\u201cI am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”\u00a0 – Alexander the Great<\/p>\n
How important is leadership to selling custom embroidered shirts and promotional products?<\/strong><\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if leadership, as a subject, gets more attention now than it used to. But as we at Queensboro have become increasingly serious about TGP \u2013 The Greatness Project, which is our initiative to become a great company, it is definitely a subject that has gotten a lot more attention from me.<\/p>\n When we committed to TGP, I knew I was going to have to seriously up my leadership game.\u00a0 I was a reactive leader who related OK to some, and not at all to others.<\/p>\n I knew if we were going to be great, I was going to have to become a great leader.\u00a0 That was a very difficult thing to accept.\u00a0 To this day I don\u2019t know if I am capable of it.\u00a0 It feels right to aspire to be a great leader, but I don\u2019t know how anyone could ever claim to actually be a great leader.\u00a0 It is kind of like claiming to be a perfect person.<\/p>\n Looking for some help, I set out to learn about leadership.\u00a0 As I began to gather information, I was surprised by how disconnected it all was.\u00a0 Mostly it was a lot of successful people talking about how they dealt with people as they became increasingly successful.\u00a0 If they made a lot of money, won a lot of games, or rose to high political office, they were, by definition, great leaders.<\/p>\n I saw a few \u201cstudies\u201d on the subject that claimed to measure leadership effectiveness but didn\u2019t see much science around how effectiveness was defined or measured.<\/p>\n At least not as any kind of universal principal.\u00a0 Instead, what leadership is and how it should be practiced seems to be a lot of individual opinions validated in hindsight by impressive results.\u00a0 If results were good, leadership must have been good.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t too upset to not find a working model of leadership to adopt because it freed me to make up something on my own.\u00a0 I love doing that.<\/p>\n So I got with The Team and this is what we came up with.\u00a0 This is what we believe about leadership:<\/p>\n Leadership is influence, good and bad.\u00a0 To the extent to which everything we do influences others in some way, we are all leaders.\u00a0 The greater our influence, the more of a leader we are.\u00a0 Everybody in an organization needs to understand the influence they have on those around them and accept his or her leadership responsibilities.<\/p>\n Good leadership is positive, inspirational and leads to progress.\u00a0 Bad leadership is destructive and ultimately prevents progress.<\/p>\n Great leadership and great results are only related in the long run.\u00a0 In the short term, great leadership can produce bad results and bad leadership can produce good results.\u00a0 Sometimes you play poorly and win.\u00a0 Other times you play great and lose.<\/p>\n We see it something like this:<\/p>\n Individual Effectiveness = Innate Talent x Effort x Coaching<\/strong><\/p>\n Organizational Effectiveness = People x Effort x Leadership.<\/strong><\/p>\n The higher the degree of any of the \u201cfactors\u201d (the items on the right side of this equation), the larger the \u201cproduct\u201d, or the effectiveness of the individual or organization.<\/p>\n Get the effectiveness product high enough and you\u2019ve achieved greatness!<\/p>\n (An interesting thing to note about these formulas is that if any of the \u201cfactors\u201d are negative, the \u201cproduct\u201d is also negative. Talented people working hard directed by good leadership leads to greatness, but unqualified people, poor effort or bad leadership all doom greatness.)<\/p>\n It is no small feat to populate an organization 100% with qualified people.\u00a0 That is the subject for another blog post.\u00a0 Assuming you have done that, though, how do you then influence, coach, manage and lead to get everyone to work productively together across the entire team?<\/p>\n We talk about leadership in this way so that it is easy to understand and remember.\u00a0 If everyone on the team agrees and accepts these idea, the same principles can be applied to every leadership situation in our organization regardless of the level.<\/p>\n All great leadership, we believe, begins with relationships.\u00a0 <\/strong>A great leader has great relationships up, down, sideways, back and forth, and inside and out of an organization.\u00a0 Successful people are not always great leaders.\u00a0 Great speakers are not always great leaders.\u00a0 But we believe great leaders are always great at building strong relationships.