20 Best Business Lessons from 48 Years of Corporate Experience
I have been in management and leadership positions in the military and business world for forty- eight years, and I often get asked what were my best business lessons. Surprisingly (or not) my list of lessons probably has varied to a degree, depending on when in my career they were constructed.
The list of lessons is based on real-world experiences as well as managers and leaders I studied (including many bosses). Being such a business manager is a lifelong learning process.
You are never done learning and renewing
lessons you have learned. Every great manager always looks for ways to improve
their ability to improve their leadership qualities and attributes.
If you read ten books on business
management, you could easily build a checklist of 50 or more management lessons
for future business managers. But more is not necessarily better for the best
lessons to study and apply.
The following lessons represent my favorites on business management I have learned over my 48 years. They are the ones that have made the biggest impact on my success:
People first
No matter what the job is, leaders always want to look for
the best people and then take care of them. A business is just a group of
people working on various creations and inventions. People are your business.
It is as simple as that. It’s all about the people. They are the lifeblood of
the business.
When you’re leading a business or an organization, you’re leading people. It makes sense that leaders need to take care of their people. Many leaders work to have relationships with their employees.
Taking them out for coffee and getting to know them better is common among leaders. Putting people first is an important element in being a leader. Be a multiplier
Be a multiplier
Multiplier business managers know that at the apex of the intelligence hierarchy is NOT the lone genius. Rather, it is the genius who knows the importance of bringing out the smarts and capabilities in everyone in the team.
Corporate politics
Understand that politics is a fact of corporate life,
and learn to deal with it. That means you take time to understand the
views of the people involved in corporate conflicts, as well as the conflicts
themselves. There will be times when you have to choose between being in
the right or being employed. It’s your choice.
Establish a clear direction
Getting people on board, aligned and pointed in the right
direction is vital for an organization. If each person is going in a different
direction, it can be chaos in an organization.
Keeping people coordinated and aimed is a continual process.
You’re the luckiest leader in the world if this happens by default. Two ways to
ensure people are coordinated and aimed is setting milestones and having
multiple coaches and promoters for your employees.
Do what you can to make sure people enjoy what they’re doing.
If people aren’t passionate about the business and love what they’re doing,
they are more likely to be going in a different direction and susceptible to
becoming disengaged. Certainly not a good thing.
Both managers and leaders know
their job with their teams is about building lots of connections. They make
people feel they have a stake in common problems.
Pay attention to
culture
Understand the culture of the organization,
especially their expectations of what makes a good employee. They all say
they believe in teamwork, dedication, hard work, etc. But look at the employees
who are successful, who get the recognition, who rise quickly – they represent
what the company is looking for. What do they do that you can do?
Build and maintain trust
Trust is a key element we all need to set aside vulnerability, but it is hard to build, and easy to lose. It is not built on words but through actions and evidence. Only when it works can a team address the necessary issues to win.
Conflict and consensus
Conflicts and fights are not the same things. Conflicts are normal and required factual push backs in business, whereas fights are emotional, often personal, disagreements which do not lead forward to consensus.
Embrace change
Change is the only constant in business, so make it your
competitive advantage. Initiate change rather than react to it, and give clear
instructions to help the team understand why the change is necessary, and how
it will make the situation better.
Foster continuous communication
Communication is the glue that forms the bond between leaders
and teams and holds great teams together. Credibility is a required base.
Provide recognition
Recognition drives motivation and human behavior, and human behavior drives results. Recognition validates people and their purpose. Intangible rewards can have an even greater impact than tangible ones, but they must be relevant.
Create learning experiences
We all have a desire to learn and grow. The best learning
opportunities are experience and sharing.
Make
your boss look good
Understand what your boss regards as a priority, and help him or she accomplishes it. Make sure that you document what you’ve done. Your boss needs the accomplishment, but shouldn’t get the credit for the work you’ve done.
Train your replacement. You won’t be able to get a promotion if there’s no one else to take your job.
Foster teamwork
Peter Drucker is a silent mentor for our small agency. We are big fans. He once made an interesting point when he said that leaders don’t train themselves not to say ‘I’ He’s implying that leaders innately work with others and let the team get the credit. They don’t force themselves to say ‘we’. ‘We’ is natural for them, and it’s the way they’ve always thought.
You work as a team when you don’t care who gets the credit.
So the next time you interview someone with a resume that
states, ‘I accomplished x’ or ‘I did x’, it should send up a few warning
signals.
Staff development
Many companies follow the motto: “Hire for the character,
train for skill.” You hire people that are eager to learn. They don’t have a ton of skills; but as a
leader, you teach them, and they become better. They grow with your company and
contribute to its success.
You see this with football coaches. In football coaching,
it’s almost unheard of for someone with no experience to be hired as the head
coach of a team. Most people start in a low-level position and gradually move
up.
The same occurs in business. George Bodenheimer is the former
president of ESPN. He started out working in the mailroom of ESPN. It would
have been very difficult for him to rise to the presidency if he hadn’t had a
boss who wanted to help him grow and succeed in the company.
Do not rest on past successes
There is nothing more
dangerous to life’s success than a last great result, is there? We are ‘only as
good as our next result’. Stay paranoid.
Make yourself a project
Hairdressing icon Vidal Sassoon was famous for having said: “The only place you’ll find success coming before work is in a dictionary.” We have to work on ourselves. Put pressure on ourselves. Critique our days. Give back to society. Be our very best coaches and cheering squads. All of this applies as much to our personal lives as for our business lives.
Embrace change
Darwin said it was not the strongest of the species that survived, but the ablest to adapt to change. There will be more change in the next five years than we’ve seen in the past 50.
Get excited by change. Be part of the most movements that you can. Help shake things up.
Build and maintain trust
Always do what you say and set
good examples. Demand from yourself the same level of professionalism and
dedication that you expect from others.
Trust, once broken, is seldom
restored to its original state. It is the most fragile yet essential attribute
of leadership and management.
Accept learning is never done
You have worked hard to get to
this point. Rely on your experience but accept there is still much to learn.
Learn from everywhere you can, including your team.
The bottom line
The
moral of this story is that the best leadership lessons should have a great
influence on team development and teamwork. If these different thoughts are
possessed by your current management or leadership team, or your emerging
leaders, you will be in a good position for the road ahead.
Which of these management lessons stand out to you like the most critical? Do you have any other thoughts of effective managers worthy of mention?
Leave a comment and share your insights with other readers and us. We would be most interested in your thoughts.
D
All you get is what you bring to the fight.
And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to
be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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