Raw 02 - September 2008 - (Page 48)

RAW BUSINESS ADRENALIN Leading, managing, succeeding How working to your strengths will help your business thrive ou can have the most innovative product and best service, but if the leadership and management within your business are not up to it, then failure may beckon. Of course, ‘failure’ comes in different guises and needn’t mean a visit to a bankruptcy court. It may be a failure to achieve your true potential, or a failure to realise real benefits for your clients and customers, or failure to engage your team in a way that makes the most of their unique talents. Whatever way you look at it, this is failure, nonetheless. Of course, many entrepreneurs have no argument with the importance of leadership and management. But despite this knowledge, backed by thousands of books, degrees and training courses, why does failure in this area continue to haunt so many businesses? If like me you worked in the corporate world before going it alone, you probably wondered how some managers climbed the greasy pole to positions of responsibility. Couldn’t they see how their interactions with other people had the opposite effect they wanted? Didn’t they recognise the flaws in their decision making? As entrepreneurs, we need to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes. But what is that elusive ‘x’ factor that will help us to reach our potential and enable our businesses to thrive? Y What differentiates successful businesses from those that struggle or fail? From my own experience as MD of an HR and personal development consultancy, two factors play a major part: leadership and management. I believe the key differentiator is a leader’s ability to recognise and leverage his or her strengths, acknowledge their weaknesses and employ counter measures to mitigate for them. In practice, this means doing what you are good at and passionate about, using your strengths to deliver results rather than spending huge amounts of energy improving your weaknesses. This may run counter to the idea that you should spend time and effort working on your weaknesses, but take a good look at the leaders who have found extraordinary success; they leverage their strengths and build effective teams around them with the skills they don’t have. As entrepreneurs we adopt numerous roles as we take our business from an idea through the various stages of business growth. This requires leadership and management skills, whether we are a sole trader or the owner of a large business. Of course these skills will differ in importance, depending on where we are in the business development cycle, but we need to know, recognise and acknowledge what our leadership and management style or talent is. We need to bring in the skills we do not have, and quite frankly don’t do well and probably don’t want to do; why waste time and energy developing a skill that will only ever be adequate at best? In the last issue of the RAW Entrepreneur I found Rachel Elnaugh’s comment “…as an entrepreneur focussed on pastures new has little energy left for running their existing (if by now somewhat boring) ‘big Money Machine’”, a very telling statement. Based on her article, it appears that for Rachel the ‘buzz’ and passion is achieved through creating and developing new ideas. Once a business is up and running, she is excited and motivated by moving on to the next new challenge. There is a woman who knows her strengths and interests. Although anyone starting a new venture 48 millionimpossible.com http://www.millionimpossible.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Raw 02 - September 2008

Raw 02 - September 2008 Contents Scott English Rachael Elnaugh Colin Stroud Heidi Weir Chris Wright Million Impossible Emma Thompson

Raw 02 - September 2008

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