My Solution

The skills of leading your team can often be neglected, especially as an entrepreneur running smaller businesses. Not knowing how your team's skills are essential to your success, or how large the area is that it occupies, gives you a lack of awareness of how it affects your results. Entrepreneurs sometimes think that leading their team is essential only when they have a big group of employees. It could not be further from reality. It is also the reason why smaller entrepreneurs are not focusing on getting a new skill. It is just not as important to them.

Leading your team is essential in various areas of activity, not only within your team. Have you ever asked yourself how big your group is? And that also goes for small entrepreneurs with 1 or 2 people in the company. Looking at it more broadly, you will be amazed at how many people you operate with every day or month. The fact is that the size of your team is not just the number of your close co-workers; it is also several people you work with inside and outside of your company. For example, every subcontractor, supplier, accountant, web designer, and anyone else you outsource other tasks to, is your team that you need to work with successfully to have good results.

Having the same constant troubles with your different suppliers, for example, can indicate poor leadership from your side. Having these problems and not recognizing and dealing with them, will only make you repeatedly change your suppliers and have the same issues.

Looking back, my biggest mistake with leadership was that I didn't take enough time to do so. So many times, I was so busy with the work that I neglected leading my team. The irony was that I was working even more than I was when I didn’t have help from my employee. The problem was that the task delegation was not timely, and my expectations were not communicated enough. The result was that I was working at 130%, and one employee was working at 50% while the other was working at 90%.

As you can see, just to get things done, my workload was enormous.  When looking at it more mathematically, you would soon notice how critical leading skills would come in handy. For example, if we add up the numbers of the three mentioned employees, we get 270% efficiency. Being a better leader, I could raise the efficiency of my employees to 90%, and lower mine to 90%. Working at the same pace, you can see that we would have the same outcome as before, where I, as the owner, would be working at 130% and heading for burnout.

It is just one example of managing your team skills, so be sure you gain basic leadership skills. You, as an entrepreneur, should have the ability to step back and look at your company, to see it growing according to your vision, and not just be in the process all the time.  Impress your inside and outside teams with your ideas, because vision inspires people and inspires your team.