When it comes to the world of entrepreneurship, it is imperative that you have a deep intrinsic understand your skills and characteristics that make you a leader. While there will always be a variety of task for you to handle for your business, it is imperative that you spend a small portion of your day reflecting and understand yourself in order to better benefit your company as a whole. By understanding yourself on this level, you will be able to leverage specific values and beliefs that can drive motivate your workers each and every day.
Now, in many of my blogs, I have discussed the concept of self-reflection. While it may seem minuscule within the day-to-day operations of your business, having that deep awareness of your own beliefs and strengths can help you decide on appropriate moves in order to develop and grow your business. That holistic view of your leaders can outline the wants, needs, and beliefs in order for your business to move forward.
To help you with this, I have outlined ten vital questions that will evaluate your leadership within your company. Some of these questions will be hard to answer. In fact, some of them will take a few hours to just to think about. But by knowing these answers, you will have a stronger view of what you need to do as a leader in order to grow your business.
- What are your values?
- What is your mission and objective as a leader?
- Why should people follow you as a leader?
- How do you lead?
- What is your reputation as a leader?
- Who has influenced you today?
- Provide a story of when your leadership was effective? What about when it wasn’t effective?
- How has your leadership shaped and altered your business?
- How can you improve for the betterment of your company?
- What do you personally look for in a leader?
While these questions may seem simple, you have to understand that many of them look for you to truly understand your overall impact on your business. You want to, of course, begin by evaluating your own values, objectives, and goals for your business and for yourself. While in most cases, these values will align. But having a crystal clear understanding of those overarching goals will allow you to translate that to not just your customers, but to your investors and your employees.
In addition, a certain amount of these questions, especially questions 3 to 6 forces you to assess your own leadership in a deeper and more productive way. In order for you to grow as an individual, you have to understand your strengths and weakness. Understand how you lead and why people will follow you will be the overall crux to your impact on your company. For some, the style can be authoritative. For others, it is a more collective democracy. Regardless of the style, you want to make sure it is one in which your employees can follow as your business grows each and every day.
Now to truly be a leader, you need to constantly change. The latter questions look to seek what you can personally do to grow and evolve within your high position. For leadership, the minute you stop growing is the minute things become a problem. That is really the fact for any position in life. Don’t just settle on the idea that because things worked five years ago that it will work now. Continue to challenge yourself as a leader and look and evaluate areas in which you can grow. That type of self-evaluation will allow you to professionally grow and mature with your business on your road to success. Remember, the most successful leaders are those that are constantly asking questions. They are always learning, growing, and pushing themselves to be better than who they are today. Keep questioning yourself. Sooner or later, you will be the individual that everyone is learning from.
