The Real Skill

What does it take to run a successful business? I guess the answer to that is multifaceted but after 21 years of coaching senior leaders I have found the biggest challenges are not technical ones. They are rarely about how we invent a better mousetrap or how we display our accounts, although they are important.

I ran a survey with business leaders last year and the biggest challenge they had was people. It depends how you define a business. Many years ago, Sir Michael Edwardes, who was chairman of British Leyland defined the role of a business as ‘the achieving of objectives through people’.

I often refer to a business as being like a machine where all of the moving parts are people and people are basically unpredictable and complex. By complex I mean that they are always being changed by their environment. A simple system is one that consistently returns the same output from the same input. My computer, for example, is pretty sophisticated but it is fundamentally simple in that every time I press the ‘B’ key I get the same result. The same is not true of people.

For me then, the real skill for business leaders is being able to understand people so that together we can achieve our objectives.  We all think we understand people, after all we are one, but do we? Do we really?

So the questions for today are:

• Have you ever studied the science of Human Behaviour?
• What level of qualification do you have in psychology or philosophy?
• What model of personality profiling are you an expert in?
• How closely does your model of human motivation align with the latest published science?
• How can you improve your scores above?

If you need any help, reach out

Many successful business owners eventually hit a wall on growth and struggle to climb it alone. When you work with me you get a fresh perspective, a solid plan, and customised coaching so you can grow and scale your business safely and at speed.

To check whether I can help you on that journey https://calendly.com/iankinnery/canweworktogether