Business Executive
As a business executive, you can be either a leader or manager or both. As a leader, you are someone with a vision who makes a set of rules and takes off on a journey to make the vision a reality. People follow in your footsteps and you generally leave a lot of breakages behind for others to clean up. As a manager, you’re simply someone who makes sure that people use a set of rules to accomplish someone else’ vision. You’re like a referee in a game. You make sure that the game is played according to the rules regardless of the fact that the environment may be changing and the rules may need to be tweaked. Here are 10 qualities that define you as a business executive.
1. The Art of Making Money
You’re in business to make money. Your job is to deliver value to the customer so that you can create wealth for the business – you, the other owners and your employees.
2. Keeping Abreast of the Marketplace.
The business environment is changing rapidly because of economic, sociological and technological factors. If you can see it happening and can react quickly or are able to anticipate it you’re assured of keeping ahead of your competition.
3. Improving Your Leadership Skills
A good business executive is never satisfied with the status quo. There is always need for improvement. Keep honing your skills. Seek out others who don’t necessarily agree with you. Diverse opinions cause ideas to spark and take you to somewhere you couldn’t have reached alone.
4. Setting Goals
Understand your goals and how to set them. Don’t just reword the old goals. Take a careful look at the environment and find out where you’re at, where you want to be and then put a plan in place to get from here to there.
5. Taking the First Steps.
Setting priorities comes immediately after understanding and setting proper goals. The first step may be a small one to give you a sense of accomplishment. Engage and have a daily focus on the major steps that will make your business move forward.
6. Surround Yourself with Good People
Invest in the right people to build a winning team. Make sure every job has been filled with the appropriately skilled and motivated people and create the right environment for them to be successful.
7. Your Integrity is a Keystone of Your Success
Your Integrity is under the constant scrutiny of your customers and employees. Avoid over-promising and always deliver on your promises.
8. Be flexible
You grow when you are flexible and can challenge unchanging points of views, yours or others’. Do not allow anyone to limit what you can achieve. You should constantly strive to surpass your own boundaries.
9. Maintaining the Right Balance
There are always parties who tend to want to see your company head in a different direction. These can include but are not limited to environmental groups, government agencies, and other special interests concerns. Learn how to keep them at bay without antagonizing them.
10. There are no guarantees
Use your intuition to recognize a good idea and be prepared to move on it. If you wait for all the facts to present themselves some opportunities go away. Learn to give up on bad ideas and move on to something that works. Find a new direction as fast as practicable. Spinning wheels just burn energy that could be used profitably somewhere else.
To be a successful business executive, you need to be both. You need the vision to put the business on the winning course but you also need to keep modifying the game as time progresses. Only then do you make progress along this journey called entrepreneurship?