Want to Sell Your Company in the Future? Follow The 8 Rules of Leadership
A booming economy creates a fertile marketplace for successful ‘leaders.’ Success can be fleeting. Economically challenging times requires agility, innovative thinking, courage, and daring. And this brand of leadership cannot be done alone. To maximize your valuation, follow these 8 Rules of Leadership.
Rule #1: It starts with the foundations of vision, integrity, character, and trust.
Rule #2: Leaders embody courage, which is required to achieve their vision.
Rule #3: Strong leaders build the organization’s foundation based on a culture of design that embodies the values of the organization.
Rule #4: Once that foundation is laid, it’s time to build strong relationships that hold your leadership skills and team together.
Rule #5: Successful leaders know that to succeed, they must maintain character and a standard of excellence.
Rule #6: Lead by example from the front lines of the organization’s vision, culture, and drive.
Rule #7: Strong leaders work for their staff, employees, and community. They do not work for you; you work for them.
Rule #8: Embrace Change.
All these traits must be developed and nurtured and cannot be found within one’s company. It takes sharing challenges, exploring new ideas, and vulnerability among one’s peers that are facing similar experiences to create the environment for the personal growth necessary to become a more successful leader. Afterall, “No one is a smart as all of us.”
Companies are faced with the challenge of growing their businesses in a chaotic world of complexity? We are faced uncertainty in a world fighting a new pandemic. We must make decisions in an environment marked by a changing cultural landscape, dynamic work mores, and transcendent technology.
John Chambers, former Cisco CEO, said, “Disrupt yourself or risk being disrupted by the competition.” Chambers was reflecting on the rapid pace of change and its impact on the business world.
“In the next 10 years, 40% of the Fortune 500 companies will be gone,” according to an estimate in a study from the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University. How do you make sure your business will be among the survivors and one of the disruptors?
When businesses embrace change, they are set up to find and maintain their Disruptive Advantage. They’ll have the culture, ambitions, infrastructure, and processes in place to help their people find and develop new business models, enabled by the creative use of digital technology.
Aversion to change retards growth, impedes productivity, and diminishes the company’s value to the marketplace. How does one develop a collaborative culture of success?
Leadership (“Real change requires a change of reality”)
Embracing change starts with leadership. Professional managers and entrepreneurial owners face a crisis of leadership. Change demands investment and risk. The ironies are prodigious. Risk aversion for professional managers, who do not want to put their positions on the line, or for owners who do not want to put their lifestyles on the line, is the first obstacle. Ironically, the decision not to make the changes necessary to be of value to their customers will lead to losing value.
The power of collaboration, support, and accountability in reaching the loftiest of goals pave the pathway of your walk to professional and personally success.
Today’s CEO’s must ask these questions. How can I increase employee engagement? How can I create the culture necessary for success? How can I foster accountability in a positive way? How can I keep my top performers from leaving? How can I teach my management team to handle conflict? How can you create a work/life balance?
About DSB & Associates. Our mission is to enable company owners to maximize valuations today through business planning, strategic marketing, sales, and financial planning, process improvement, leadership training, and better technology and security; so, they can execute their exit strategy on their terms tomorrow. Our uniqueness is that we combine revenue generation, financial acumen, building a culture of collaboration, and a history of successful engagements.
