Leadership Equals High-Profits
Learn the three primary factors you need to achieve a high-profit culture.
Building your leadership team is essential to achieving a high-profit culture in your company, you need three key factors in place and fully operational.
1. Select an “A” team.
First, to build an “A” team, you need outstanding leaders.
Specifically, you need them in the roles of sales, production and admin/finance. Typically, the owner takes on one or more of these roles when the company is smaller, but ultimately, you want to surround yourself with leaders in all three areas.
Have you heard the saying” The cream always rises to the top”? Well the level of your company will rise or fall to the level of your leaders—it’s that simple—so it’s critical to staff these positions with “A” players. Why, because leaders solve problems and leaders maximize resources, thus maximizing profits.
It is not enough to put A players in place, you need to set up these leaders with clear direct reports underneath them (every employee should have just one boss, not two or three), clear responsibilities and required results or success metrics. In other words, it needs to be clear to every employee what their job is and who they report to. Do not assume your leaders will just know. Too many companies have messy organizational charts and it is not clear who takes ownership for profit and client results.
You may think you already have these super leaders, but do they operate at the level needed to reach your dreams? An entrepreneur’s expectations can exceed the capacity of his or her team. So, in order to maintain a high level of leadership you should always be training and if needed, hiring to upgrade your team. If you have B players that have the potential to become A players, train them, don’t just discard them, discarding them would be an underutilization of valuable resources that already have a knowledge of your company that can be a significant advantage, then to bring in new employees.
To reach the full potential of your leaders, you need to form them into a cohesive team. It requires that everyone in your team be utterly honest with each other and stand up and take responsibility for the results assigned to their area. Do not let them place blame for failures within their areas of responsibility on others, they have to own it. Encourage your leaders to provide and get feedback from everyone within their division. Having your employees come to their leaders with honest feedback without the fear of repercussions will not only develop camaraderie but will also build that “A” team you need.
2. Set meaningful goals utilizing metrics to measure success and guide the team.
The second factor to building your “A” team is developing meaningful metrics to steer and motivate the team.
Before you play a game, be it sports or even board games, you know what the goals are, if you did not know the goals, you would have no way to measure how well you are doing. Business is no different. Having a scorecard that keeps the most important priorities front and center is essential. This will keep your team focused on the results and enable you to achieve success. The two most watched metrics are: sales and production. Meet and beat these, and you have your greatest chance of success.
Measuring sales figures (by month, by salesperson and by division) tell you if the market is being served the right way. Measuring production will tell you if you are able to profitable produce at the right daily and weekly pace to achieve success.
Each of division leader needs to know what metrics to be accountable for daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. Use your leaders to help develop these metrics through monthly, quarterly and annual evaluations of their performance. Prioritize their metrics, lay out which are the most important ones for each area. This will allow the leader to know that when that metric, when met, ensures that a multitude of other metrics are also met (e.g. Hours budgeted to complete the job). This will keep your “A” team focused, motivated and highly productive.
Metrics is what allows you as an entrepreneur to ensure your team maintains their “A” team status. Measuring metrics in production, sales, marketing, client satisfaction and employee development. Will give you a clear picture of how your company is performing. To many times business owners focus only in one area, the more areas you maximize your results, the larger the profits will be for your company.
3. Staying on the cutting-edge will drive your team to new heights.
In order to maintain market dominance, the entrepreneur needs to always be working “on” the business not “in” it, they cannot have his or her head in the sand or deep in the day to day. When this happens, the team loses its leader, and the leader loses his or her ability to think outside the box and establish cutting edge breakthroughs in the business. If you are not working on the business, you won’t sustain your “A” team.
The entrepreneur should always be networking with key clients, large prospects and establishing themselves as an industry expert. These things will allow you, as a leader, to develop your cutting-edge breakthroughs.
Once you have built your team and given team members their definitions of success, now they need guidance and turbocharging that comes from “cutting-edge breakthrough” leadership.
“A” teams achieve high-profits
What happens if you only have two out of the three? Without the owner or CEO bringing the cutting-edge breakthrough leadership, the company will only achieve low-altitude (mediocre) results. Without the company establishing and consistently using meaningful metrics, the company is likely to crash and burn from flying blind. Without the cohesive conflict developed within the team, the company will suffer from infighting in the cockpit, distracting it from all sorts of opportunities and threats. It takes all three to develop the high-profit culture where your super team will thrive.
Where to start?
This is the one thing I hear most often when working with new clients, “I do not know where to start”. An honest assessment of your goals, business and existing team is the first step in developing your “A” team. To create this team, you need vibrancy and adaptability in to capture new ideas, new technologies and new directions.
As a leader, your journey to build your “A” team starts with a clear and compelling vision. It is imperative you share this vision with everyone on your team, don’t keep it a secret, knowing what direction you want to go in will allow your “A” team to get you there.
Contact CBMS Consulting Services today by visiting our website at www.cbms.co or just give us a call at (631) 721-4347.
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