Becoming a Better Business Leader: 5 Tips for Success
Becoming a business leader takes more than just being in the right role or having a professional attitude. A business leader should be able to inspire, empower and motivate their teams. Although what it takes to do all three can be learned with the right training and enough commitment, it takes someone special to do it. Many of the skills and qualities that make a good business leader are developed from experience, but there are a few things you can do to become a better business leader.
Know Your Employees
It might seem trivial but knowing everything you can about your employees will make you a better leader. The process of getting to know them should start before you hire them. By doing your due diligence, you will ensure that the business and relevant managers identify, interview, and hire people who are the perfect fit for the business, and you should feel that you know the candidates well before this whole process is done.
Knowing your employees means you understand their strengths and weaknesses. This makes it possible to assign them roles and responsibilities that fit them well and to know how to communicate with them in addition to leading them down the right path to their personal and professional development.
Connecting with your employees the right way because you know them so well also makes it easier to be open and forthcoming with them. This allows you to encourage and motivate them individually and as a group. In doing so, you will be seen as a business leader who is accessible, who cares about their employees, and who always provides support to their employees.
Be Open to Personal and Professional Improvement and Development
Personal and professional development should not be relegated to employees only because business leaders need both too. You might have had to develop personally and professionally by taking leadership skills training, but once you have this role you need to show that you deserve it. What you do to show this will help you thrive even more in that position.
For most people, that will mean looking within themselves to find their strengths and weaknesses while also trying to understand themselves better. Doing so is a critical part of personal development because, after all, you cannot improve if you don’t understand yourself.
For many business leaders, that means investing in continuing education. Good business leaders know that advanced degrees can help them understand the business better, help them navigate an increasingly complex global marketplace, deal better with changing customer expectations, and implement new processes, systems, and operations anchored in technology.
Business leaders who want to thrive in this way can enroll in the online MBA degree programme at Aston University to earn an MBA that gives them real-world skills that turn them into excellent business leaders.
Ask for Feedback
Personal and professional improvement also means listening to the feedback you get from different people, including your employees. Feedback should be seen as an opportunity to grow instead of as a criticism of your leadership or ability to motivate and encourage.
Many employees are uncomfortable with giving their bosses feedback because they fear the outcome. If you are a good business leader, this should not be happening because you will have already worked to ensure your employees feel you are part of the team.
It can still happen though, and this is why it is a good idea to ask for anonymous feedback from your employees. Ensure your employees know there will be no retaliation on your part, and that you are just looking to make the workplace better for everyone.
Use the provided feedback to discover additional areas of improvement. If you can, talk to a professional who will help you work through the issues identified by your employee. The combination of employee feedback and professional advice can help you much more than reading books on leadership ever will.
Keep a Positive Attitude
As a business leader, you always want things to go right with your business and employees all the time. However, this is not realistic because every business and its leader will face obstacles from time to time. How you deal with these obstacles determines the type of leader you are.
Keeping a positive attitude means finding the good in anything that does not go according to plan. By looking at what has gone bad positively, you reduce panic and confusion within yourself and your employees, giving yourself enough time to identify and rectify the problem.
Your employees will also notice if you think a problem is overwhelming. This can create an issue where engagement and productivity are reduced. Enthusiasm and confidence even in the face of seemingly insurmountable issues can have a significant positive impact on the working environment and the trust your employees have in you.
Lead Instead of Managing
A manager is very different from a leader in that the manager leaves their employees to find solutions and implement them while overseeing what they are doing. A good business leader, on the other hand, shows instead of telling. They provide their employees with a vision, task or responsibility to work towards and then support them to ensure the employee can reach the required goals.
Acknowledging the accomplishments and successes of your employees regularly keeps them inspired, motivated and productive while also endearing you to employees. This goes hand in hand with not berating employees who are struggling with or failing at something. Instead, try to find out what happened and why it happened so you can develop strategies to not only solve it at the time but also stop it from happening again.
Leaders who lead instead of managing typically have happier employees and lower employees turn around. The sentiment that people quit their bosses more often than they quit their jobs are true, and you do not want to be the kind of leader or boss that people leave.
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Being a business leader is about much more than your qualifications. It is also about how you handle your employees and other people, plus various aspects of your personal and professional life. Good business leader looks within to improve themselves and cultivate qualities and an environment that help their employees and business thrive.
Pranab Bhandari is an Editor of the Financial Blog “Financebuzz”. Apart from writing informative financial articles for his blog, he is a regular contributor to many national and international publications namely Tweak Your Biz, Growth Rocks ETC.
