Why Leadership Matters in Your Family Business

I agree wholeheartedly with John Maxwell who said:

“Everything rises and falls on leadership.”

The quality of your leadership impacts everything in your organization.

• Leaders are catalysts of change
• Leaders drive your organization to success
• Leaders initiate action and provide guidance

When everything is going well, it is leadership that keeps people from getting complacent.

When things are going poorly, it is leadership that rights the situation and sets a new course.

Leadership provides purpose, vision, and hope for the future.

Without good leadership, a whole host of problems arise.

Signs you have leadership problems in your company

All the following are caused by poor leadership:

• Low employee morale
• Lack of productivity
• Poor customer and employee retention
• Lack of teamwork and employee engagement, increased conflict
• Resistance to change or improvements
• Downturns in revenue or profit
• Reduced or nonexistent innovation

Are any of these a problem in your business?

The good news is that leadership is a skill that can be learned.

Good leadership is ACTIVE

At the Alliance, we’ve turned leadership into a verb. We call it “leadership-ing.”

That’s because leadership is active; it’s something you DO.

Leadership-ing is an ongoing process of developing alignment and creating clarity for your team.

As leaders in our companies, we recognize that we are here today – and we have a point we want to get to in the future. In an ideal world, we hope that everyone would just line up behind us and march in a straight line. And maybe a few will do that.

But not everybody does that.

You may have some employees that actively resist the direction you’re going in.

Others may have a different idea of the direction you should go.

And maybe you have others who want to follow but are unsure of what their role should be.

Our job as leaders is to lead – by bringing the future to the present.

We do that by providing Alignment and Clarity.

This is something leaders should be doing daily.

Constantly reminding people of the north star vision, values and mission, the organization’s policies, and processes – and their role within it.

As one of our clients put it “we live by the Alignment Triangle.”

(The video clip above is an excerpt from our training on Alignment, you can get the full recording here: Free Resources)

Good leadership makes great things happen

When your leaders embrace their role of “leadership-ing” your company can look forward to benefits like these:

• Employees becoming empowered and engaged
• A strong sense of alignment with employees working together to attain common aspirations
• Your work culture can be inspiring and fun
• Productivity improves and employee turnover decreases
• Continuous improvement becomes part of the culture and innovation is ignited
• Change becomes more easily accepted and conflicts are resolved faster
• Higher levels of customer satisfaction and customer retention
• Faster conflict resolution and better productivity
• Increased growth, higher profits

Want to learn more about how to improve the leadership in your company? Register below for a free online training.

If you’d like some assistance developing stronger leadership in your organization, contact us for a free consultation.