\u00a0 Influence is extended through relationships.\u00a0 Without great relationships, influence quickly erodes.\u00a0 How does one develop great relationships and great relationship skills?\u00a0 Maybe we\u2019ll write a separate blog post on that, too!\u00a0 It all starts with slowing down and listening, though.\u00a0 And of course, one must truly care.<\/p>\n Relentless<\/strong> is the favorite leadership quality of those who like to lead by example.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it is never enough to just lead by example.\u00a0 Most people need more explicit guidance than that.\u00a0 Some feel that to be a leader is to have permission to tell others what to do, while not actually doing anything themselves.\u00a0 In fact, a great leader is usually the hardest working member of the team.\u00a0 All eyes are on the leader.\u00a0 The leader sets the pace.\u00a0 But a leader who only leads by example doesn\u2019t really know if anyone is really following, and if they are not, why they are not.\u00a0 Without the leader\u2019s relentless drive, though, a team will never be inspired to dig down for the extra effort necessary for superior results.<\/p>\n A great leader is also reflective.\u00a0 <\/strong>They are not impulsive.\u00a0 Being reflective is the only way to effectively deal with the barrage of issues that come up every day.\u00a0 A great leader doesn\u2019t immediately react to something they see for the first time.\u00a0 They find context to put around new information as they begin to understand it.\u00a0 When context is not available, decisions are postponed avoiding mistakes.\u00a0 The idea that a great leader always knows exactly what to do is a myth.\u00a0 When a great leader responds quickly it is because he or she has prepared.\u00a0 Team members respect a thoughtful leader.\u00a0 Everyone knows good decisions require careful consideration.\u00a0 When reflection<\/strong> is combined with relentlessness<\/strong>, it makes a great leader decisive.<\/p>\n One of the most gut-wrenching reflections <\/strong>a great leader embraces is around evaluating talent.\u00a0 Bad leaders don\u2019t understand the importance of having talented teammates.\u00a0 Mediocre leaders understand the importance but aren\u2019t relentless <\/strong>about acting on it.\u00a0 Great leaders hire carefully, reflect<\/strong> and coach constantly, and make changes quickly when necessary.\u00a0 The speed with which a great leader acts when the wisdom of a judgement becomes clear is a trademark of a great leader.<\/p>\n Finally, a great leader continuously reconnects<\/strong> the team.\u00a0 Great teams support and encourage individual creativity and expression, which is where progress ultimately comes from, but only within the framework of the larger group.\u00a0 This creative impulse gives a team energy, but it also drives it apart.\u00a0 A great leader is constantly bringing the team back together.\u00a0 A great leader always knows were each member of the team is, emotionally and physically, and makes sure each team member is reconnected to every other team member.\u00a0 All great teams stay connected and that does not happen by itself.<\/p>\n Why are we so inspired and fascinated by great leadership?\u00a0 Surely part of it is a degree of envy for what often comes with it \u2013 money, power, fame.\u00a0 And no doubt another part of it is a fascination with how a single person can achieve seemingly superhuman things.\u00a0 We are drawn in by the question \u201cHow can we do that?\u00a0 What does that person have that I don\u2019t have?\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t believe it is for anyone to say if they are a great leader.\u00a0 That is for others to judge.\u00a0 There is greatness in aspiring to be a great leader, though, just as there is greatness in aspiring to be a great company.<\/p>\n Ambition, confidence, and humility are the partners of greed, arrogance and ego.\u00a0 Great leaders, guided by the 4 R\u2019s, make a career of understanding the difference.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”\u00a0 – Alexander the Great A marketing partner from Canada asks: \u201cHow do you view leadership at Queensboro?\u201d How important is leadership to selling custom embroidered shirts and promotional products? I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}So Leadership lesson # 1 for me was, there is really no such thing as leadership.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Our goal at Queensboro is to become a great company.\u00a0 What role does leadership play in that pursuit?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Our belief is that great leadership comes from the 4 R\u2019s \u2013 Relationships, Relentless, Reflective and Reconnect<\/strong>.<\/h4>\n