There are three fundamentals to successfully scale up your business: having a clear organisation structure, having comprehensive systems, and developing great leadership.
Heard the quote, “What got you here won’t get you there”? These are wise words (and the title of a book you should read!) are from Marshall Goldsmith. Choosing to scale your business does not come without risk!
Many leaders focus on their systems and teams when looking to scale, which is important, but they must also focus on scaling themselves.
Fundamental three: developing great leadership
Most reasons why businesses fail, directly and indirectly, point to leadership failure.
From poor planning to poor hiring, poor communication to poor process, poor capacity to poor execution - most things can be fixed with great leadership.
Scaling the business will make new demands on a leader’s time and attention and it’s critical that these are both focused on the right things:
1. Planning. Setting a clear vision and relevant business goals, regularly reviewing progress, and resetting goals to drive performance improvement.
2. Inspiring. Motivating others to achieve more than before; showing them their potential to make an impact.
3. Empowering. Enabling your team to find their own solutions by guiding them with your support, trust and encouragement.
4. Culture. Demonstrating allegiance to the team and standing for the business’s core values.
5. Innovating. Continuous improvement in people, product, and process.
6. Personal growth. Developing and supporting your future leaders with mentoring and guidance.
While there can only be one leader of a business, there are seven operational departments that need individual leaders. People can lead multiple departments initially but, as the business grows, should look to empower others and delegate the leadership of some departments to ‘leaders in training’.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how well do you rate your performance on the above six categories? Where can you scale your leadership?
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“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” - Ralph Nader
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