Coach Dan Foster

Every leader would agree that having a dynamic healthy team helping you achieve your business vision and plan is crucial to success. Whether you’re a sale professional, branch manager, owner/operator, or a CEO the people on your team will be calling on you to deliver leadership and direction in the year ahead. What can you do to better to answer this call and develop your high performing team?

Whenever a leader announces they will be sharing a new vision for the company or revealing their vision for the first time there is anxiety in the hearts and minds of those working for the leader. This type of experience is not uncommon in today’s challenging times. Leaders in many industries are looking to reinvent or take their company in a new direction. The question for many of us is, what do we do before and after we hear our leader’s new vision?

The best leaders at some point in the their career realize they cannot do it all alone. The late nights at work, the juggling of responsibilities, and the expectations for performance in all key areas of life and business become too much for one person to handle. A failure to realize this can lead to burnout, poor performance, the ultimate demise of your company. In the past I’ve written and spoken about the attributes of a great leader, and one of these attributes is that a leader has the support of a great leadership team. Defining the attributes of this leadership team is the first step in developing a cohesive group which a leader can rely on to delegate responsibilities and achieve the overall vision of the company.

In these challenging times, I believe that we need great leaders and we need them now! A little over a year ago I wrote a post entitled, The Ten Attributes of a Great Leader. It has since become the most popular post I have ever written. This past week I had the privilege of speaking to the Newberg Rotary club about leadership development and the need for everyone to discover their unique leadership style.

Last week I interviewed executive coach and author Steve Scanlon, of Building Champions for my Leading With Purpose blog series. We discussed his new book, Reality and Hope. Steve is an exceptional coach and writer that has spent over 11,000 hours coaching sales professionals, small business owners, and business leaders to be more purposeful and intentional in how they live their life and run their business.