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Highest & Best Leadership – how to focus your time, energy and resources on growing your business

The most successful business leaders are the ones who are most able to focus their time, energy and resources on growing the business. However, this is not easy to achieve. Many business leaders get caught up in the day to day concerns of finding and serving customers and end up with little time for the really important activities that produce sustainable growth. The most important actions that would enable growth get lost among the minutiae of day to day responsibilities and actions which conspire to fill the day and soak up energy. This is a reactive, short-term approach to leadership which may help solve operational problems but makes it difficult, if not impossible to deliver future goals and objectives.

The leader also becomes more and more indispensable for short-term decision-making, all the while moving further away from the developmental and strategic role that is really required for long-term business growth.

The most successful leaders find ways to change how they operate and spend the much more of their time focusing on the delivery of next year’s plan and beyond. These leaders have clarity and focus; clarity about the key actions which are necessary to take the business to the next stage of growth and focus on delivering these actions. We describe leveraging your time, energy and resources in this way as “finding your Highest & Best”.  Highest & Best requires a combination of better strategic thinking, more effective time utilisation and a focus on management and organisation development. The result is the development of a more capable organisation, pursuing a more effective strategy, with much less dependence on the leader to achieve short-term results.

The transition to Highest & Best is set out below

The above model illustrates the focus and development required to be a Highest and Best Leader; concentrating your time energy and resources on the areas which will have the biggest impact in delivering your vision and objectives.

You may have heard the analogy which describes the leader’s role as driving the train. We believe that a more accurate description for the leader’s role in this situation is not driving the train but laying the tracks! 

Driving the train involves making sure that the business follows a predetermined track and arrives on time (delivery of short term objectives), while laying the track is about developing new routes for the future; a strategic focus on actions for next year and 4 years out to ensure that the vision is being delivered.

As a business leader you have a choice.  You can continue to be reactive, focusing on the day to day, and remain personally involved in all aspects of the business. It goes without saying that persisting with this approach to leadership can only lead to personal frustration and the certain knowledge that your business will never achieve its potential. Your dreams and visions will remain unfulfilled unless you grasp the nettle of personal change and make the transition to become a Highest & Best leader.

Graeme Crombie and David McKeran

Do Entrepreneurs make Great Leaders?

Leadership is about making things happen. Entrepreneurs are great at reacting to gaps in the market, seeing market opportunities and building businesses from nothing. Surely the entrepreneurial characteristics of driving, initiative, visionary, strategic are the very essence of great leadership and therefore entrepreneurs should be highly effective leaders?

However, the research shows that although two thirds of business owners want to grow their business, the majority don’t achieve their aspirations.  This suggests that many entrepreneurs are less successful at making the shift towards the leadership approach which is required for sustained business growth. 

What are the key leadership traits for business growth and how do entrepreneurs shape up against these? At Matrix we work with the leaders of growing companies – entrepreneurs. Over the past 10 years we have developed a set of competencies for leadership in the growing business. Our 360 degree profiling tool; Spectrum, has allowed us to assess over 250 entrepreneurs and benchmark them against each other. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the leadership effectiveness of the leaders of growing companies, as scored by their teams. 

Entrepreneurial leaders score highly in the following areas;

• Management of Change

• Commercial Awareness

• Strategic Focus

• Analysis and judgement

• Leadership

• Achievement/motivation

These are classic entrepreneurial traits and it should come as no surprise that these areas score high. The lower scoring areas are more interesting;

• Time Management

• Communication

• Managing Staff

• Delegation

Unfortunately, for entrepreneurial leaders these are core skills for which enable business growth. As a business grows the role of the business leader has to change. From doing to delegating; from working in the business to working on the business and from operational to developmental; these are the significant transitions in the leader’s role as they seek to grow and develop the business. Effective leadership is about stepping back from the day to day operations and concentrating on the strategic actions which are necessary to grow the business. Delegation and Time management are critical in achieving this change.

In addition, Communication and Managing Staff are critical in getting the most from your people. Effective growth to the next level requires a move away from a dependence on the entrepreneur and the development of the breadth and depth of management. The development of a strong senior team and leadership behaviours at all levels of the company is a prerequisite for growth. Leadership involves getting things done through other people and Coaching and managing staff are key competencies to deliver this.

In essence, great leadership is about a wide range of skills. Great leadership requires the ability to be visionary, strategic and entrepreneurial; combined with effective personal organisation and the ability to get the most from your people. For entrepreneurs to become truly great leaders and achieve their own aspirations and the growth potential of their business, they need to build on their natural strengths and augment them with some of the leadership traits necessary for business growth.

David McKeran