Transform the Way You Lead With These Five Strategies

What happens if your business chugs along, doing the same old thing, without a strategy? It's like a small row boat in a vast ocean that just tosses about on the waves, going wherever market forces take it. Instead, business leaders should evolve their companies using five strategies.

1. Blend Knowledge and Wisdom

Knowledge is power — there's no doubt about it. However, business leaders must temper that knowledge with wisdom. Knowledge is based on pure facts, but wisdom entails knowing how those pure facts came to be. For example, an office mate knows that revenues dipped last quarter by 3 percent.. That's knowledge. Does he know why that happened?

Business leaders should think of wisdom as applied knowledge. Memorizing every key performance indicator from last year is great, but innovation happens when companies know what to do with that data.

2. Manage in Lean Times

Managers, supervisors and executives go through rough patches when budgets are scarce. Profits might be up, but the business decides to invest that money in new equipment. Scarcity fosters innovation, because companies know how to get by with less. Business leaders should take an active role during lean times and try to assess how the firm can do the same things it always does, only better.

3. Recognize People as More Than Just an Expense

Business leaders may lose sight of the fact that people in an organization are human beings and not commodities. Yes, human resources takes up a majority of American companies' budgets. Workers are what make the company great. Without workers, nothing gets done. Workers are more than just numbers, and executives must take care of the workers that take care of them.

4. Avoid Complacency

Complacency, in a business sense, means investing in the same initiatives that failed in the past. Instead, managers should try innovating every once in a while. New money for a new project might just be a risk worth taking. This is where knowledge, wisdom and knowing the workers come to fruition. Supervisors must know when to make these choices, how they can rely on teams to make the new initiative a success and how to manage the project from start to finish.

5. Share Everything

Co-workers need to give it their all at the office to make success happen. However, executives must lead by example when they share their fears, ambitions, strategies and methodologies for moving the company forward. Employees then look to that person with respect for being completely honest and forthright about what to expect. Honesty is the best policy, and that means breaking down barriers to communication with transparency.

These five strategies can put a company in a great position to earn more market share, innovate at the right time and push forward with new ideas. These principles all start with business leaders at the top who recognize the potential for greatness, and the rest of the team follows along.

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