Leadership 101 – What every leader needs to know

Which kind of leader are you? If you’re a sole trader, it’s probably fair to say leadership and management responsibility sits entirely with you. If you’ve got a small team, the responsibility still sits with you, but you now need every single one of your people aligned and performing at their peak. And if you run a much bigger operation, creating consistency and building strength at every level is critical to succession planning.

One of the most powerful things you can do in your lifetime is to grow your personal leadership capability and skills. You see, we are all leaders. You may lead your family, or your local football club, or your department of 5 people, or your start-up business of 2 people, or your business of 100 people or even a global enterprise made up of 1,000’s. Leadership is an influence and it starts with you.

Great leadership starts with looking in your mirror and recognising that being a great leader of others, starts with being a great leader of yourself. It’s not an external journey, it’s an inside job.

In a competitive market where there is a greater demand on businesses, people and resources, leaders play a critical and ever-increasing role in maximising the performance of their teams, and ultimately the business.

A great leader wins the hearts and minds of their people in order to deliver with passion and commitment, not because they have to, but because they want to. So the key question really is, what do you need to lead others to success?

There are many stories of inspirational leadership throughout this book, because it is such an integral part of building any high performing organisation. So in this chapter, we’re going to cover two key things: first, the correlation between leadership capability and building a high performing sustainable business, and second, the key traits of inspirational leaders.