Two Vital Abilities Any Leader Must HaveWritten by Shaun Kirk, MHS, PT, MTC
As a business owner, you are a leader whether you like it or not. Whether you like it or not you have to guide your group in order to expand your organization. And whether you like it or not, there are some difficult situations that you have to confront and handle -- hopefully in a way that inspires confidence in you from your staff.I commonly say that in order to be successful you only need to be right 51% of time. You really don’t have to be much more right than that to make it. Fortunately or unfortunately more correct you are in your actions, decisions, policies, directions and programs more agreement you get from your group. Some people, one would say, are natural born leaders. I believe a natural born leader is one who is right more than 51% of time, but even more importantly is willing to be wrong 49% of time. He or she is willing to make difficult decisions organizationally in planning, administration and justice within group. The group then respects him or her for making call and is more likely to support leader in future decisions. If a business owner has guided his organization to high levels of prosperity over a period of time, when that business owner presents a new plan or goal to staff they are likely to support it because that leader has demonstrated a majority of correct decisions and actions in past. Conversely, if a business owner has not guided his organization to desired levels of success in past, when that business owner presents a new plan or goal to staff they are likely to disagree with or not comply with plan because leader has demonstrated a majority of incorrect decisions and actions in past. Business owners I have met commonly know what they should do but most of time they lack courage to make decision and act. I see this so often — an owner knows exactly what he needs to do to expand his organization or handle a particular staff member, but chooses to do something else; something easier to face, something easier to confront. This choice, in essence, makes him do wrong thing. A real leader is one who does right thing for group even if it doesn’t win a popularity contest. If you formulate a positive plan, if you get agreement on it from your staff, if you are not weak about your orders and if you follow through and get compliance, you will expand. We find in a less courageous leader an inability to issue an order and probably more importantly lack of ability to get compliance to that order. These are two vital abilities that any leader must possess. The ability to make call and ability to make sure it gets done.
| | Businesses Need to 'Rehumanise'Written by Jesse S. Somer
Big companies and corporations have lost human touch. The question is, when will humanity catch on, or like robotic sheep will we do whatever business shepherds tell us, no matter how bad we are treated? I am talking from firsthand interaction here. Aren’t you tired of having to talk to machines and sit waiting in queues that may not even really exist, while horrible music repeats itself over and over for eternity? How about having to talk to person after person as they try to find someone else who ‘can’ do task that you need done? What about machine that tells you to speak into phone but can never properly interpret what you are saying? Or pushing buttons, how many numbers have you had to push before finally being told that section you are looking for is vacant? Vacant, how about humans you do finally get in contact with but for some strange reason know less about their job than you do?I may sound pessimistic but I truly believe that human society is meant to evolve differently from this path of customer numbers and automatically generated notices. We are intelligent creatures, well, in many ways, and I just wonder why we haven’t created systems for our own society that are more conducive to making our community a happier place to live in. I am definitely not against technological, financial, and material progress, but I do question intentions of our corporate institutional leaders. It seems that as long as person at top of hierarchal food chain’s paycheck keeps increasing at a steady rate, customer service is no longer a priority. But then again, I reckon if CEO of an insurance company has problems with their telephone line, they’d probably have problem fixed in no time, as they have a direct line to telecommunication CEO from one of card-swapping sessions at their $500-a-head luncheons. The thing that these leaders of society have forgotten is that without normal, average human customers, their empires would be quickly reduced to dust. I think one of problems lies with us, those average people. The companies are so big and powerful that we have become apathetic, feeling that we are too small and insignificant to question their systems of interaction. We simply let them dictate how things work and go through all rigmarole and red tape no matter how much it frustrates us. There was a time, and you can still find this in most small companies, when customers were treated with respect and as equals. “The customer is always right.” This statement used to be very normal when discrepancies came up in our business practices. Now however, customer is often treated as guilty before innocent, as if average ‘small’ person is just a criminal who wants to leech off righteous and just institutions.
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