What kind of leader are you? What kind of leaders are you developing within your business? It's something to think about.
While at the NSGA Management Conference, we took part in a hands-on workshop in which all participants discussed important topics, such as developing leaders within your business and improving vendor/retailer relationships. Groups were given different questions to answer and then we shared the results with the room. From my notes (which I can barely read, if you’ve ever seen my handwriting you will know what I mean), here are some things that were universally recognized by the group as leadership characteristics:
- Someone with a passion for the business
- Individuals that lead by example (like coming to work early and staying late)
- People who treat others with respect
- People who act without direction (don’t need babysitting)
- People who take responsibility and don’t have to be asked to get things done or to fix things
- People who aren’t afraid to be measured by performance
- People who own up to their mistakes (accountability)
- People who are not purely motiviated by results and can encourage others not to be afraid of failure
Some important leadership values that the group noted:
- Integrity
- Ability to listen rather than talk all the time
- Visionary skills
- Ability to motivate high potentials to perform
- Ability to instill and inspire trust within the team
- Ability to self-evaluate
If you have “high-potentials” on your team that you would like to see grow into a leadership position, here are some ideas that were shared as to how to facilitate that growth:
- Give them more opportunities
- Give them more responsibility
- Give them more resources
- Give them more input and more access to higher level executives.
Really great to get input from others in the sporting goods industry and hear what others think. What do you do in your business to develop leaders?