With the pace of business and innovation moving faster, company leaders feel ever-increasing pressure to move faster too. But we’ve all heard the adage, “Work smarter, not harder,” and there has never been a better time to make that your mantra. These business tips can help make 2019 a transformational year for you and your company,
1.Know your role…and focus on coloring within your lines.
“But everything in this company is part of my role!” If you believe that, you are stretching yourself too thin. Your job is to develop strategic plans and initiatives, not to work in the day-to-day weeds of your business. You’ve hired people for that and you need to trust them and delegate. That can be hard to do, especially if you founded the company or have worked there for a long time, but you truly can’t do everything and be everywhere. Science has proven that successful multitasking is a myth. Burnout is not productive.
2. Develop leaders within your organization.
To delegate comfortable and successfully, you need a great leadership team. Building that team is a critical business initiative. Encouraging employees to reach their full leadership potential will lead to a better sense of fulfillment for them, more and better ideas in every area of the company, and good succession planning (an area of concern for many successful companies). Communicate with your team, coach them, give them real-time feedback, trust them and offer impactful rewards for their wins.
3. Nurture your corporate culture.
The tips for building leaders apply to all your employees, from the shop floor and loading dock up. Encourage a culture based on communication, trust, and recognition of wins. In 2019, remember the lessons we’ve recently learned from companies whose reputations have fallen apart in very public ways, and focus on integrity too. Integrity is the critical foundation of long-term customer trust and business success.
4. Ask questions and listen (really) to the answers.
You already follow this well-known leadership tactic, but do it twice as much this year. Listen to your customers’ complaints to help you develop the best products and services. Listen to the fresh and different perspectives of the great leadership team you are building. Don’t forget to listen to yourself as well. We all tend to listen to our “shoulds,” but pay equal attention to your “cans” and “mights” and “what ifs.” Years of experience strengthen intuition as well as business knowledge.
5. Be ready to move.
The business impacts of global economic shockwaves and the quickening pace of modern innovation are givens today, and — no surprise — it requires agility to survive and thrive. As a leader, your task is to strategically balance flexibility with preparation. You need to be willing to respond to challenges and opportunities with changes in anything from your logistics chain down to your corporate mission, and you can’t always wait for the perfect time, circumstances or level of preparedness — sometimes you just have to start the change and find the way as you go. To do this successfully, focus in 2019 on establishing a network of resources to support agility, including flexible workforce, communication, equipment, and financial options.
At Gibraltar Business Capital, we provide reliable, creative and nimble solutions to give companies the capital they need to seize opportunities during transitional situations or to resolve short-term challenges.
