Building a leadership team is easy, but building a leadership team that helps small businesses reach their goals requires a little more effort than hiring and promoting.
So how do you create an effective leadership team for your small business? Let’s explore the ways to build a leadership team that drives profit-focused results effectively.
Benefits of Building a Leadership Team for Your Small Business
Many small businesses lack the luxury of a large staff, and business owners assume several positions. But business owners can’t wear every hat as their company grows, and forgoing a leadership team can lead to burnout—not just for overworked owners but also their employees.
The efforts you put into building a strong leadership team are well worth it because strong leadership teams can drive your business, freeing you up to focus on running the company instead of working in the company. Leadership teams play a crucial role in the success of your business by clarifying employees’ priorities, developing effective processes, and navigating them through roadblocks.
What Makes a Good Leadership Team for Small Businesses?
Leading a small to medium-sized business is different from leading a big company. When you’re in the upper ranks of a large corporation, empowering leadership to be better is a responsibility that’s often diffused to someone higher in the chain of command. But when you’re at the top of a small to mid-sized company, there’s no diffusion of responsibility—it all rests on you.
Below are the unique traits that make a good leadership team for small businesses:
Influencing the Future
John Maxwell said, “Leadership is influence—nothing more, nothing less.” As a small business owner, it’s your job to execute change, meaning that a decent amount of your time is working at a grassroots level to let people know what it means to them, adjustments they need to make personally and professionally, and what the future looks like if it is successful. Whether the change is a new procedure, schedule, structure, or initiative, it’s crucial to have conversations focused around it so team members can fully embrace and execute it.
Being the Keeper of the Vision
As a business owner, working with your leadership team to help employees understand your company’s vision is crucial for small businesses. Your goal is to help them understand what their role is in achieving the vision, how they fit within the culture, and how they’re going to take action to achieve the vision.
Removing Constraints and Destroying Roadblocks
As the owner, you have control of your company’s resources, you understand the bigger picture, and you have the power to make adjustments. When you see your leadership team getting bogged down, it’s important to recognize the problem and help them find a way to resolve it or move forward.
Is Your Leadership Team Effective?
As a business owner, it’s your job to develop and coach your leadership team to be collaborative, results-oriented, and profit-focused. But how can you tell if your team is making the right decisions in order to drive profit-focused results?
A few signs that your leadership team might need some development include:
- Team leadership meetings are too long and leave employees feeling frustrated.
- Your managers aren’t accomplishing a lot.
- Communication is lacking.
- You’re noticing finger-pointing and backbiting among your leadership team members.
- People are going around their managers and coming directly to you… and you’re drowning.
It’s common for performance problems to start at the management level—and the sooner you encourage leadership team development, the better.
Your leadership has a huge impact on the success of your business—it’s brought your company to where it is today, but how do you figure out where to go from here? Business coaching can help.
How to Build a Leadership Team That Drives Profit-Focused Results
You might be realizing that your leadership team needs improvement, but where do you go from here? How do you empower leadership in a way that drives profit-focused results for your small business?
Below are a few practical actions you can take to build a leadership team that results in growth, stability, and strength:
Master Delegation
Mastering the art of delegation is the single best thing you can do to build a leadership team that drives the results you want. When you delegate lower priority tasks to team leaders, you spend more of your time, talents, and expertise on work that truly moves your company forward by freeing yourself from tasks that don’t result in profit.
Develop Meeting Rhythm and Communication Systems
Once you’ve begun to delegate and others are beginning to drive the day-to-day part of your business, the next step for building a leadership team that’s successful is to develop a meeting rhythm. That way, you can consistently interact with leaders you’ve delegated tasks to. Since you no longer have your hand in every little thing that’s going on, developing a more sophisticated communication system is crucial to help you stay in the loop.
Master Change Management and Coaching Methods
As the leader of your small business, it’s important to help develop your organization’s people. Your primary role is to drive change, so mastering the process of change management is crucial. As you navigate through the change management maze, you’ll find yourself needing to coach your team members rather than completing the work on your own. Using proven business coaching methods to help guide them results in a stronger, more capable leadership team.
Implement SERVANT Model
Implementing the SERVANT model in your small business helps you build a leadership team that drives profit-focused results. With the model, you’ll:
- Master time management and delegation
- Develop meeting rhythm and communication systems
- Build capacity and remove roadblocks
- Master change management and coaching methods
- Build a solid, capable senior leadership team
- Implement a SERVANT style leadership
Leaders that manage using the SERVANT model serve their team and your organization first and never prioritize their own objectives. Implementing the SERVANT model in your small business means you can operate your business through your leadership team knowing that your organization’s needs always come first.
Empowering Leadership With the SERVANT Model
At Inspire Results Business Coaching, we can help you build a leadership team that drives profit-focused results. Our team of coaching professionals modify methods and tools generally written for large corporations and make them useful for small business owners. Within a few months of implementing the SERVANT model in your small business, you’ll begin to see results in your culture, operations, and profit. You’ll also have peace of mind knowing that you’re doing the right thing for your team members, your business, and your community. Contact us today to start building a leadership team that drives profit-focused results.
