to get their shared experience.  Then again… why not?

Golf does not build a successful team.  In fact most individual skills – while learned and/or experienced in a group setting – do not build successful teams.  Only events that make individuals work together, learn together, and overcome obstacles together will build stronger teams.

So the next time you are planning a team building exercise for your business meeting, why not give these a try:

• Learn A New Skill. Whatever you choose as the new skill should have practical applications and if done improperly real consequences.  A great one is learning how cook as a group, which involves communication, delegation, teamwork, chain of command, and listening skills.   Sure you might have a budding gourmet chef in your team, but the reality is that most people only know the basics.  The goal is to cook a meal for everyone.  Get it right and you’ve got good food.  Get it wrong and well…

• Overcome A Problem With Many Possible Answers. These exercises usually have a stated goal and limited resources to achieve it.  While there might be one best solution, there are many other solutions that could possibly work.  A particular exercise I enjoyed was building a boat out of cardboard and duct tape.  To be successful the boat had to pass a strength test on dry land first and then go around a buoy and back in the water: all under a time pressure.  Teams that prioritized tasks, discussed possible designs, and staffed their boats correctly made it.  Others that did not sank.

• Scavenger Hunt. Break your team into smaller groups making sure to split apart any cliques you may have.  What makes this a great exercise is the element of time pressure, getting everything correct on the list, and great stories everyone will have when they return about their successes and failures during their hunt.  If built correctly a great scavenger hunt will have goals that will force everyone to stretch him or herself to achieve them.

Put Down The Clubs And Build Teams

What is great about the exercises above is they require your teams to work together to succeed.  One person alone cannot do everything.  Success means that everyone has to work together as a team.

Teams Are United Through A Common Experience

While you may learn more about the three other chaps in your foursome on the golf course, in the end it is the individual who must swing the club or make the putt.  It does not take a team to overcome the sand trap.  Therefore the opportunity to build that common bond, to unlock the gene that brings teams together, is never to be had on the golf course.

What are some other events you have done that help build stronger teams?

I have recently discovered a wonderful new series on the Discovery Channel called, “Surviving The Cut”.  The series is about the young men who sign up and join the various special warfare schools of the United States.  As you will see when you watch the series is that the training is tough, brutal, and pushes each individual to the breaking point.

What is not obvious in the beginning of the series is that for each man to be successful he has to lead and follow his peers.  Each of the special warfare schools teaches one key trait: no one can survive alone.

Special Warfare & Business

If you have gotten this far then I am sure you are asking yourself, “great but what does this have to do with me and my business?” An excellent question and the answer to that is: a lot.

Take a look at your business – whether you own one or a leader in one – and all the people that are involved in making it a success.  On the face of things each person plays a key role and their individual effort is important.  The key differentiating factor between your business surviving or thriving is how well those individuals operate as a team.  Everyone, including yourself, must acknowledge and believe that they can only succeed if they help their partners succeed.

That is the creed taught in the special warfare schools.  Only teams aligned on the successes of each other will succeed.  The success of the individual is built on having confidence in themselves, the willpower to overcome the desire to quit, and a loyalty to helping their teammates succeed.  In the end it is about the team succeeding in its mission.

Your business is has one mission: profitability.  No one starts a business or joins a company seeking to be mediocre or declare bankruptcy.  While profitability is the goal, many businesses do not create that year in and year out.  Many do not survive the cut.  The primary reason being: the business is a team in name only, but acts like a collection of individuals.

A team that is a collection of individuals – unfocused and not aligned – will score some wins, but have more failures than victories.  It is a recipe for disaster in the special operations field (where failure means death) and in the business world.

Building A Business That Survives The Cut

A Highly Trained Business Team

Whether you are building a business from scratch, promoted to a leadership position, or deciding to lead your business in a new direction you must build an espirit de corps.  It starts with your hiring process.

Of course you are not going to have your interviewees wrestle each other, crawl through the mud, and become sleep deprived in order to become members of your team.  What you can learn from that “interview process” of the special warfare schools is that it builds a common experience in everyone who survives.  They have been through hell together.  They have all suffered alike.  The all have been tested to their limits and they did not quit.

You must build you team around a similar experience.  They too must share a common struggle or test of effort that binds them to a common thread.  Without this shared experience that tests them as individuals your team will have a difficult time helping each other succeed.  They simply do not know what each other is made of and therefore have no common bond.

