Many well-meaning business leaders are experts at finance, HR, sales, marketing, IT, and operations but still cannot seem to make their business profitable in a sustained way.
What is missing? In a phrase, “Leadership Effectiveness.”
Leadership Effectiveness is a primary contributor to business performance. Data from over 2000 businesses strongly suggests that if you can improve leadership effectiveness in your organization, that one shift alone gives you a 38% probability of seeing that improvement translate into higher business performance. Since few businesses enjoy a 38% profit margin, leadership development is a strong business investment.
You need two basic skill sets to achieve meaningful success in business:
- Business Intelligence – You must know the nuts and bolts of business and how it works – the sort of stuff you learn in college or MBA school.
- Leadership Effectiveness – You must understand and manage yourself and your professional relationships in a compelling way that others want to follow you, know how to make solid decisions, and be able to take targeted and sustained action.
The Inner Game of Leadership
At Benjamin Papa, LLC we use a handful of evidence-based and time-tested methodologies to reliably increase leadership effectiveness – the distinguishing factor between failing or mediocre businesses and ones that flourish over time. Leadership effectiveness is, at its core, about learning to lead from a place of vision and creativity instead of from the default mode of reactive problem-solving.
Leadership effectiveness includes three basic dimensions:
- Self-Awareness (Thinking) – Knowing your core internal motivation (ego strategy) and how it animates everything you do at work, as well as fully understanding your true strengths and weaker areas and how they show up in your leadership. When you are in solid touch with productive and mindful thinking, leaders make solid decisions for their organizations.
- Collaboration (Feeling) – The ability to relate well to other people, including critical skills such as communication, emotional intelligence, and conflict management. Top leaders know it is impossible to run a successful organization single-handedly and that no one person has the perfect set of strengths to navigate all business challenges. Building and sustaining strong interpersonal relationships across and between organizations is critical for success.
- Engagement (Doing) – The ability to be in touch with your physical body in the moment, fully present and ready to take action. Engagement includes resourcing the body to maintain the energy necessary to see projects through to completion. Many leaders are less effective because they have great ideas and even collaborate well but lack the “engine” necessary to bring initiatives to fruition.
Different personality styles are naturally dominant in one of these three dimensions of leadership effectiveness. When on autopilot, every leader has one dimension that is the hardest of the three to access productively and consistently. Knowing your habit nature and how it affects your leadership gives executives and other leaders a head start toward creating a tailor-made and highly effective development path that meets you exactly where you are and gives you what you need to succeed.
Contact us to schedule a free strategy conversation to talk about how our Executive Coaching, Workshops, or Team Coaching services can get you and your team on the fast track to sustained leadership effectiveness and increased business success.