Does your business take vitamins?

Visual Courtesy: www.blogigo.de
Visual Courtesy: http://www.blogigo.de

For those of us who manage, run or own businesses, we all know the three key ingredients that go into making sure the enterprise is healthy:

  1. Cash Flow—Liquidity is the life blood of any business. Managing and having the necessary cash flow enables a business to invest and grow.
  2. Employee Engagement—Motivation leads to productivity & efficiency. Employees represent the organisation brand and their output determines the organisational brand value. They are the heart of any business.
  3. Leadership— The right leadership provides strategic clarity & direction to the business through coaching the employees in their self-development. Leadership is the vitamin for a business to give it stamina, immunity and growth.

As a business owner or a corporate executive, whilst we give a lot of attention to the first ingredient—Cash Flow—most of the times we don’t focus on employee engagement or on the leadership the organisation has.

Without giving the due attention these two important areas deserve how do we expect our businesses to deliver growth year on year?

Here’s why:

  1. Leadership needs to be priority number 1. With the right leadership getting employee engagement becomes easier.
  2. Employee engagement occurs when the employee sees a clearly defined benefit, in doing his or her functional role with efficiency. This occurs when the leadership is able to show alignment between the employee’s individual goals and the organisational goals.
  3. Engaged employees are more productive and deliver a far better customer-experience. This results in a high cash flow for the business through sales, repeat sales and higher customer satisfaction.

So if we are looking to grow our business, the first area to study is not the new market opportunity or the pricing or doing the cost-benefit analysis. The first place is to look at the leadership of the organisation and evaluate if the leadership is:

  1. Being effective
  2. Having strategic clarity

Why are these two factors so important?

Leadership is the link to having engaged employees. In any organisation you need to have engaged employees to generate growth. Without the employees being engaged a business simply exists up until a point where the cash flow would severely be affected resulting in the closure of that business.

The way to get employees engaged is to ensure that the leader is able to clearly articulate and align organisational goals with direct benefits that impact the employees. Answering the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question brings about an empathetic connect between the employee and the leader. That aids in motivating the employee to perform.

This is why leadership is vitamin for an organisation! Leadership is that all-pervasive and all-encompassing element for a business that provides it with stamina and energy to have a sustainable brand.