We all want to be winners in life and taste success, but what is success anyway?
Is it financial? Is it about power or fame or physical prowess? Personal growth? Overcoming a handicap, or fear, or weakness? The size of the business? Influence?
One of my learned and wise friends claims that success is maintaining strong family relations, especially a supportive marriage. Someone else suggested that you are being successful while you are on your way to reaching a goal.
Everyone has a different perspective on what being successful means to them, which means there is a multitude of answers for the same question.
Seeing that this is a business website, we’ll keep it there.
I’ll address one of the essential components of success in business, which is building a team.

I have yet to come across any successful leader or sportsman who does not have a support team. Nor does a successful team function without a coach and a support system.
Whether the team is an executive one, or a supportive one, the fact remains that real success cannot be achieved alone. And beyond real success lies what all leaders should be striving for. It is significance, which always involves building others. Whether you are a business owner or a team leader within an organisation, the same principles apply.

Building a team is an investment in the future.
No leader has all the skills necessary to maximise opportunities or reach their potential without a dedicated support team. The more I study leadership, and the more I look back on my own experiences, the more I realise that the hero depends on a team. We have all heard the saying that it takes a village to bring up a child. This is so true. I remember that when my daughter was at university studying for her Law degree, there was a team of family members involved. Similarly, self-made millionaires (so-called) do not do it alone. Some of them may even have come from impoverished circumstances; they may have had the original idea or concept, but there was a team along the way to success.

Early in my career, I chose an easy payday by prematurely selling a successful business which had taken me seven years to build from scratch. It had reached a reasonable critical mass but was not yet mature. I believed the lie that talent and charisma alone would enable me to build any other enterprise successfully. There are many valuable lessons to be learned from that transaction which introspection and retrospection have uncovered. Beside the lack of personal growth I needed to have taken the business to the next level, I had not surrounded myself with an inner circle. I had not invested in or intentionally developed other leaders. I had reached a glass ceiling and was realising that my leadership was a bottleneck and was beginning to throttle growth. I had not developed the tools necessary to expand the business, and so I chose to sell it, which was probably the worst of the options available at the time.
Hindsight is a beautiful science, and with it many great options appear, like genies out of a bottle.

The take-away leadership lesson here, is that part of growing any business must include creating an inner circle of people who can be trusted, have bought into the vision, and have complementary skills. Another valuable lesson learned from the same event mentioned above, is that if I had had an effective leadership team in place, I would have had the time, space, and peace of mind to be creative and add other product lines to the existing ones, or to diversify the business.

Building an inner circle requires strategic and intentional selection of potential leaders, because these people will determine the future success of the business. The inner circle once developed has only one role: to make the leader’s life easier. The members are a trusted resource, provide essential skills, and extend the influence of the leader beyond his reach. This select, hand-picked team should be made up of people who are there for more than rubber stamping the leader’s decisions. These people are part of the decision-making process, ask good questions, unblock the leader’s blind spots, are comfortable with taking some responsibility, and are there to inform their own inner circles of decisions and new directions. This spreads the influence, creates clarity and cohesion, and ensures everyone understands the road ahead. One of the fundamental values of this team is that it allows you, the leader, to take time out with the assurance that the enterprise is running smoothly. The leader is the visionary. His job is to create the vision, to get the team to buy into it, and share his passion for it.

Coaching tip:
A good leader knows each member of the inner circle well enough to know their strengths, their aspirations, and their circumstances. This requires regular one-on-one intentional get togethers. It is part of successful leadership and management. To grow the business, you need to grow the people, and it all starts with the leader.

There is an Old Testament quote which says:

Write the vision and make it plain on tablets,
So that it can carry the correct message to others.
For the vision is yet for an appointed time.
It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled.

This speaks of motivation, passion and keeping focus.
Leadership is relational as much as positional. People you climb over will look for opportunities to bring you down. It is worth remembering that the desired level of leadership is when people follow you because they want to, and because of what you have done in them and for them. So, to become a successful leader, it is important to be a connector who prefers cooperation rather than competition. This involves taking people with you up the ladder.

“Everything rises and falls on Leadership.” John Maxwell
“When the leader wins, the whole team wins.” MH

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