When you decide to start your own business, you will receive an abundance of information on how to start it. No one, however, prepares you for all the paradoxes that you will encounter in this journey. If you think about your role as the owner of a company, you will realize that you have many responsibilities and commitments to fulfill. Soon it will become painlessly clear that you cannot fully discern as to which of these responsibilities you are doing well and which ones you suck at.
Sometimes you wonder: Are you working IN your business or working ON your business. Are you managing or are you leading? Are you putting out fires or preventing them in the first place?
Is your ‘leadership style’ a growth enabler or a growth barrier?
Leadership
involves many inconsistencies and demands continuous behavior
adjustment.
Many fail to keep up with the constant changes and get stuck with their
auto-conditioned behavioral style and then expect that everyone must adapt to
it. Forcing that style on others and taking the ‘it's my way or the highway’
approach will only deem you as ‘one of those’ bosses!
The best way to enable growth is to listen to what others have to say, understand what optimizes other people’s performance, and be agile in adapting to the situation.
A huge paradox in the life of a business owner is - Are you a boss or are you a leader?
The
truth is, you are and must be both!
One of the mistakes many business owners, and managers in general, tend to make is being too friendly with the people they are supposed to manage. They don't know how and where to set the boundaries. Very few people know precisely how to behave when they first become a boss or a supervisor. They find it difficult to resist the intoxication of power and simultaneously their need to be liked by everyone.
Being too friendly will not get you far, nor will it assert you as a leader. Similarly, being too authoritarian won't get you better results. Essentially, you must strive to find the balance and one way to do that is by being empathetic. It does not imply that you will stop holding people accountable for their work. It only means that emotional intelligence and business success go hand in hand. These two can and must coexist.
To be a good leader, or a boss, whatever you want to call yourself, you must embrace these paradoxes and determine your customized choices. Some situations will require you to lead from the front, and others will need you to let your team lead. Should you make decisions quickly or take your time? Well, both - depending on the situation.
Each meeting, person, and task will need a customized approach. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and trying to create it is worthless. Every interaction and issue will require you to be agile in your thinking, fine-tune your strategy, and continually adjust your actions.
Leaders need to be optimistic and realistic, enthusiastic and cautious, all at the same time. You need to build an optimistic vision for a project as you want your team to be focused on the goal. At the same time, you want to be realistic and alert everyone that things may not play out as planned based on the occurrences of external events. How open and transparent should you be about possible issues? Should you share all the trivial and irrelevant information? Would it be okay to share bad news right up front? Balancing all these disparities is vital to avoid causing anxiety, fear, or worry among your team members!
This is what happens during change management like let's say due to a merger you move your office to a new location. We know that merging is always a challenge as people may be worried about layoffs and a new working environment.
Do your employees participate or contribute?
Should
a leader create a structure or allow freedom? Should people involved in your
organization contribute to the development of the system or participate as a
cog in the machine?
Generally speaking, organizations could have a mix of both. The manufacturing side of things could be more process and precision-driven, while the product design could function with more fresh thinking and innovation. A leader's job is to recognize when to allow the brainstorming to unravel and when to step in and steer the conversation in a specific direction.
Final thoughts
As
we have observed, different scenarios demand different approaches and hence
leaders take these paradoxes in their stride. Plus, resilience
is vital
for a good leader. As a business owner & leader, finding the right balance
and knowing how to adapt to the ever-changing variables is critical.
