Develop a Leadership Platform: What’s Your Vision?
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy what you stand for”, Simon Sinek
I love this quote from Simon. It reminds me that business is about way more then just making money. I believe business is about being in service to your customers and making a difference for them.
Most business owners want their business to grow (duh!) In fact, if we’re not growing, we’re dying. I see many owners go about growing for growth’s sake wanting to become bigger, faster, thinking that “bigger has to be better”. They do everything they can think of just to grow. Their decisions and actions often follow many different tangents which is exhausting for themselves and frustrating for their staff. It’s frustrating and exhausting because the decisions and actions seem haphazard and not based on a solid grounding with a sound direction. This type of growth feels like you’re flying by the ‘seat of your pants’ and is often unsustainable and doomed to implosion.
Successful, sustainable growth requires us to base our growth plan on a solid foundation. Like a house, you can’t build walls and a roof without a strong foundation. If you do, the house falls down. A successful business is the same, it needs a strong foundation to stand on. Once defined, this foundation becomes the ‘measuring stick’ from which an owner and his team can make strategical and tactical decisions and take sound action. This ‘measuring stick’ is called a Leadership Platform.
Like a simple house with four corners, a Leadership Platform has four elements; Vision, Purpose, Values & Goals. These four elements, once defined, create a strong foundation for your business to be built on.
This post is the first of four, designed to help you define your Leadership Platform. Check out the following video to understand more about building a leadership platform and to start defining your vision for your business:
Lead To Succeed: What’s Your Vision? from Venture Coaching on Vimeo.
Have fun working on your vision! Play with it and make it GRAND! Your vision should represent an exciting (and somewhat scary) possibility you see for the future of your life and business.
I would love to hear about your discoveries, so please comment on this post to share your experience.
Remember, this post is the 1st of a 4-part series. If you’d like to continue developing your platform check out Part 2: Defining Your Values.
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