What regrets do you currently have in regards to leading and managing the growth of your business? Have you ever thought about the regrets you will have in the future, perhaps at the sunset of your career in regards to leading, managing and growing your business?
I’ve asked the question of hundreds of CEOs, VPs, sales managers etc. and three of the top answers may surprise you. I pull these answers from the more successful managers, leaders, business owners I’ve worked with. The most successful tend to think a bit differently. The most successful will have not been as likely to have regrets around family, faith and community, the most successful are successful because those priorities had their right place in life’s plans.
Mark Faust will be presenting, “Growth of Bust! Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business” at the 2020 Top Producer Seminar, which runs Jan. 28-30. Register now!
The greatest regrets I hear from the more successful leaders are:
1. Not thinking big enough
People are frequently surprised by their successes, and thus they learn, that the greatest constraint to their growth was their own thought. How have you and your leadership team limited your growth through limiting thoughts, limited vision, limited goals, etc.?
You want to always have the checks and balances of an excellent and exhortational board of directors as well as outside advisors that get you to push the envelope in a rational but challenging way.
The last thing you want to be saying to yourself at the end of a leadership term is, “I wish I set the bar higher, and I wish I had more people around me that would have exhorted me to aim higher.”
2. Not focusing on you and your team’s core areas of passion
When you focus on an area of passion, you have more energy, creativity and determination. You wake up to a purpose not an alarm clock. There are management tools that help you to regularly bring your managers back to the areas that leverage their passion and thus boost their productivity.
You should be reviewing a person’s role focus every six months, yours included. Asking questions like, “how could I spend more time what I love doing most in my role and how could I follow my passions more frequently in my role” will invigorate you and your performance.
3. Not connecting the short term to the long term in order to accelerate toward the vision.
It’s called the “tyranny of the urgent.” We all have daily distractions and minutia that can take our eye of the end goal and direction and hypnotize us with a sense of busyness rather than a sense of purposefulness.
The cure is to have meetings management processes and norms in place that help to balance the strategic and tactical focus. We must manage our teams to be focusing appropriately on the longer term vision and outcome rather just the day-to-day distractions and quarterly P&Ls.
If you would like to share my meeting and management communication best practices with your leadership team, drop me a note and I’ll get you a synopsis of our meetings management best practices training that can help you and your team eliminate these areas of Top Regrets.
But the action we all must take now if we are to be good leadership stewards of the organizations we’ve been entrusted with is to
- Think bigger
- Intensify our focus on our personal passion and the passion of our teams
- Get our own thinking and the thinking of the teams we lead to better connect our short-term priorities to our long-term visions.
Growth has few regrets…other than not growing as much as the potential holds.
Mark Faust will be presenting, “Growth of Bust! Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business” at the 2020 Top Producer Seminar, which runs Jan. 28-30. Register now!
Mark Faust is a growth advisor, CEO/board coach and professional speaker speaking on strategy, growth and management. He has also been an adjunct professor at Ohio University and the University of Cincinnati. His book Growth or Bust! Proven Turnaround Strategies To Grow Your Business has been a #1 best seller in the business section of Barnes & Noble. He has been a member of over a dozen of boards and is a Vistage speaker. Mark can be reached at 513-623-8000, mark@em1990.com, www.echelonmanagement.com
