The Leader Mindset
Guest Contributor: Marci Cowan
For more than five years, our coaching and leadership training company has offered a particular workshop in which we ask participants, all of whom are business people, to write 15 or more “I Am” statements in three minutes. While people may identify themselves by their profession (“I am a doctor), their family role (“I am a Mom”), or as having particular attributes (“I am positive and optimistic”), less than 5 percent of the participants ever identify themselves as a “leader.” What is the leader mindset, and why is it important to you as you grow professionally and personally?
A leader mindset is fundamental to your business success whether you are a company employee, a solopreneur or the CEO of a corporation. It’s a way of thinking about the business journey and the ultimate destination you plan to achieve. And, perhaps most importantly to the majority of business people, it will lead to increased profits and revenues, enabling you to have the lifestyle and freedom you originally imagined. Most people who run their own small businesses are stuck in the “employee” or “self-employed” mindset in which they haven’t crystallized their values, haven’t created a vision for the endpoint of the business journey, and don’t understand how to solicit feedback and “keep score” to create a business that is constantly improving.
Here are three steps you can take immediately to begin moving yourself into the leader mindset.
Identify Your Values
Your values are your guiding principles, and they should be reflected in everything you do. Thus, a first step to create the leader mindset is value clarification and crystallization.
An exercise we use in our workshops is to ask participants to write a Statement of Culture for their company. What points of culture would be important for your employees and customers to know about you and your business? While many business people identify integrity in their relationships and excellence in their product and service offerings as core values, what are the other values that drive you and your business? Do you value balance, success, credibility, continuing education, fun, gratitude?
Value clarification is an ongoing process. It requires self-awareness and introspection. The business owners with whom we work often wonder how they will find some time on a regular basis for personal reflection to keep values top of mind and to continue refining them. But research has shown that people with value clarity have the highest degree of commitment to their businesses, primarily because this clarity allows them to more easily align their actions with their values.
Create Your Vision
Vision is a view of the future, and leaders know that vision is critical to business success. In order for your vision to be relevant to you and those who support your success, it needs to be framed for the long term, well after you are done with your professional career. It needs to describe how the world will look because of you and the impact your business endeavors will have on the world. Every person who works with or for you needs to know your vision. Your chances for success increase dramatically if others can enroll enthusiastically in your cause.
An exercise we conduct with workshop participants involves having them pretend they are being interviewed by a magazine of their choice at the end of their business journey. Did they retire as the CEO of a large company? Did they sell their business assets for millions of dollars? What do they like to do with all the money and free time that success has allowed them? Giving life to a vision by writing it down and articulating it to others is much more likely to make it manifest.
Solicit Feedback
Great leaders actively seek out feedback. If you’re on a team, other team members or colleagues can provide feedback. If you’re a solopreneur, you can solicit feedback from vendors, suppliers and customers.
One way to solicit feedback is to keep score. We have a completed feedback form from every person who has ever participated in our workshops and seminars. We want to know if, in their opinion, the material is relevant, the speaker is engaging, the venue is high quality and the experience is referenceable to others. Where constructive criticism is noted on the feedback form, we follow up with the participant and ask for more details and specifics.
Learn and understand what people think about your products, your customer service, your reputation, the attitude of your delivery people, your return policy, your location, your uniforms, and whatever else may be important to your business success. If you don’t know, you can’t do anything to improve it!
Leadership is not a title or position, it’s a mindset. With these three steps, start to liberate the leader in you for a more successful business journey.
Marcy Cowan is a principal in TriOdyssey GPS, a leadership development and training company based in Atlanta, Georgia which provides franchisors with tools to help move their franchisees from the self-employed mindset to the leader mindset for increased growth and profit. For further information, call Marcy at 770-912-0250.
