One practice that drives business results
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Ken Blanchard often says, "Profitability and success within an organization is the applause for building positive relationships." In other words, focusing on relationships will drive results.
My leadership coach once told me I need to shift my paradigm and how I spend my time. I was focusing on business performance-related issues, finances, and fire fighting, as opposed to people. He said I should be spending about 70% of my time on coaching, developing, and building relationships with people.
Long story short, he was exactly right. As I started to shift the use of my time, the business flourished, and I found my work to be much more rewarding as I added value to people.
True servant leaders build relationships with all stakeholders of an organization. I recently spoke at a client's Customer Leadership Conference. They use this opportunity to truly provide value to their customers and in the process build extremely strong relationships with them.
Yes, they spent some time sharing information on their capabilities, as you would normally see at these events. But they spent the majority of their time talking about the process of being a visionary company, their values, trends in the overall industry, and their journey toward building a culture of servant leadership. Their company chaplain also shared how the organization takes care of their stakeholders' spiritual well-being.
The discussions with customers at this conference were far deeper than normal client-customer conversations. Relationships were taken to a new level. This organization's clients could truly feel they were being cared for and were receiving value they could not get anywhere else.
It would come as no surprise that this client is extremely successful, and significantly growing even in light of very difficult times.
How much time are you spending building relationships and providing value to people? Is it 70%?
I assure you that shifting the focus to spending the majority of your time coaching and building relationships will be far more inspiring and rewarding work for you, and will also drive results for your organization.
 | Mark Deterding is the founder and principal of Triune Leadership Services, LLC. In 2011 he formed Triune Leadership Services to follow his passion of working with leaders to help them develop core servant leadership capabilities that allow them to lead at a higher level and enable them to achieve their God-given potential. He is married to his wife Kim, and they have two sons, two lovely daughter-in-laws, and three wonderful grandchildren. This article was first published on triuneleadershipservices.com. Used with permission. Learn More » |
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