A Matter of Everyone’s Leadership
Blog’s Digest – Podcasts
A Matter of Everyone’s Leadership
[Picture: Emma Frances Logan]
As a leader, your company’s performance depends largely on the contribution and commitment of every team member. Instilling leadership qualities in every professional and personal capacity can aid to get the best out of everyone and convey a sense of ownership and responsibility for their share of the company’s success. But employees should also have self-interest in growing the business accordingly.
Ideas, Thoughts and Quotes pulled from…
Broke But Not Broken: A Success Story, Part 2, ft. Bedros Keuilian, with Andy Frisella – MFCEO212
Cultural Replicas
Being in a leadership position, you are the conductor of an orchestra. In an ongoing pursuit, at everyday and in every conversation, your objective is to drive home culture, to communicate a vision and establish what your company stands for. Make your employees understand how their current position and duty and functions contribute to creating and sustaining this image. Everyone adds value. Ranging from managers on different levels, accountants, marketing or sales person to facility management and cleaning personnel. Doing this for long enough, after time, you…
…create cultural replicas of what you want your company to stand for in your people, and your people will further the creation of that.
Andy Frisella, 00:07:15
By assigning responsibility and passing on stewardship to everyone in your company, you instill intrinsic motivation for them to feel accountable and model your ethical behavior. The culture you drafted out on paper for your organization to be about will be aligned with the actual culture lived within.
Idea Meritocracy
You don’t have to be right all the time, let someones else’s idea be the right one. Your job is just to pick the right idea.
Andy Frisella, 00:10:58
For an leader it can require humility to accept that others can have a better idea or solution to a problem and that he’s not always right. Furthermore, as Bedros Keuilian points out, the fact that you, as a leader, have made your team members feel safe enough to speak out their ideas, whether those ideas are outlined perfectly or impeccable all the time, is emblematic for an open minded, constructive and no-blame culture where everyone is indeed allowed and welcomed to form and have a voice.
The role of an CEO is not that of a dictator, it’s that of a decision-maker.
Andy Frisella, 00:12:55
For which, in the first place, multiple and diverse ideas are required to be on the proverbial table. This spurs creativity and conveys a feeling of empowered self-realization under the roof of the company’s vision and code of conduct. Feeling as an integral part contributing to translating the company’s mission into action, with leadership as ultimate decision makers and bearer of responsibility, employees will be more likely to provide them with resources needed from them to make their common endeavor a success.
Someone who successfully applied, refined and digitalized Idea Meritocracy is Bridgewater Associated founder Ray Dalio. If you like to read more on this concept and get other insights from Ray into his life and work, have a look at his highly recommended book:
Ray Dalio – Principles: Life and Work
Worker’s Self-Interest in Business Growth
From the perspective of an employee, a thriving and growing business due his/her contribution, creates the opportunity for pay raise. The company makes more money, you make more money – a win/win situation. Having provided more value than you maybe previously were payed for, having succeeded expectations, you are in a good negotiation position to claim a raise. And that, with the feeling of doing so righteously.
Do more than you are being paid to do, and you’ll eventually be paid more for what you do.
– Zig Ziglar
With business growth your responsibilities and tasks will eventually grow as well. Thus, even if your wage will not increase, you improved or learnt new skills. Feeling that monetary compensation and your share at the company’s success is out of balance for too long, you can use your newly acquired and field-tested qualifications to find another job that will pay you accordingly. Creating the habit of always striving to give your best on a task that you were given and accepted is a universal one that will benefit you in other areas in your life too – relationships with family and friends, taking care of your health, pursuing and enjoying hobbies, taking tome for self-development. Success, no matter in which area, is a universal concept. It’s a habit. How you do anything is how you do everything.
I’ve never seen an example of where doing the right thing didn’t work out in your favor.
Andy Frisella, 00:15:10
Winning is Everyone’s Responsibility
For a more practical example, Bedros mentions web developers that have control over the time people spend on the page, whether people buy the low barrier offers or not and whether the site is SEO’ed and ranked high on google. He illustrates one important concept:
Everybody in the company has control over the money needle.
Bedros Keuilian, 00:28:34
For every employee to independently take on their responsibility for the company’s growth to occur, you create personal and professional leadership positions and centers at every position. Leadership should invest into human resources management and especially development accordingly as their responsibility towards the organization and every single member.
What are you built for?
Given that not everyone has the same innate skill set or talent, to perform at your best, i.e. providing the best ROI of your time and energy for the organization and it’s mission that you agreed to commit part of your life to, you need to find out in which position you contribute the most to any team or endeavor. Different confounding factors in different environments and situations have to be taken into account, so that the role you’re assuming in one work setting may not be the best suited one for you in another one. To meet your obligations and act in the best interest of the organization, you maybe have to subordinate personal preferences and aversions. Just like it can require humility for a leader to pick the right decision, whether or not it is his own, in sole interest of the organization that he committed to – off course oftentimes he/she’s also the one who defines the ethical framework within which decisions are right or not. As it is with every goal in life one set out to achieve that, from time to time, may goes against momentarily tendencies of the self, it is the goal to keep the goal the goal.
