Leadership development for small businesses
Successful entrepreneurs build successful businesses. As your business grows you might choose to employ people or sub-contract work out to build a team around you to help you achieve your goals. Whichever option you choose, even as a small business owner you need to be capable of leading the people you recruit. This includes enabling them, not only to perform for clients, but to lead others in a way that maintains your organisation’s reputation.
Tricky or neglected?
An accountant once told me about a tricky colleague she’d had over a long period of time. When that colleague eventually left the business, the accountant said she felt relieved. At the time I couldn’t help wondering whether that colleague had really been tricky or whether they left because they felt unsupported by their manager.
Even as a subject matter expert like an accountant, you can still desire to grow and build your business, but if you are recruiting a less experienced colleague, such as a junior accountant, they need your support and leadership to enable their performance beyond their current reality.
Without support, direction and encouragement, less experienced members of your team will leave.
Is this what you want?
Or do you want to support and guide them to exceptional performance and become successful, just like you?
A lockdown epiphany
Zest for Life has been delivering Leadership development programmes for over a decade, in fact we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the business during lockdown. Over this time, we’ve had the privilege of working with many fabulous clients who value leadership development for people at all levels. These clients understand how this contributes to their business success.
Why are these businesses so successful?
Our clients’ businesses are successful because they invest in their people through investing in people development programmes, like those Zest for Life and other providers offer.
But it’s not just big organisations which are hungry for success. During lockdown I realised that small businesses also want to expand, develop their leaders and recruit new people to their teams. They have ambitions, goals and growth objectives they want to achieve too. And when you look at the big picture, pretty much every large, successful organisation started off as a seed of an idea from an entrepreneur with a dream.
So, why are we only looking to develop leaders in larger organisations?
The answer is we’re not. We are currently adapting our Zest for Life Exceptional development programmes to meet the needs of leaders and teams in small and medium-sized businesses. The programmes will still meet our aim of being accessible, affordable and achievable. They will still deliver on the objective of giving leaders and their teams a renewed Zest for Life - and we are so excited about it!
The programmes will support small business leaders to apply principles, tools and techniques to many tricky situations they faced with, and:
Build trust with colleagues, associates and sub-contractors to achieve exceptional performance
Value, recognise and appreciate their teams
Encourage teamwork and collaboration
Build a more productive team
Reduce their own workload by learning to delegate
If you are interested in learning more about Exceptional Development for SMEs, please send an email to Sally.Prescott@zflltd.com and we will be in touch once further details are available.
Developing a team starts with yourself
Whether you lead a small business or a large organisation, as a leader you have a responsibility to develop your own leadership skills in order to lead your team effectively. As the famous airline safety demo goes, ‘Put your own mask on before you help others’. If you fail to work on developing your own leadership skills, everyone in your team will suffer. They might even leave to work for an organisation where they feel valued and supported, as I suspect is what happened with the junior accountant.
This is why we are working on developing open courses to offer smaller businesses the opportunity to enable their people to achieve exceptional levels of performance, tricky or not.
We want smaller organisations to become more effective and efficient. If you lead an SME and want to join the fabulous organisations in our client portfolio that invest in developing their people (and are hugely successful as a result), please get in touch for more information.