Tips and Tools for Small Business Leaders

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the leaders who report to you have strong servant leader skills?

Once you begin solidifying your own servant leadership competencies, you can begin a strategy of implementing it throughout your small business.

If you haven’t already completed our Servant Leader Competency Assessment for Small Business leaders, click here to do so. It’s a short scorable self-assessment using the 21 concrete, observable competencies from Seven Pillars of Servant Leadership (James W. Sipe and Don M. Frick).

Here’s a process you can follow for implementing servant leadership in your small business. The questions provide structure to facilitate your group in wrestling with how your organization lives or doesn’t live the competency and what you can do to embed it into your day-to-day activities:

1. Start by having each key leader complete our Servant Leader Competency Assessment for Small Business and follow it up with a similar process to the one you followed (see last month’s blogpost). Help them understand their strengths deeply and create a development plan for 2 or 3 of their weaknesses.

2. Form a discussion group of your key leaders. Set a regular meeting or embed it in one of the meetings in your usual meeting rhythm schedule.

3. Over the next few months, work through each of the 21 competencies using the following discussion questions:

A. What do we do well? Not so well? What do we need to improve in this competency? Use the Inspire Results SERVANT model to think through the answers to these questions for every area of your business—

1. Sales & Marketing

2. Executive Leadership

3. Relationships

4. Vision & Planning

5. Accounting & Finance

6. iNternal Processes

7. Team

For each competency, generate a list of things your team will Start, Stop, or Continue in order that each competency takes a foothold and is ultimately able to flourish.

B. What are the consequences if we don’t improve it?

C. Do we need to understand the competency more deeply? Who do we know that already does this competency well? How can we learn more about it?

D. What opportunities can we identify to practice the competency behaviors?

E. What feedback did we get? Did we ask for feedback? How will we hold ourselves accountable?

It could take several meetings to chip away at the barriers to a servant-led culture. You can spin off other discussion groups as you move through the organization so that every team member has a chance to participate.

Within a few months of implementing servant leadership in your small business, you’ll begin to see results in your culture, in your operations, and in your profit. Not to mention the peace of mind you’ll have knowing that you’re doing the right thing for your team members, your business, and your community.

Growth Plan Workshop

We've held several safe and socially-distanced Growth Plan Workshops to rave reviews (especially the taco bar)!

Join us and create (or update) your 2021 Small Business Plan

April 15, 2021 9-3 pm

Discover the potential in your business by completing your Single Sheet Business Plan. Then break it into quarterly, monthly, weekly & daily goals and get a line-of-sight from your daily tasks to your 10-30 year purpose. Step out of the day-to-day business for just 1 day, get organized, complete a prescribed planning process, and walk away with an action plan that leads to greater profits and free time back.

Get more out of your business in the next 90 days than you ever thought possible!

Holiday Inn Indianapolis Airport
8555 Stansted Road, Indianapolis 46241

For owners & leaders of small to medium sized businesses. Bring your 2nd-in-command or your whole leadership team!

*Registration Required

Sometimes the act of making a list is just as valuable as the list itself.

On the surface, the purpose of a list is to remember to do a task. But getting our tasks on paper somehow gets them out of our head and frees up valuable head space… with the result being increased mental focus. As if by magic, seeing all our tasks written in one place somehow makes them seem not as big.

“Unfinished tasks plant intrusive thoughts that can interfere with subsequent work,” says Myers-Briggs-certified consultant and Co-owner of Inspire Results Business Coaching, Susie Engelau. ”You don’t want that stuff swimming around in your head.” Research on the psychology of list-making shows that an unfinished task causes interference with other tasks you're trying to achieve. But making a list gives your mind permission to focus on other things.

"Goals are interesting as they are almost these autonomous agents that kind of live inside you and occupy space in your mind," said E.J. Masicampo, an associate professor of psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. "When a goal is unfinished it might be a weight on your mind in terms of anxiety or worry and it colors how you see the world, because it's sort of tugging at the sleeve of your conscious attention," Masicampo says. "It can be omnipresent whether you're aware of it or not."

The bottom line… simply writing a task list is beneficial even if you don’t complete the task… and even if you never look at the list again.

Inevitably some tasks can’t be finished today. Having those written down gives the sense that they’re being handled so you can feel OK about going on to the higher priority tasks for that day.

Of course if you DO look at the list again, you can enjoy that sense of satisfaction that comes from checking off those completed tasks!