What’s Your Formula for Success? (#234)
The Confident Leader
BOOST YOUR LEADERSHIP IN UNCERTAIN TIMES
You have achieved success. What strategies and tactics brought you to this point? What is your formula for success?
“It worked so well; I stopped doing it.”
This Week’s Edition
If you’re unsure about your formula for success, this newsletter aims to help you define it so you can achieve consistent success.
Clarify Your Thinking
The leaders I often work with concentrate on fresh approaches—new strategies, tactics, and ideas for enhancing their leadership and expanding their businesses.
New is important for future growth, and old is important, too—existing best practices that drive results. All too often, the former causes leaders to pay less attention to the latter, diluting performance results.
I’ll ask leaders, “What’s your formula for success?” They will share a list of various actions they consistently take that have yielded their desired results.
Then, I’ll dig deeper. I’ll ask about each item on the list, one by one, by asking whether they still do each one. For example,
- Do you continue to have monthly one-on-one meetings with your team members?
- Are you still logging your prospect meetings in your CRM?
- Do you still give client referral gifts and handwritten notes?
At some point, we find at least one item on their list that they have stopped doing. When I ask, “Why don’t you do that anymore?” the usual reply is, “I don’t know. We should. It’s been effective for us for years. Huh! I wonder why we stopped.”
Old Thinking: I need to try something new. My old habits feel outdated. I doubt they are still useful. I must pursue new activities to experience fresh growth.
New Thinking: Our strategic and tactical habits, developed over time, are the foundation of our success. If we want to try new things, we should determine how they fit with our current formula for success so we don’t abandon what is working.
Thoughts Lead to Actions
Todd, the founder and CEO of a high-growth private company, struggles with his organization’s lack of growth. He’s built the organization’s infrastructure for greater growth than its current level.
During his coaching session this week, when we discussed his formula for success, he was very clear:
- We built fantastic relationships that have lasted.
- We discovered the industry niche.
- We identified the needs of the prospects.
- We identified the service that faced minimal competition.
- We began serving clients.
This was his industry formula for success. When asked about his formula for success in operations, he experienced an epiphany:
- I used to approve all projects over $X prior to their start, but I don’t do that anymore.
- We used to attend trade shows and establish new relationships, but we no longer do that.
- We used to manage our finances with a strong focus on COGS margins, but we’ve moved away from that for some reason.
Learn from Todd’s lesson. Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of neglecting those tried-and-true strategies and tactics that worked so well for you in the past. Give this assessment exercise a try:
Step 1: Outline your formula for success.
Step 2: Assess whether you are still engaged with each element.
Step 3: Assess whether any of the elements you paused should be reintroduced. If so, begin implementing them again.
Constantly seeking new ways to foster growth can be exhausting. Before jumping on the hamster wheel of finding new strategies, consider whether you can reinstate some of your previous successful ones.
Put your leadership confidence in what has worked before prior to taking a chance on something unproven.
Boost Your Performance
Watch this week’s video to find out more details about how to define your formula for success.
What’s Your Opinion?
What’s your formula for success? Share it with me at robin.pou@robinpou.com.
If you are going to be a leader, you might as well be a good one. Don’t let doubt count you out. Have a confident week!
Robin Pou, Chief Advisor and Strategist
We live to make bad leadership extinct so forward this newsletter to others who strive to be confident leaders.
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What is “The Confident Leader”?
During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I began a video series called “Panic or Plan?” It was designed to equip leaders to navigate the doubt they experienced and to rise in the confidence they needed to lead during turbulent times. It took off. I then started this newsletter to equip leaders in the same fashion each week for the doubt that crashes across the bow of their leaderSHIP.