Without breaking laws or sending your business team to Ranger School, here are some things you can do to build espirit de corps in your business:

• Make The Interview Process Tough.  To be successful in business you must always adhere to the rule “twice as long to hire as it is to fire.”  Your open positions are better of remaining open then having a bad hire.  Everyone who joins your team should have the same experience interviewing with you: the questions tough, the process long, and the testing to get in rigorous.  Getting hired is a badge of honor they all share together.

• Praise Individual Effort/Reward Teamwork. Individuals who shine in your company should be praised with awards, recognition, and promotions.  Their efforts to make your business successful should not go unnoticed.  The largest and lavish of all rewards should be given to the team only.  Plaques and certificates are one thing, but everyone loves being sent to a destination and/or pampered.  By giving the most lavish rewards to the entire team if they meet their goals will inspire everyone to work together.

• Create Real Team Building Exercises. Golf is not a team building exercise.  In fact most sports – unless your entire business team is athletic – are not good in building team unity.  You need to pick an exercise that take everyone out of his or her comfort zones, tests their limits, and makes them work together to succeed.

• Focus The Team On Common Goals.  Everyone has his or her own goals.  Some seek financial success and others seek promotion.  Those goals are individual in nature and in most cases can only be achieved if the entire team is successful.  You must align those individual goals with the team goals with one caveat:  the team goals are supreme to the individual goals.

Beyond The Cut

The one defining attribute sought after by businesses seeking leaders is if they can build a successful team.  The four steps mentioned above will help you get there in terms of creating an espirit de corps and common experience for your team.  This builds a strong foundation for you, your team, and your business.

What happens next depends on how you train your team, how the market reacts to your team’s efforts, and other forces outside your control.  A team that is focused, aligned, and supportive of each member can overcome almost every obstacle in its path.

Author’s Note: In accordance with FTC Guidelines and Regulations the author of this post has not received any compensation from the Discovery Channel, its parent companies, and/or production companies hired to produce, create, and broadcast any of its programming.  The picture in the article is from an article in The Economist titled “MBAs are for Wussies.“

Would it not be great if there were signs your employees wore on their heads that helped identify what they would be great at?  You can walk through your cubicle farm and see who would be best at managing, sales, customer relations, negotiation, etc.  It would make some of the problems a company experiences disappear and others minimal at their worst.

Well you cannot have the signs, but you can have something that will keep your organization staffed correctly: a plan.

Out With The Old Method

Have A Plan For Your Leadership

You know the old method and how it turns out.  People who are excellent at demonstrating their skills in their chosen career paths are promoted to the next level.  Unfortunately they fail at that next level.  The example that most people know is that of the stellar salesperson who gets promoted to sales manager.  The skills they have demonstrated in the field – meaning an excellent record at closing sales – do not translate into the leadership needed to coach/manage a team of salespeople.  This is the same for the best researcher, human resources interviewer, and/or quality engineer.

Why does this old method happen?  Companies like to reward effort and merit.  They should.  It is in the American work ethic that hard work and toil are we rewarded.  A meritocracy at its best is what a company represents.  The next logical step is management. Or is it?

Create Multiple Paths For Promotion

What if your company rewarded increased challenges and responsibilities without promoting a stellar performer into management?  What if you built a new promotion plan that identified leaders early and groomed them while keeping the most successful people where they excel at in their current roles?  What if you rewarded merit differently?

The answer is that you can and your company will be successful at it.  The first thing you must do is to be resolved to break the current cycle: performance-based promotion to management.  Yes, it works, but it also comes with a slew of headaches/heartaches when it fails.  Which is a large portion of the time.  Instead you should have performance-based promotion into increased challenges for the current role.

This new method means that you must have a promotion plan.  Take a star salesperson; this person exceeds the quota day in and day out.  In a typical company they would be promoted to a management position.  They typically fail because they enjoy being in contact with the customer and closing the sale.  Beside your company is removing a major channel of revenue from the field.  Instead this stellar salesperson can be given numerous incentives to stay in the field – bigger commission, increased perks, or larger territories – producing for the company. You share the promotion path with everyone so that they know their merit is rewarded beyond just management.

