Lead Your People

If it weren't for people, owning a business would be great. Those aren't my words, but I'm hearing them more often these days. In this video, I want to give you a few thoughts about why it's getting harder to lead people. And I want to give you a few things that we can do to become more effective leaders. Have you ever seen a movie?

When someone walks into the general store, you hear the little bell chime above the door and they walk in and the storekeeper is stocking shelves and he turns and greets the customer. There's always another employee, probably a young boy working and stocking shelves, doing anything that the store owner needs. The most complicated thing about this business is ordering what's not in stock.

When the shopkeeper explains to the customer that it'll take weeks for that item to come in. The customer accepts it, purchases what he can and moves on. Life was simple. Everybody seemed happy. When life was simple, running a business was simple. Today, life is complicated. People's expectations are changing dramatically. When I say people, I mean customers. I mean our employees, our managers and our leaders.

We expect things to happen exactly the way we want them. And we want what we want. Right now, we're also becoming less tolerant of other people, which is probably why people are saying if it weren't for people running a business, it would be great. The truth is, now that the world is more complicated and people's expectations are changing so quickly, running a business is more complicated.

How do we lead people more effectively today? The first thing we must do as business owners and entrepreneurs is cast a clear vision so everyone knows where we're going. Our number one priority as the leader is to keep our vision in focus. The second thing that we must do is attract the right people to our organization. Our vision must attract them, and they must be dedicated to help us reach it.

And finally, we need to become the leader our company needs us to be. By personally adopting a growth mindset, we model the behaviors and characteristic our team members need so they can grow. In the end, we need to lead our people. Please tune in next week as we explore ways to grow your company and remember as you grow, your company grows.  Keep growing!