Taylor Hack, the marketing strategist for Gravidia and a serial entrepreneur, joins Scott Connors, Crankset Group’s Chief Change Officer, to discuss how leaders can observe, orient, decide, and act to achieve results while being true to themselves.
Leadership skills are not something you can learn overnight, it is the result of life experience, good communication skills, and empathy. A leader needs to be someone who has been there before and knows how hard it is to succeed with the external forces constantly pulling you down.
The leader is the person who encourages and supports their followers in order to achieve a goal or solve a problem, these actions can only truly be genuine if that leader has humility. The main benefit of humility is that it can help people better understand the needs of others and then better satisfy those needs to create a culture that builds trust.
Culture and trust are what leaders want to instill in a business. A leader with humility makes people feel safe and confident to come forward with their ideas. Employees freely doing this shows they’re comfortable and this gives the opportunity for a leader to further build trust with employees. Trust is very important because it unites people and in a business puts everyone on the same mission or mindset. Employees will be more involved thus leading to better productivity and execution.
Humility in a leader helps employees but also allows a leader to admit shortcomings and mistakes. Being receptive to criticism, and taking corrective action when necessary leads to the leader being helped. If the leader is doing something wrong that individual will be open-minded about other people’s opinions and to admitting flaws. Accepting or asking for help wouldn’t be a challenge. This is good because it also builds trust in the business which again also contributes to productivity and execution.
Humility forces leaders into an introspective mindset instead of an extrospective mindset, which focuses on what other people might want or need from them rather than on their own thoughts. If the inner of a business thrives on being extrospective towards the individuals within it that intentions can easily transfer to interaction with its customers. A business being introspective will prioritize its own profits over customer happiness whereas an extrospective business will prioritize customer happiness over its profits being more true to the saying, “the customer comes first”.
Solving customer problems or making them happy helps a business retain them, this leads to higher margins, good reputation, referrals, recommendations, beats the competition, and is long-term profit friendly. These are all great for business profit, focusing more on customer satisfaction passively increases ROI. This result is a reflection of the business and the business is a reflection of its leader.
This podcast was originally published by Scott Conner. Are you looking for ways to improve your organization? Become a 3TO5 member today.
