Coach Dan Foster

At Building Champions we help leaders develop and communicate a vision for where they want to take their business, team, or company in the future. Often we will coach clients who have written a vision and articulated it to their team at a special meeting, but are still struggling to get buy-in and desired results. Experience has taught me that creating a vision is a fun, exciting, and motivating process for a leader to engage in over the course of a few days. Whereas, communicating a vision requires a leader to be purposeful, intentional, and consistent every day as long as they hold the title of leader. In short, it is hard work and many leaders fail to communicate vision effectively.

A recent survey by the international consulting firm, BlessingsWhite revealed that overall employee engagement at work is directly tied to how much an employee feels they are appreciated by their manager and the company executives. In these challenging economic times it is easy for leaders to overlook the needs of their employees because they are so focused on profitability and survival. This may manifest itself in a failure to recognize and reward achievements, provide resources necessary to do the job, provide feedback on performance, and ask for input on projects and initiatives.

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.

This past week while reading the words of an ancient Hebrew prophet I was reminded of how easy it is to wake up one day and find yourself heading so far down the wrong track that you don’t recognize yourself or the direction you are going in life. The world we live in puts so much pressure on us to perform at a certain level and live up to others expectations, while at the same time deceiving us that this is all being done for own good.

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.