What regrets do you currently have in regards to leading and managing the growth of your business? Have you ever thought about the regrets you will have in the future, perhaps at the sunset of your career in regards to leading, managing and growing your business?

I’ve asked the question of hundreds of CEOs, VPs, sales managers, etc., and three of the top answers may surprise you. I pulled these answers from the more successful managers, leaders, business owners I’ve worked with. The most successful tend to think a bit differently. The most successful will not have been as likely to have regrets around family, faith and community. The most successful are successful because those priorities had their right place in life’s plans.

People are frequently surprised by their successes, and thus, they learn that the greatest constraint to their growth was their own thought. How have you and your leadership team limited your growth through limiting thoughts, limited vision, limited goals, etc.?

You want to always have the checks and balances of an excellent and exhortational board of directors as well as outside advisors that get you to push the envelope in a rational but challenging way. The last thing you want to be saying to yourself at the end of a leadership term is, “I wish I set the bar higher, and I wish I had more people around me that would have exhorted me to aim higher.”

When you focus on an area of passion, you have more energy, creativity and determination. You wake up to a purpose, not an alarm clock. There are management tools that help you regularly bring your managers back to the areas that leverage their passion and thus boost their productivity.

You should be reviewing a person’s role every six months, yours included. Asking questions like, “How could I spend more time doing what I love most in my role?” and, “How could I follow my passions more frequently in my role?” These will invigorate you and your performance.

It’s called the “tyranny of the urgent.” We all have daily distractions and minutia that can take our eye off the end goal and direction and hypnotize us with a sense of busyness rather than a sense of purposefulness.

The cure is to have meetings, management processes and norms in place that help to balance the strategic and tactical focus. We must manage our teams to be focusing appropriately on the longer-term vision and outcome rather than just the day-to-day distractions and quarterly P&Ls.

If you would like to share my meeting and management communication best practices with your leadership team, drop me a note, and I’ll get you a synopsis of our meetings management best practices training that can help you and your team eliminate these areas of top regrets.

But the action we all must take now if we are to be good leadership stewards of the organizations we’ve been entrusted with is to:

1. think bigger;
    
2. intensify our focus on our personal passion and the passion of our teams; and,
    
3. get our own thinking and the thinking of the teams we lead to better connect our short-term priorities to our long-term visions.
    

Growth has few regrets—other than not growing as much as the potential holds.

Each Tuesday, turnaround consultant Mark Faust will be sharing his expertise on how to turn around your small business. His blogs will be filled with practical insights and basic turnaround strategies designed to guide you through crisis leadership and change management.  You'll be able to tap into tips on everything from profitability issues, business continuity plans and pandemic pivots to operational processes, marketing and customers additional value.

As one of the companies he helped grow, we know first hand how inspiring his leadership is and just how well it works! Mark has also agreed to make his best-selling book ‘Growth or Bust’ available, free of charge, to any small business to help them create  their own effective turnaround plan. We’ll be sharing that with you soon.

You can learn more about Mark and his company, Echelon Management, by clicking here.

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