The top 5 habits of good leaders

Business coach Jackie Cooper looks at the top five habits good leaders need to develop to build resilience and grow – and how you can learn these skills and more on the Help to Grow: Management course run at DMU.

Jackie says: “More than ever small businesses must develop resilience and become more sustainable to survive, and if done well, will lead to increased and more efficient productivity.”

 

Here are Jackie’s top five tips to make yourself a better leader:

1. Strategic Space - Give yourself the strategic space to develop your business. As a small business owner/manager you probably spend a lot of your time working IN your business, create strategic space by diarising time to work ON your business.

2. Communication is a two-way process of sense making and sense giving. Two ears and one mouth and using them accordingly springs to mind. Listen intently to feedback and comments from your customers and staff. Feedback is sometime hard to digest but it is the best communication you can act upon giving you the opportunity to change and improve.

3. Innovation – In the words of management guru Peter Drucker ‘Innovation is the task of endowing human and material resources with new and greater wealth-producing capacity’. It is often the simple product or process change that can turn something from great to fantastic.

4. Self-Reflection – once practiced as a regular activity, the realisation is that of immense positive impact on you as a leader.

5. Company Culture – the vision, mission and values of your company starts inside and radiates out through your brand and employees. Many customer and potential customers buy from companies who have a company culture that aligns with their own beliefs.  

Interested in learning more?

You’ll learn more about developing these habits and how to become a better leader on the Help to Grow: Management programme. You’re eligible if:
•    you have line management responsibility in a UK based company with 5-249 employees
•    your company has been trading for at least a year

Jackie Cooper is programme manager for Help to Grow: Management, a Government-backed programme for leaders of small businesses to survive and thrive in the coming months. The Government pays 90% of the cost. It’s part of a £20m package of support for SMEs and scale ups.