We all have come across the phrase “No man is an island.”
For success to be achieved in a business, every entrepreneur needs people. People make up the business and are more important than anything else. To succeed as an entrepreneur, you would need to learn how to lead your team. There are some basic leadership fundamentals you need to learn in other to sail seamlessly with your team.
During the planning stage of your business, you need to begin to envisage the various stages of development and resources required to scale; also you need to put into consideration how your style of leadership would adapt. What works for a large team might not work for a small one. However, there are fundamentals of leadership that every entrepreneur has to know irrespective of the size of the organisation. Below are four fundamentals every entrepreneur should know:
1. Leaders make decisions: Leadership requires some exceptional decision-making skills. There are some stages which would require you to make tough calls. As a leader, you must learn to evaluate risks and opportunities and make commitments to achieving the goals which benefit the business.
2. Leaders are consistent: Consistency is vital; it builds trust in actions and intentions. How your team or stakeholders perceive you are very pivotal. Your client, employees and partners want to know they can rely on you. On the perspective of your customers, they need to be assured that your company is still the same, they joined a few years back. Your employees, on the other hand, want to know that eight months down the line they still have a job. It’s all about following the grand scheme of things.
3. Leaders create value: Value is very important to leadership. Values are lasting beliefs or ideals shared by members of a culture about what is good or bad and desirable or undesirable. Values have a significant influence on a person’s behaviour and attitude. What value are you offering? What draws the line between “valuable” and “useless”? As a leader, you need to identify the important opportunities you are adding to the organisation and your team.
4. Leaders communicate: Analyse your communication and decision-making process. As a leader, you need to learn that communication is very pivotal, share success and failures with your team. Communicating with your team gives them a feeling of belonging in the organisation. If your company is making big wins, informing your employees can serve as a source of motivation, and this would, in turn, grow the organisation.
The companies success isn’t meant for you alone but your whole team. On the other hand, if your organisation or business is going in the wrong direction, your employees can serve a viable source of ideas on how to improve the situation of thing.
All these may not seem particularly new or surprising, so many entrepreneurs fail to recognise and practise these fundamentals. If beating the odds is what you desire in your entrepreneurship journey; you need to learn to practise these fundamentals.
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