“The power of growing your business as a leader”
Nathan Jamail – Keynote Speaker, Best Selling Author
Fact: If leaders focused on growing their people instead of growing their business- their business would grow 10X.
Growing your business vs. growing your people falls in the same trap mindset of urgent vs. important (how leaders get stuck working on ‘urgent fires’ instead of important coaching principals) or working in your business vs. working on your business (when leaders get stuck doing a role that another person could easily do so that they don’t have the time to grow the business because they are doing the wrong activities or roles), or most similar to coaching vs. managing (when leaders micromanage issues vs coaching teams to success); all have a similar theme in which we, as leaders, inherently know these truths but still don’t follow the right path to optimal success. And when it comes to truly growing our business- growing our people is the absolute truth to sustainable success and growth.
The WHY:
If we focus on growing our people- beyond training, product knowledge and industry experience- really focus growing our people- they will actually become better people, better employees and better leaders. They do this by becoming more skilled at communicating, listening, inspiring, selling- all of the soft skills that differentiate the strong employees from the weak (in which also creates more business and increases revenue/profits/overall growth). Think of how sports athletes train everyday until they retire- no matter how good or successful they are. In fact the best train the most often. They don’t learn more about the league they play in, they learn how they can get better at the basic skills that are used everyday- and most importantly coaches focus on making these players better every day- which is how they win more games. Also, think about this- if you replace your worst employee with a duplicate copy of your best employee how much better would your business be?
The HOW:
First overcome your fear that you as the leader are not good enough to grow your people or, perhaps you even fear they are actually better than you are. Don’t fear it- because hopefully, if you hired right, they are better than you in one or more aspects. That would be true in today’s sports too when you think about it. To grow your people- a leader does not have to be better, rather they just have to know how to make others better. Focus on the soft skills and go deep into the basics. No detail is too small. Coaching our people is not about telling people how to do their job, it is about how to make them better at their job. Trust those employees you want to keep will never complain about you ‘micro-managing’ them- they will be grateful for the coaching/challenge. As a leader and coach, you should be spending 2 hours a day coaching your team- and at 2 hours day you are still only coaching 20% of the time, which is not a bad start. The scary part is at 2 hours a day- you are at 200% more than most leaders!
Last note:
Most leaders won’t follow this particular principal of growing people vs growing the business- this is because growing your people requires selfless commitment, time and the results are sometimes not seen for weeks or months. However it is the secret sauce of the same leaders that continue to deliver the best results and produce the next generation of exceptional leaders. The secret to growing your business 10X is to grow your people everyday.