At the same time you start to identify early on those individuals who fit best into management.  From their first day on the job you can test and track your employees to see who fits best in management.  Yes there is a performance component and most leaders demonstrate their leadership through their actions.  They also possess emotional intelligence, situational awareness, and a desire to coach others for improved performance.  They have a desire to lead.  These individuals should be tracked, challenged, and based on their merit promoted into management positions.

Case Study

A company that has broken the “Promote Star Performers” mentality to career advancement is Stryker.  This medical device manufacturer learned a while back that star performers do not translate to being excellent/start managers.  In fact they tend to fail in that position and wreck not only their careers but others as well.  Stryker set out to promote differently.

Stryker created incentives and other paths for promotion to keep their star performers engaged.  Management was no longer the only path to increased pay/responsibilities; instead it was one of many to choose from.  Stryker also tests those individuals identified early to be on the management track.  These individuals are tested to see if they have the right stuff to be managers.  Being a stellar performer is not enough to get you promoted to manager, you have to be able to lead.

The result for Stryker has been amazing.  Their stellar performers stay in the field strengthening their relationships and bringing much needed revenue into the company.  These individuals are challenged and desire to stay in their roles.   Meanwhile those that are promoted to management have been rigorously screened and set up for success in their new roles.  These individuals have what it takes to lead their teams resulting in a low turnover rate.

Your Choice

Take a look at where your company is now.  How does it promote people and how often do those promotions work out?  What is really in the best interest for your company: promoting star performers or keeping them where they are the best benefit for your business?

These are tough decisions and the easiest thing to do is stick with the status quo.  Breaking from the latter, though, will set your company up for the best possibilities of success.

Peer leadership takes many different forms.  You can become a leader through promotion above your peers.  You can be one of many at the same position seeking to influence a course of action.  You can be a designated leader assigned to a group of other leaders.  Depending on your commitments your ability to lead your peers can be all of the above.

What rarely gets mentioned in books, courses, seminars, and training on leadership is how to effectively distinguish yourself from you peers.  It is surprisingly simple: knowing when to apply the golden rule.

I speak directly to the people, and I know that the people of California want to have better leadership. They want to have great leadership. They want to have somebody that will represent them. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, young or old.  – Arnold Schwarzenegger

Everyone Wants To Be A Leader

Have you or your company every participated in leadership training?  You know the kind that flashes pictures of great leaders of the past, from Abraham Lincoln to Gandhi?  It might even have some flashy acronym or twelve steps to be completed that will instantly improve a person’s leadership.  Yet behind all that training something always seems to be left out of the conversation: not everyone can be a leader.

Follow Me!

It comes down to the simple fact that humans like to organize themselves in a pyramid structure.  From corporations, organized religions, politics, and even in sports the leadership structure is in designed to have one person at the top.  Now granted there are designated leadership roles within the structure to allow for delegation, independence of action, and increased productivity through combined effort.  Even they have a pyramid structure.  Therefore under organizational systems and formal structures it simply lends itself to the fact that not everyone can be a leader.

Yet companies, schools, and other organizations seek to train their staff to become leaders.  Leaders of what?  Why would a company want so many leaders in the first place?  What happens when there are too many cooks in the kitchen?

The question you should turn back on yourself is why do you want the title of a leader in the first place?

Leadership is influence. — John C. Maxwell

True Leadership Is Informal

If it is your desire to become a CEO, President, or Supreme Ruler, then there is no grudge held here.  If it is your desire to improve yourself, your family, and your community then title alone is not enough.  You have to have influence.  To have influence you must be able to lead your peers.

Peer leadership is really about the golden rule: do onto others, as you would have them do onto you.

When it comes to leading your peers the golden rule does not simply mean that you are civil.  It means that you offer more when you can.  It means that you lead from the front, doing what you would expect those around you to do.  It means following and supporting your peers every chance you get.  It means singing the praises of your peers and covering their weaknesses for the betterment of the team.  It means giving without expectation.

The result is that you position yourself amongst your peers with an ability to influence, persuade, and lead.

You see this more often than not in sports teams.  It is not the star player, the captain of the team, or even the coach that has the final pull of a team.  It is usually a player who has skill, but not flash.  It is a player who is called “the glue” and whose “work ethic” is never questioned.  It is a player who is always there.  It is a player who is key in a championship run.  It is a player whose leadership is only revealed when they retire and the team falls apart.

Those same leaders exist in companies, communities, and other organizations.  They lead their peers everyday through the value of their actions.  They wield an influence that has more power than any designated title or position on an organizational chart.

