What makes an effective leader? How do great leaders narrow their focus and make the most of each day?
When you think about some of the most effective leaders you’ve met, have you noticed how they can seem to make the complex simple? Or how these great leaders can often distill their areas of focus down to a handful of priorities?
“Having interviewed dozens of turnaround CEOs I have seen this narrowing of focus with most of them,” says Mark Faust, president of Echelon Management. “They have a handful of priorities for the business’ growth, as well as a handful of priorities for their own leadership behaviors and role focus.”
Mark Faust will be speaking at the 2023 Top Producer Summit, which takes place Jan. 23-25. Register now!
Listen to him discuss the event with AgriTalk’s Chip Flory:
The first step in transforming your farm, Faust says, begins with you:
- Are you willing to spend even a fraction of one hour a day to think about your strategy, like a good leader?
- Are you willing to recruit the retired and outcasts, to build a great team?
- Are you willing to build up a culture of hope, focused on an empowering vision and intensify their focus on winning not just for themselves, but the team, their community and their world?
“Your focus within your role as the leader has an amazing power to accelerate your organization’s growth,” he says. “A leader, just like a company, has a singular point of strength, that if intensified, gives the highest return on effort of anything else you could focus upon.”
Faust says the steps for a “Leadership Transformation” are:
- Create a Vision of Your Role. You need to become the best version of yourself as leader.
- Prioritize the top one to three organizational objectives with which you should be most involved.
- Identify one to three of your organization’s greatest constraints, empower people, and kick off innovation efforts to ameliorate or eliminate those constraints.
- Ask for feedback. Share with one to three of your team members your ideas, objectives and strategy. Ask: How am I doing as a leader? What is one thing I could do better to focus? Do not respond, just take notes and say “Thank you!”
- Engage an outside third party from either your board or a strategic growth advisor to hold you accountable
“You can begin at any point in the year, but the power of this is that by improving yourself first, others follow,” Faust says.
Register for the Top Producer Summit!
