The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 9 Review - The 5 Principles of Successful Leadership
Tue, 15 Oct 2024
Matt and Jonny review their 5 leadership principles from lessons learnt from a 20+ year consultancy of over 1,000 clients. These include operational rigor, commercial alignment, and the power of a coaching culture in business leadership. They discuss how leaders can maintain discipline and effectiveness amidst the monotony of routine tasks, while also fostering a strong coaching culture that nurtures growth, and explore how aligning key functions across sales, marketing, HR, and finance can drive success.
Hello, and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best, and Jonny Adams. Jonny, hi, great to see you again. How are you doing? Very good, thank you, Matt. Doing very well, thank you. How are you? Good, yeah, very well, thanks. The topic for today is what are the five principles of successful leadership?
We created these principles based on the thousand clients that we've worked with, all that SBR have worked with over the years, and many of those on leadership programs.
just to run through those five principles our first one being you know leadership is everything and making sure that you're recruiting the right people and how are you recruiting the right people into leadership data is the second looking at people versus metrics so balancing having good analysis good data that you can analyze and understand and identify trends within but also balancing that with the individuals operational rigor how you create consistency and effective habits in in leadership
Commercial alignment, that client-centric approach, making sure everyone's going in the same direction, I think is really important. And then finally, to wrap them all up, is that underlying coaching culture. So providing the team with a real track to run on, having a supportive view of leadership and focusing more on the carrot than the stick. The first principle, their leadership is everything.
What's that mean to you?
Really like this first principle. When we're thinking about leadership, who are you recruiting into that role? And do they have the capacity and the capability to be successful? Also thinking about that ability to role model. So that is leadership is everything is principle one.
The next principle is data and people versus metrics. And I think this is a really interesting topic of how to find the right balance between the people and focusing on the individuals in the team and then what the numbers are telling you. And I think balancing what data you're capturing, why you're capturing it, but more importantly, how you're using it and what you're looking for.
First of all, do you have data? Do you have quantitative data that can give you some insight? And we live in the world of overindulgence in information. That information needs to be valid. So let's check the validity of that. That is just one story. That's the important part of what we're saying here is people versus metrics.
Once you look at the metrics, then what you want to be able to do is overlay the people, the quantitative stuff that you can see, right?
Balance, it's about balance and it's about looking at the right things. How do we, again, to your point, take the right metrics, look at them in the right way, coach the team on how to understand them and how to adapt their ability to talk to those numbers, but also what they do that impacts those numbers. And leading on from that into our next one, which is operational rigour.
What operational rigor means to me, quite simple, is about discipline. You've got to be aware if you're a middle manager or a leader that some of the work that we do is monotonous. So be conscious around how you deal with monotony because every day, every week, every month, it's the same thing. Check the stats, check your people, check your process.
If your operational rigor is successful, your employee net promoter score should be fantastic. Your attrition in terms of the people being regrettable should reduce and ultimately productivity, i.e. revenue, should improve.
So moving on to our fourth principle, commercial alignment. You've got a lovely quote that you shared with me previously I'd like you to share again.
What we're talking about here is how do we align all key functions together? And the quote that you talked about there is actually one of my favorite books. And if you've never read it or ever been on a training course, it's from Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry in any market against any competition at any time.
I 100% support that. How do you maintain that? But more importantly, how do you maintain that as your business grows? Thank you. And then our last principle of coaching culture, how to develop a rich coaching culture, a culture of support, providing a clear track to run on for your team, aligning to that data principle that we mentioned earlier. Is it really clear what your team needs?
How are you supporting your teams? What does it scream out for you, Johnny, coaching culture?
I see this coaching culture principle as, again, a universal principle, but it wraps around the other four principles we've spoken about today. If that is a really great culture within your organization, that not only is the sales coaching the sales, but marketing is coaching sales, sales is coaching marketing. Marketing is coaching finance. Now we're starting to align the commercial piece.
Operational rigor. Again, a half a culture talks about it. It's living and breathing. It's in your ecosystem. Therefore, operationally, it will be living and breathing in the processes that you do. I would say that's the piece there, Matt.
Absolutely, Johnny.
thank you to to you and thank you to everyone who joined us today i'm certain that you may have your own perspective right you may have your own principles that you follow within your business but hopefully what we've done today is share five really great foundational principles to successful leadership alongside some really great examples of of how they've of how they can impact your business and how they can help you in being successful as a leader
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