Business owners need to be so much more than just the face of a business when it comes to creating a successful company. The most important element to your business owner requirements is that as a leader, you need to inspire, motivate, and support your team to be the best they can be for your clients.When you make the huge leap into bringing on staff to support you and your business, you bring in the need for your position to transform.
When you were the only person driving the business forwards you did everything, and everything was your success or failure. Now you have a team, they can be given the opportunities to help save you that time and stress of having a million things to do each day. This requires some work from you, so your team can do their best in your business.
Don't skip on training day. Your team, no matter how experienced they are in previous roles, require you to train them to do the processes, tasks, technologies, and day to day job requirements that you have for them. You must commit time and energy to your members of staff to train them.This doesn't end once you feel they are trained however! You must spot the ways in which you can continue to up-skill your employees, as a good leader you need to keep an eye on the members of your staff and how you can help support them. This is what makes you a great leader - being there to help your team throughout their journey of working with you, helping them to see that they can comfortably and confidently come to you if they have a question, rather than feel they will be judged and shunned for not knowing something.
Listen to your team. Your team know what is happening each day, from their own perspectives, and we all know that 2 sets of eyes are better than 1! When you give your team the chance to share their opinions and thoughts on how the clients can be served better, or how business processes could be improved, you are not only showing your team that you value their opinion, but it also helps your business get better too!Let your team have the opportunities to share their opinions and thoughts, and actually respond or action them if you feel they can be implemented.
Don't be afraid to delegate. Your team want the opportunities to help you, so give them the tasks that will do so. As a business owner, you should have the knowledge of everything in your business, but you needn't do everything in your business. Delegation is so important to the life of your business, and ultimately to your wellbeing too. Consider the tasks that really will help you in your business, and curate the job description to support this, so the right candidate can come to you, who will be able to jump into the tasks, making your delegation smooth and easy to do.
Don't micromanage! When you do delegate to your employees, do not spend their working lives looking over their shoulders! One of the biggest falling points for new leaders is that they micromanage each and every task their employees do. This causes those members of staff to feel that you do not trust them to get their jobs done - it takes trust as a leader to help your team shine. Once you have given your staff the training, you won't need to micromanage the delegated tasks, because they will not only feel prepared to do the tasks, but they will also feel they can come to you if they have questions, because you have built that rapport with them from day 1.When you think about a leader that you would want to have, if you were an employee, what are the key traits they would have? Consider if you are replicating this in your business, and if you aren't what are the steps you can take to help become the leader you aspire to be?
