Traits of Great Leaders

Speaker 1: experience with Melanie join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and infus Tech Innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in each week on the Sheil podcast we hear exceptional leadership advice from women leaders and CEOs running businesses from startup to multiple seven figures around the world this week they share their advice leadership success vulnerability and what makes an exceptional leader here are six tips to grow your business through exceptional leadership from SIA Stockland Stacy Brown Randall Erica Davis Barry afy Virginia frorn and Suzanne Mitchy hire people and surround yourself with people who can help you jump to the front of the line who can help you skip the mistakes or at least be there for you when you make those mistakes and push you through and set yourself up for success by doing things right don't cheat yourself we spit so much money into opening our business $250,000 to open my store but then I don't want to spend $100 a month on a bookkeeper so really think about right equipment right people and surrounding yourself with that good team having processes in place it helps you in so many ways when you have processes spelled out as far as what you want done and how it should be done nobody can argue it because it's written out and it helps your people learn it helps you learn from it it helps ideas to build more and more processes that helps a company grow it helps the culture another thing is having that open door policy to listen to ideas listen to concerns when people say they have an open door policy sometimes is not always accurate you have to really have an open door policy with your team that's the way they're going to support you and support your business and believe in your business and another thing is have your people's back I was a manager of a huge department when I worked at a previous company one of the things that my team would always tell me when we have these recognition of say good some good things about your manager they will always say that I would have their back even though in private I might get on them but if I know that they were right in the situation and they could have probably handled the situation differently I'll support what they were right about in public but I would get on them on how they handled it and try to coach them that way but you always have to have your team back when they're in the right we need processes and we need systems and we need workflows in our business to deliver that seamless repeatable client experience and it needs to deliver the work that you do and the relationship touch points that you're trying to build as well and then the second piece that people Overlook is there's actually moments within your client experience where you should be paying attention to opportunities to plant referral seeds to kind of like we talked about earlier making it your client's idea to ultimately refer you so we teach people okay once we've got that repeatable that wow client experience it's sticky right we're really proud of this client experience that we have down then we want to go in and we want to look for moments where we have the opportunity to use different language and to do different things to be able to generate the idea of referrals and we want to be paying attention the third thing is paying attention to the who not every client's going to refer you I want every client to love you but loving you does not equate referrals because if it did I wouldn't be here you wouldn't be talking to me and I wouldn't have a business because not every client will refer you and so we need to also be paying attention to those clients that have the greater potential to refer

Speaker 1: you're working operationally not being too good for anything doing whatever it takes to get the business off the CR reaching traction leaders need to be very adaptable very flexible trying out many things and being intellectually honest to themselves also of what is working what is not working talking to customers potential customers asking for feedback and building the way into product Market fit and then once a company found something that works it's really about building and developing the team finding hiring the right people which is obviously very crucial for scaling the business one of the things to lead is to make sure that you don't forget to listen and so many times going into into new situations whether it was going from agency consultancy to a corporate to now a nonprofit world is going in and doing some Fearless listening first so you can lead effectively as a leader you have to be able to bring out the best in others and create followership and sometimes that means being more trusted than liked which was something hard for me come growing up in the South as a southern woman I always felt like you know you wanted to be liked and what I learned over the years is if people trust you and they understand why you're making decisions they might not like everything that you're doing but they can respect you and so I think trying to earn that respect trying to cultivate Talent coach them and help them be their best selves but also take the time to listen before you're decisive and make decisions are all things I try to really make sure I

Speaker 1: it's about surrounding yourself with the right people you've got to find the right support the right tribe the right cheerleaders that are going to come and help you see your blind spots and for me it it was going and talking to so many people a doing market research for the product but then that actually led to conversations of oh you should meet my friend they do X Y and Z as well as going and tapping other professional resources and saying I know nothing about how a SAS platform Works who do you know that knows this or I've never built an app before who do you know having so many conversations and jumping over the hurdle of there's never a right time to steal it from Nike just go out there and do it and you learn as you go and you pivot as you go and if you take note of all of those opportunities to learn eventually the products going to be that much better and all of a sudden you're going to be look back like whoa wait I just did this which is really empowering and so exciting thank you for joining us today today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheed website or at Sheed on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that