During a lunch meeting the other day, a colleague asked me, “Could you help me elevate my organization to one that is highly engaged, more profitable, and employee growth-focused.” I thought for a moment then said, “You’re going to both like and dislike the two answers I’m going to give you. Here’s the one you will like. Changing a company is easy and straightforward, and I’ve done it many times.“
”Here’s the part you may not like. Change starts with you and with your leadership skills. Your growth will take effort and practice, and when you grow your capabilities, the rewards will be amazing.
“Here’s the best news,” I explained. “Not only will you change your organization within the next year, but you will also likely increase profits by $1 to $2 million.”
Increasing profits is not hard, nor is it difficult work; it just takes practice – lots of practice to raise yourself to be a fantastic leader who produces extraordinary results. Think about it. Most of us spend more time practicing our tennis, golf game, or other hobbies than we do to develop our leadership skills. The biggest secret yet – becoming an expert performance leader is the key to unlocking explosive profitability growth that many of my clients have achieved.
The Seven Insider Secrets
Here are seven insider secrets I discovered over 20+ years of consulting and from interviews with hundreds of people for my international best-selling book Expert Performance: Achieve Extraordinary Results with the Team You Have – Guaranteed!
You can look forward to my future writings when I expand on each secret laying out step-by-step instructions for your practice. (If you are impatient, you can find all of these seven insider secrets – and more – and easy to practice skills in my book. Here’s a link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08111DW2F
1. Focus on the Future.
Top leaders concentrate on the future, not the past. Throughout all of your communication, emphasize the future and opportunities that lie ahead. Stop dwelling on past errors and instead steer people to what the organization could do differently, to never to make those mistakes again.
2. Emphasize Strengths
Expert performers accentuate employee strengths. Focus on strengths putting people into situations that amplify their talents. Stop working on weaknesses that don’t get you or your people where they need to be – you are wasting everyone’s time! One of my clients used the strength of introversion to become a different type of leader who used his quiet personality to increase engagement, efficiency, and profitability.
3. Build an Expert Performing Team
Expert leaders fill their teams with the best people possible. Grow, develop and expand the skills of your top contributors. Working with individuals who are not top performers saps your energy, time, and strength, forcing you to compensate for poor performance. One of my clients regularly builds solid, high-performance teams, and as a result, most often exceeds company expectations and contributes more profit and revenue than his colleagues.
4. Engage and Grow Your Employees
Top people engage and grow employees, creating an environment in which employees bring their minds to work to help expand the business. When employees bring their discretionary efforts to a company, profits and revenue sore.
Here is a simple, quick tip that will increase your engagement dramatically, at least 10 percentile points. Listen intently for your employees’ dreams, then help your employees fulfill those dreams. (If you want to measure your engagement against national or international norms, I recommend the Gallup engagement survey -- https://q12.gallup.com/public/en-us/Features -- 12 simple questions will help you predict your performance and profitability for the coming year!)
5. Teach Everyone How the Company Makes Money
The best leaders teach all employees how they individually contribute to the performance and profitability of their organization. It’s human nature that we want to do meaningful work and add to the welfare of our team.
Teaching this simple but powerful process helped one of my clients increase profits by 50% in one year and another almost 300%. (Take a look at this book: The Great Game of Business. https://www.amazon.com/Great-Game-Business-Expanded-Updated/dp/0385348339 )
6. Learn How to be an Extraordinary Influencer
Learn the skills to influence others and practice these skills every single day. For example, while at lunch a colleague remarked how I had engaged the waitress, got her smiling and laughing, and confiding that I had made her day. I told my colleague he had witnessed one type of influence – an ability to change the emotional states of others. Granted, there’s more to influence than just changing emotional states, but anyone can learn, practice, and become extraordinary at all of influence. Just like much of leadership, we can practice influence every day and everywhere.
7. Be a Caring, Compassionate, and Understanding Leader
Perhaps this secret is the most important. Great leaders care about their employees, they are compassionate with their people, and they understand the difficulties everyone faces daily. You will want to join other leaders in this compelling and common trait. Practice viewing every challenging employee issue through the filter of the compassionate leader.
