By Jon Randall
Chief Coaching Officer
Leadership is an area where many business owners and independent financial advisors struggle. A lot of your training and development and education was probably in finance or business and marketing. A lot of what you’ve learned as an advisor is how to be a really good advisor. There’s not a lot of learning on how to be a really great business owner, which also includes being a great leader of people.
It’s important in business to leverage other human beings. They can help your business grow and get to where you want to go. You can also help them get to where they want to go. Now here’s the most important thing to remember: human beings do not respond to directives. That’s what managers do at McDonald’s – this is our process and you have to do it this way. You shouldn’t just tell them, “Go do A, B and C.” That’s not really exciting and it’s not really motivating for other human beings. So avoid doing that.
What human beings do respond to is objectives and motives. Human beings want to get better. They want to achieve something greater in their lives. And your business, whether you’re a franchise owner or financial advisor, can help other people get there, help them have a motive or something that drives them. Their motivation that will help them get to where they want to go, which might help your business improve.
What are things that they want to accomplish? How can you help them accomplish those, which in turn might help your business? Also, when you can align what people want with what you want for your business, that is leadership. The best leadership is helping someone see where they want to go and fanning that fire of motivation to help them get there.
This is a very difficult, deep topic. This kind of leadership is not a flip of the switch – it’s a new skill. Like any new skill, it’s going to take time to develop so you’ll need many, many hours of doing it. That’s how you get better.
We’ve got lots of white papers, exercises and workbooks on this, and we do lots of coaching sessions on this. If you want to schedule a complimentary consultation to work on this more, fill out the form to the right, send me an email at jon@dynamicdirections-d2.com or call 270-663-7264.