As an entrepreneur, you’ll be used to wearing a number of different hats and being held accountable for a range of responsibilities, from accounting and money management to marketing and business development. As your small business grows, these responsibilities will become increasingly overwhelming, at which point you’ll need to get help with the tasks that are less important or simply too complicated or time-consuming for you to handle alone. From this moment on, your leadership skills are vital to your success.
Here are seven ways to be a better leader.
Work With Your Team
Being a leader doesn’t mean working over your employees. In fact, more often than not, you should be working right alongside them. In regards to a small business, this might mean creating some of your blog content yourself, posting on the social media platforms, or responding to customer queries and complaints. Unless you’re willing to get your hands dirty now and then and do what your employees do, you shouldn’t expect them to do it happily every single working day.
Leave Your Door Open
Communication can be the difference between a good and bad leader. For this reason, you should never stop trying to improve your communication skills. You should also do what you can to create an open and honest working environment by establishing an open door policy. Your door doesn’t necessarily need to be open all the time, of course, but doing so is a clear sign to your team that you’re ready to talk whenever they need you. This shows that you genuinely care.
Stay Up To Date
No one wants to work for someone that is behind on the times, especially if that causes harm to your company. With that in mind, you need to keep upgrading yourself and stay current on the latest business news. Finding yourself a mentor or business consultant is a great place to start. Ideally, this person should have experience running a number of different companies, like Jozef Opdeweegh. You could also read business newspapers and blogs and listen to podcasts.
Don’t Ignore Your Mistakes
Great leaders aren’t scared to admit when they make a mistake, so you shouldn’t be either. After all, learning from what you do wrong is much more beneficial than pretending that you’re perfect. With that in mind, you need to be humble enough to share your struggles with your team and teach them how they can overcome similar issues. This will help to improve and strengthen your company as a whole, while also building a more united and cohesive workforce and culture.
Learn To Delegate Effectively
Trying to do everything on your own won’t benefit anyone. All it will do is lead to wasted time, stress, and exhaustion, all of which will harm you and your business. For this reason, you should focus on tasks that you are skilled in and are most important and delegate everything else to your employees, freelancers, and agencies. You should also use software, apps, and other online tools to automate repetitive, monotonous jobs, like posting to each social media platform.
Stop Wasting Time Unnecessarily
In the world of business, time is just as precious a resource as money, so you should stop wasting it wherever you can. This, of course, is important in regards to your time, but it’s just as crucial for your employees too. For this reason, you should limit the number of unnecessary meetings you hold each week and ensure that every meeting you do hold has a schedule or plan to follow. You should also automate or outsource tasks that aren’t suited to your team’s skills.
Know “Perfect” Doesn’t Exist
Everyone in the world makes mistakes now and then, even you. With that in mind, you can’t expect your employees to do everything perfectly all the time. Of course, you should strive for perfection, but don’t get angry or start dishing out punishments when things don’t go quite as planned. Instead, work with your employees and help them to learn from their mistakes. You should also make sure that you only assign tasks to those with the experience to do them well.
Being a leader in business is never easy, especially when you’re new to the experience. You’ll never get things right all the time, but that doesn’t mean that you should stop trying altogether. Instead, your evolution as a leader should continue every single day. Hopefully, with the advice above, you’ll find this a little easier to handle.