Value Added Leadership

Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with our Digging Deeper pod series for The Family Business Institute.
Thanks for joining us today and I invite your comments blog to our blog post at any time. And we'll hopefully respond to
you there.

Today, I want to talk about value added leadership. What are we talking about here? Well, the first thing, I guess, is leaders
like to think of yourself as servants. I'm sure you've heard of servant leadership, but think of yourself as a leader as serving
your people, serving their needs, attending to their needs, to try to help them be more successful, be better, sort of unlock
all of the potential of your people.

You probably encounter the situation along your career where you got your first opportunity to lead, or you're giving some
folks an opportunity to lead, and it could be a general superintendent position, a VP of ops, a project director, even an
office manager, an opportunity to lead people instead of doing the day-to-day work yourself.

I know I have a lot of folks that I'm working with in coaching who come to me and they say, "Well, shoot." It was very easy
to accomplish things when I went out, and I ran a job and I did that. Now, as a leader, it's hard to know where I'm having
my effect in whether I'm actually accomplishing anything by being a leader. Maybe I should just run the tough jobs again.

Well, what we want to talk about with value added leadership is really that is the key to encompassing that leadership
position and accomplishing more than you can by doing the direct work of the company. And how do you do that? Well,
you do that by making each of your people better by getting a better result out of each of your people, by adding value to
what they do or adding value to their abilities and their leadership.

There are quite a number of ways you can do that. But very simply if you have four people reporting to you and you're
put in a leadership position, your objective might be to add 25% to each of those folk's abilities, output, accomplishments
that they can do. In a sense, you have to be a multiplier of your team. What are the activities that lead to that value add?
Where do you add value? There are lots of ways that value.

Planning, of course, is a great way to add value. You may have more experience than your people maybe be able to
envision a better job plan or a better way of going about this task or whatever it is. You may be able to help them get a
better plan to accomplish whatever they're trying to accomplish.

Daily direction and goals, prioritization. A lot of times, lesser capable people don't keep their priorities straight, don't know
when to delegate, et cetera. You can perhaps help them prioritize. Of course, you can give them advice when they
encounter a situation, again, that you might have experience with, you can help guide them through that, help them
problem solve, help them make decisions, or in some cases, just make decisions for them to help them get unstuck from
wherever they are.

And again, those are different ways to add value. Other ways, leaders add value by removing barriers. Now, what am I
thinking of in barriers? Well, a barrier may be that they can't get to this because they have to do this first, but they don't
know how. Well, you can remove a barrier by giving that responsibility to somebody else or helping them to do what they
don't know how to do so they can get to what you're asking them to do.

Sometimes, those barriers are a lack of resource. Sometimes, it's a person who's not cooperative in their chain of
command, and you might have to intervene to get that person to cooperate and give the person you're trying to help the
information or the cooperation that they need. Sometimes, it's providing resource as a budget or technology that a person
needs and doesn't have. It could be training and coaching, another way to add value in a general sense. Just
encouragement, keeping a person's morale up, telling them they're doing a good job, giving them a pat on the back,
encouraging them to take the next step in their career, or to [inaudible 00:05:12] for the next thing that they haven't tried
to do before in their process.

And then there's general feedback and sometimes just clarity. Leaders give clarity so people don't have to wonder if they're
doing the right thing, if they're going about it the right way. You can give clarity for leaders. Some of that clarity comes by
establishing a clear vision, a clear purpose for your organization so that even if you're not there to give them guidance,
they know what the right thing to do is in the thing that you would do, sharing your decision process when you make a
decision, so they understand how you look at things, and then again, they can make some of those decisions themselves
when you're not present.

Those are all ways to add value to your people as a leader. Again, if you envision yourself no longer in that day-to-day role,
and you're in the role of making others better and getting more from others, think about that as value added leadership
and start making a list for each of your people about how you can contribute to their success and how you can make them
better at their jobs. That's what leadership's all about. Thanks again for tuning. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.