So what type of leader do you want to be?

I have mentioned before that leadership is highly sought after by organizations of many different stripes.  As a species we are drawn to organize ourselves in groups with named and un-named leaders.  No matter how much we cry for individualism, we look for strong leaders for guidance, inspiration, and to challenge us.

Where Does Your Compass Point?

Since there is so much data out there on leadership, I thought I would do the helpful thing and give you a round up of different leadership podcasts.

The Leadership Podcasts

Project Leadership Podcasts – A podcast for project managers, R. Camper Bull interviews thought leaders on the latest tools and skills a certified project manager (PMP) must possess.

EMS Leadership – Part of the EMS Radio, these podcasts address the various trends and issues for leaders in the EMS field.  Items discussed are Six Sigma in the management of EMS teams and who are the customers for an EMS team.

UC Berkley Organizational Leadership – Can’t get to a business class on leadership?  Why not drop in at UC Berkley and skip the quizzes through this podcast!

CEO Exchange – PBS sponsored podcast of interviews with leading CEOs.  Learn from the successful captains of industry!

Harvard Business Review IdeaCast – A weekly podcast that discusses the latest business trends.  This podcast discusses lessons learned for leadership successes and failures.  It does not focus only on leadership, but on business as a whole.

21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – John Maxwell’s podcast on the different laws from his best selling books.

World Business News – By the BBC these podcasts deal with current events.

London Business School – A podcast that discusses leadership and current business trends that can impact a leader’s decisions.

What Great Bosses Know – This podcasts interviews managers and business leaders on practical skills they learned to become great bosses.

There are many more podcasts out there.  Just like there are probably so many books on leadership that they could build a ladder from the Earth to the Moon.

What leadership podcasts do you listen to?

About the author:

Erroin A. Martin is a Business Advocate with the Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC, a business coaching and consultancy provider for business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs. He has fifteen years experience working within the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, natural resources, medical devices, software, technology, business services, and agriculture industries in various levels of leadership across six continents. He has led diverse teams in sales, marketing, planning, and in the Army.  He currently coaches business leaders and physicians in the tools needed, like social media, to plan for their success. Learn more about the Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC at www.vongehrconsulting.com or call +1 203 433 8079.  You can follow him on Twitter at @Erroin

The Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC, was founded by Erroin A. Martin to provide business coaching, business consulting, and other services to companies both large and small.  The primary goal is to have his clients be passionate about their business and reach the unachievable.

Leadership.  It means different things to different people.  It is the most sought after trait that employers look for.  It is a topic that has countless tomes written about it.  Yet in the end there are fifteen simple rules a leader should abide by to be successful.

Here are the rules:

I lead by the rules.

Leaders only hire top talent.

Leaders put the right people in the right positions.

Leaders tell people what needs to get done and why.

Leaders delegate and then let their people get the job done.

Leaders train their people.

Leaders listen – to their people, their customers, and everyone that impacts their decisions.

Leaders remove barriers, frustrations, and obstacles to allow their people to succeed.

Leaders inspect what they expect.

Leaders promote their people publicly and privately.

Leaders lead by example.

Leaders hire slow and fire fast.

Leaders inspire a vision for success.

Leaders make decisions – especially the tough ones.  That is why they get paid the big bucks.

Leaders hold the highest standards of excellence for themselves and their team.

Leaders coach.

Like many things in life, the process, the steps, the skills, and the rules all seem so simple to follow.  If it were easy then there would not be so many books, classes, seminars, and leadership experts.  Why people fail at the above is that they forget to be successful you have to practice the fundamentals everyday.

What rules would you add?

About the author:

Erroin A. Martin is a Business Advocate with the Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC, a business coaching and consultancy provider for business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs. He has fifteen years experience working within the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, natural resources, medical devices, software, technology, business services, and agriculture industries in various levels of leadership across six continents. He has led diverse teams in sales, marketing, planning, and in the Army.  He currently coaches business leaders and physicians in the tools needed, like social media, to plan for their success. Learn more about the Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC at www.vongehrconsulting.com or call +1 203 433 8079.  You can follow him on Twitter at @Erroin

The Von Gehr Consulting Group, LLC, was founded by Erroin A. Martin to provide business coaching, business consulting, and other services to companies both large and small.  The primary goal is to have his clients be passionate about their business and reach the unachievable.