This third Pivot Point blog focuses on the April theme of our peer advisory roundtables:
Entrepreneurial Leadership Traits
(Missed the last two blogs? Click here to learn about Growing Through Delegation or the Quarterly Business Review, our February and March themes.)
As business owners, we know that developing our leadership skills is critical to long-term success. But what are the essential paths and roadmaps to entrepreneurial leadership? While there’s not one perfect route, there are eight key areas in which we can evaluate our entrepreneurial leadership skills. Those eight key areas were our peer advisory roundtable focus in April. We used self-evaluation questions to clearly see our strengths and to identify gaps in skills that we can narrow with intention.
The two leadership traits I’m about to discuss here are the ones circle members most commonly identified as weak points in need of shoring-up were strategic vision and development of leaders:
1. Strategic Vision
We tend to be agile with the daily fire-drills of our business, but less adept at focusing on bigger picture issues such as staying ahead of shifts in market demands or competitor offerings.
2. Development of Leaders
An example in this area from a real-life peer advisory roundtable member is a family-owned business that’s expanding rapidly to multiple sites. They need to effectively develop entrepreneurial leadership skills in employees to transition them into bigger, more responsible roles.
While strategic vision and development of leaders are only two of the key entrepreneurial leadership skills, they are two of the most important and most difficult to achieve. Identifying whether these are weaknesses or strengths is the first step.
Good news is the business success traits we reviewed can be cultivated; the skills are not simply innate talents. They can be honed with awareness and coaching.
The guided visualization exercise we shared in our monthly check-in roundtable call helped circle members put their leadership learnings into action. After releasing tension with deep breaths, we collectively imagined where our businesses will be five years into the future.
→We imagined what our big wins might be and the difference we will be making in the world.
→We visualized the most significant breakthrough we had that launched our companies into a new level of success and how it materialized.
→We know being in business is all about contribution, so we also looked at the lives we’d touched and who we’d served.
Feedback from circle members confirmed the visualizations were a powerful experience for all. Want to try it for yourself? Here’s a video of the exercise from one of our groups’s calls.
My challenge for you:
What could serve as your business’ pivot point for expansion through visualizing your successes, honing your strategic capacities and leadership development skills? How can you shift these things into higher gear for yourself and your teams while keeping your eyes clearly on the road ahead?
In your challenges, remember that small and consistent changes over time add up to big change and steady growth.
Onward,
Erin Joy
P.S. The unique journey of an entrepreneur is my passion and my specialty. I can’t wait to share my keynote speech on entrepreneurial empowerment with attendees of the Midwest Women Business Owners’ Conference, coming up SOON on May 17th, 2018. I’m taking a fresh approach to business and personal success.