Business Book Summaries

“5 Steps to Successful Business Leadership” is an important management guide which explores the principles and practice of leadership in business. It provides readers with five creative and groundbreaking tools which, if used properly, can help them to succeed at the task of managing a team.

How to motivate the management team
Establishing and achieving targets
Coaching skills
Monitoring performance
Creating the environment for success
Thinking outside the square

STEP 1: Gain agreement that people want to be successful in their jobs
A common issue is the line where management influences stop and personal influence starts. All individuals have the right to select the thoughts they hold in mind and the thoughts influencing action.

Attitude leads to Behavior that leads to Consequences.

Do not train to change attitude. Training is the act of improving the performance of the actions and tasks to achieve the goals. It can and must be a focused activity with clear payback, and if there is no clear payback, then the training expense must be questioned. Attitudes can and should arise in training, but only good attitudes can help the employee focus behavior and enhance his or her performance at work.

Business has no right counseling employees. A person’s head is his castle. People will have life difficulties, such as divorce. But the business has no place involving itself these situations. It can only offer the employee the chance to file a leave, or offer advice on whom to approach for counseling advice.

Surveying attitudes is a waste of time and money. First, any effective manager can walk into a work place and have a very good idea in a few minutes of the attitudes of the employees there. The best and most effective thing management can do to build the best possible attitudes within the business is to focus on management’s proper job – of course, “to manage” – to do it very, very well and then ask everyone to come along for the ride, grow with the challenge and enjoy the success.

STEP 2: Define success in terms of the numbers the team must achieve
For a management team accountable for profit and loss, coordination of effort is effectively achieved by the profit profile. Each team member is responsible for some number on the profile and for some project whereby that number will be improved this year and next year. This defines success for the team, and momentum and commitment to being successful in this team and this job. The result of these clear and focused efforts is to arrive at a strong ‘team spirit’.

SUMMARY OF TEAM WORK
Coordination. All team members are expected to cooperate in such a way that the total level of operating profit is always enhanced.

Ethics. This is the responsibility of all team members, but a crucial focus of the team leader. It is not necessary that the team members actually like one other, but everyone must afford his or her fellow team members professional respect, ensuring that no personal biases undermine any aspect of team performance.

Personal performance. Bounded by the preceding points, each team member is expected to be thoroughly focused on his or her own job to the extent that when they say ‘such and such will happen’, other team members are confident that it will.

STEP 3: Identify the actions that, if acted out, will facilitate a satisfactory result
What management must do is create the climate to motivate, and provide the understanding and coaching and training in the behaviors of success to build the skills.

STEP 4: Keep the team focused on their level of effectiveness at implementing behaviors of success
The principles of job descriptions as we know them seem sound. Yet, there is something missing – a tie-up between the job descriptions and the behaviors of success. The form is kept very simple, with teams and team leaders completing it themselves. This process seeks to encourage regular discussions on ‘how we do a particular thing’, a.k.a. behaviors of success.

It must be clearly derived from and related to the strategic business plan and team members can see immediately why they in fact exist as a team.

The thrust is team based, and this emphasis on team effort and teamwork, when backed by the simple ethics as outlined in an earlier section, leads to improved team cohesiveness.

The system immediately places current performance expectations against business benchmarks, and the business benchmarks are always higher. The system focuses on the key behaviors of success with a strong positive effect on the person concerned. He or she is constantly reminded of the actions needed to attain success.

The system has proven very successful and has become a tool used by many managers to enhance the performance of their teams.

STEP 5: Celebrate large and small successes
A relationship can be established between the satisfaction and emotional state of a person’s life and the time he spends working. Daily emotional state is graphed as an irregular line, which indicates fluctuations in the level of satisfaction on a daily basis.

The progressive build-up of life satisfaction is something that should occur despite this daily flux, and ideally should increase over time. It can seen as being related significantly to a person’s goals.

Note that work is only one component of a person’s life and, for some people, not even a major component at that. Celebrating both small and large successes is a sure-fire way to get staff to realize their significance in the eyes of management and the team itself, itself a stepping-stone towards a realization of the importance of work in their lives.

FINAL NOTES
A leader has the ultimate responsibility for the productivity of his team, and some people will actively or passively resist the challenge to improve themselves and will show no energy or interest in doing so. These obstacles must be overcome by the leader if he or she is to bring the team to realize the power and potential of each person in that team.

As already stated, personal growth and an increase in satisfaction through success is only comfortable in retrospect.

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