Breakthrough Leadership Team (eBook)

Strengthening the Heart and Soul of Your Company

Mike Goldman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-0739-2 (ISBN)

Infos

This is NOT a leadership book. If you want to be the leader of a growing, profitable business that positively impacts the lives of employees and clients, it'll take more than leveling up your capacity and capabilities as leader. It will require a leadership team of A-players who can work with you to create a vibrant, winning environment that cascades down through the organization. Or, as Mike Goldman calls it: a breakthrough leadership team. In this book, Mike shows you how to structure your team now and plan for future growth, get the right people on the team and the wrong people off the team, craft the right culture, develop your talent, and execute with discipline and accountability. This is a hands-on book you'll want to use with your leadership team and keep on your shelf to reference as your business grows and new challenges arise. It's your key to enjoying greater and more consistent top and bottom-line growth, creating a fulfilling environment for your employees, adding more value to your clients, and having a greater impact on society.

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Introduction

You Need a Breakthrough Leadership Team

Think of your company as a human body. If the heart is weak and not pumping blood sufficiently, the body falls apart. Extremities go numb. Organs start to shut down. You can put the patient on dialysis to help the kidneys or use physical therapy to strengthen their arms or legs, but if the blood flow from the heart is sluggish or inconsistent, you can’t thrive. The best way to get healthy and feel energetic again is to strengthen the heart.

Your leadership team is the heart of your company.

I’ve been a business coach and consultant for thirty years and have found that improving leadership teams is the most effective way to bring my clients lasting success.

My core purpose is to help as many people as possible feel fulfilled by their work. I work with leadership teams to create great companies that provide amazing work environments and exciting opportunities for growth. This book provides a framework that will help you develop your own incredible companies and work environments. I wrote this book to not only share my knowledge in helping companies find success, but also to improve the lives of the individuals on leadership teams.

If your leadership team is weak—if its members are overwhelmed, for instance, or not skilled enough to bring fresh ideas that keep your company growing—the problems will spread throughout your organization. If the people on your leadership team aren’t working together, the people beneath them won’t work together. If the members of your leadership team don’t hold themselves accountable, the people who report to them won’t hold themselves accountable. If the leadership team is more concerned about individual goals than they are about the team’s goals and the company’s overarching goals, then the rest of your company will be similarly fractured, and growth and revenue will stall.

Your leadership team isn’t just the heart of your company; it’s also the soul. A great company with a strong leadership team has a conscience. It’s adding value to society. It’s solving a problem, addressing a need, or working actively to help its customers do that. Great companies have a sense of purpose that goes beyond profit; they help make the world a better place.

I’ve learned that the central problem for most struggling companies is their leadership team. As the leadership team goes, so goes the organization. If you don’t have a strong leadership team—if you don’t have the right people, culture, and processes in place—the company will not grow in a healthy, sustainable way. It will not be the kind of place employees love to work.

Business leaders, too often, focus on the symptoms of problems within their company. Sales are down, so they concentrate on sales. Leads are declining, so they turn their attention to marketing. But if CEOs and other business leaders focused instead on improving their leadership team, they would see ten times the value. More importantly, they would see sustained, long-term value. CEOs can either examine and treat individual organs of their company, or they can work on strengthening the heart—the leadership team—so it can take care of all the other problems at the same time.

Here’s what the 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Report, a survey of more than 11,000 business and HR leaders, found:

Fifty-one percent of the respondents we surveyed this year rated “C-suite collaboration” as very important—making it the most important issue in our 2018 survey—and 85 percent said that it was important or very important. Additionally, we found that respondents at organizations with the highest level of CxO cross-collaboration were the most likely to anticipate growth of 10 percent or more. Stunningly, however, 73 percent of respondents told us that their C-suite leaders rarely, if ever, work together on projects or strategic initiatives.

Fifty-four percent of the respondents in our 2018 Global Human Capital Trends survey told us that their companies are not ready, or only somewhat ready, for the level of executive-team collaboration they believe is now required.

Studies also show that the main reason a strategic initiative fails is a lack of leadership buy-in and support (see Figure 1), lending more evidence to the importance of a strong leadership team.

Source: Economist Intelligence Unit Survey, March 2013

© The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2013

Leaders with a good business idea think they can white-knuckle it and make things happen. That’s how many business leaders become successful in the first place. They launch a successful company through unglamorous, difficult work, but as that company grows, long hours and personal commitment aren’t enough to keep the company moving forward. The leader needs help, and in desperation, they hire quickly and wind up with a mediocre team that is unable to scale with the company.

Instead, leaders need to recruit talented individuals who believe in the company’s purpose and already live the company’s core values. They need to define the culture of their company, execute with discipline, and continually work to develop and improve the team. They need to create a Breakthrough Leadership Team.

Building a Breakthrough Leadership Team is not something you can put on your to-do list and check off when you think you’ve completed it. Building and shaping the team is a process that never ends. It starts with the CEO adopting a growth mindset, discovering their own strengths and weaknesses, and finding ways to grow and improve themselves. Smart leaders know they can’t build a strong leadership team if they don’t hire people who complement their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.

Similarly, you must ensure that the team you assemble has the desire and capacity to learn and grow to meet the needs of the business. Breakthrough Leadership Teams constantly discover new insights they can inject into their DNA to improve the health of the company. Just as a tree can get stronger when it’s pruned, leadership teams get stronger when members who aren’t up to the task are removed. CEOs must be ready to have those difficult conversations.

Here are some of the other things you’ll learn from this book:

• What does a Breakthrough Leadership Team look like, and how do those qualities help create a great company?
• How do you structure your leadership team for success?
• How do you know when to hire for key leadership positions?
• How do you find the right people for your leadership team? What are the proven interviewing and hiring practices?
• How do you create the right culture that cascades down through the rest of the organization? How do you create the right vision and set direction for the leadership team?
• What processes do you need on the leadership team to execute with discipline and accountability and in a way that will improve the performance of the entire company?
• How do you decide when there’s a leadership team member who can’t scale with the organization or is holding it back? How do you make and carry out the difficult decision that someone no longer belongs on the team?
• How do you continuously develop and improve as a team? How should your leadership team members continuously develop as individuals?
• Where do you stand on this continuum between having a weak leadership team and having a Breakthrough Leadership Team? How do you spot the gaps and fill in those gaps?

The principles and action plans in this book are based on my decades of experience as a coach and as a business owner. I’ve also conducted dozens of interviews with leading business coaches and CEOs as I’ve pulled together the ideas in this book. The practices I describe have proven successful time and again, both in my work coaching companies and in the organizations I’ve researched. I’ve implemented the same strategies with companies of all sizes from several industries, and in every case, the companies that committed to strengthening their leadership team went on to enjoy long-term success.

This book was written for CEOs and business leaders who are beginning to build a leadership team. It’s also for those who have weak leadership teams they’d like to strengthen, as well as those who have a thriving leadership team and are looking for new ideas to take the team to the next level. It’s for CEOs and leaders who want top-line growth, bottom-line growth, and a more fulfilling environment for themselves and their team.

How to Use This Book

This book is a detailed guide to help CEOs, leaders, and their direct reports build a Breakthrough Leadership Team and ensure that it is continuously improving.

This is not a book about leadership concepts for you to ponder, nor is it a philosophical book about how to become a great leader.

This book outlines specific, practical actions to build and maintain a Breakthrough Leadership Team with...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 28.4.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-0739-9 / 1544507399
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-0739-2 / 9781544507392