Benchmark Business Group

Leadership - 2010 Archive

Going back to our roots in E-Myth, we believe that leadership is a central piece of owning a business.  Your leadership skills as a business owner will impact every area of your business.  Over the years we often touch upon leadership in our Business Owner Insights and below is a collection of our leadership articles.

SUCCESS BEGINS WITH YOUR POINT OF VIEW

The secret to success in anything—business, sports, raising a family, pursuing a hobby, or whatever—begins and ends with attitude.  To say it another way, your point of view will determine how you see things, how you think about things, how you react to things, and how you act upon them.  The success of businesses that have had the extraordinary advantage of an E-Myth Business Coach, and indeed the success of the E-Myth Mastery Program itself, can be attributed to a point of view.  We call it simply the “E-Myth Point of View”, or in shorthand, the EMPOV.

There are five core principles that make up the EMPOV.  The first is the Principle of Life, which begins with the simple premise that your life is really your only business.  The purpose of starting and owning a business is to give you more life, however you may define that.  It could mean more money, more freedom, more enjoyment, more time to spend with your family or friends, more satisfaction from doing what you love, more control over your destiny, and so on.  Most business owners, however, find themselves experiencing just the opposite.  Instead of having a business that gives them more life, they have a business that is literally consuming their life!  They’re not really running their business…their business is running them.  Is your business giving you more life?

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THE KEEPER OF THE FLAME

There are volumes written on leadership, and quotes that end to end would circle the earth several times.  In spite of the volume, there are only a very few basic themes that keep repeating themselves.  Those themes involve clarity of vision and purpose, an ability to move others to action, and an ability to draw out the greatness that already exists in others.

I once asked a retired CEO of a regional bank how he would describe his function in his former position.  He simply said, “I was the Keeper of the Flame”.  That was both an exciting and intriguing response, so I pressed on with more questions.  He described his view of leadership in that position as creating real clarity around the overall results the organization wanted to achieve…the end-game, if you will…the final picture.  To complete the picture, it then had to be imbued with a clear sense of shared purpose and value, so that it became like lighting a torch…a Flame.  It has an aura of something bigger that any one person in the organization, even the leader.  He then had the job of continually reminding everyone in the organization of the Flame and it’s meaning, and using the Flame to shine a light on all the activity in the organization, to the end that the final picture would be achieved.

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Leadership By Design

Setting an employee up for success is good leadership.  Hammering on an employee who is not successful – that’s assault.  In our work with hundreds of businesses each year one of the top complaints we hear from business owners is; you just can’t hire good people. As we inquire deeper about this statement we hear the gory details of seemingly uncaring employees who just can’t seem to get the job done – they don’t follow through, don’t listen, don’t care, don’t show up and don’t last long.  We invariably find the very same business leaders who are convinced you just can’t hire good people, have not designed their business to ensure their employees are successful.  More often than not, these very same leaders point the finger of blame at the employee, without recognizing that their business is not designed to ensure employee success. 

It’s all so predictable.  And curable.  What’s missing most often in these businesses is clarity.  Clarity of results.  Clarity of action.  Clarity of accountability. 

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Consistent and Persistent

As you engage in the annual ritual of reviewing the year that has passed and designing the year ahead, we at E-Myth Benchmark and the Benchmark Coaching Center encourage you to weave two words into your business strategies; consistent and persistent.  Marketing experts understand and advocate that companies be both consistent in their marketing message and persistent in their advertising activities.  They know by experience that inconsistent messages and scattered advertising initiatives will not yield the returns that consistent messaging and persistent advertising provide.

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