Forget the stereotypical

Forget the stereotypical leadership image of a buttoned-up person in a gray suit hauling around a hefty briefcase. Today, standout leaders come in all shapes and sizes. She could be a blue jeans-clad marketing student, running a major ecommerce company out of her dorm room. He might be the next salt-and-pepper-haired, barefoot Steve Jobs, presenting a groundbreaking new device at a major industry conference.

"Our research indicates that what really matters is that leaders are able to create enthusiasm, empower their people, instill confidence and be inspiring to the people around them," says Peter Handal, chief executive of New York City-based Dale Carnegie Training, a leadership-training company.

That's a tall order. However, as different as leaders are today, there are some things great leaders do every day. Here, Handal shares his five keys for effective leadership:

1. Face challenges.

Great leaders are brave enough to face up to challenging situations and deal with them honestly. Whether it's steering through a business downturn or getting struggling employees back on track, effective leaders meet these challenges openly. Regular communications with your staff, informing them of both good news and how the company is reacting to challenges will go a long way toward making employees feel like you trust them and that they're unlikely to be hit with unpleasant surprises.

"The gossip at the coffee machine is usually 10 times worse than reality," Handal says. "Employees need to see their leaders out there, confronting that reality head-on."

2. Win trust.

Employees are more loyal and enthusiastic when they work in an environment run by people they trust. Building that trust can be done in many ways. The first is to show employees that you care about them, Handal says. Take an interest in your employees beyond the workplace. Don't pry, he advises, but ask about an employee's child's baseball game or college graduation. Let your employees know that you're interested in their success and discuss their career paths with them regularly.

When employees, vendors or others make mistakes, don't reprimand or correct them in anger. Instead, calmly explain the situation and why their behavior or actions weren't correct, as well as what you expect in the future. When people know that you aren't going to berate them and that you have their best interests at heart, they're going to trust you, Handal says.

3. Be authentic.

If you're not a suit, don't try to be one. Employees and others dealing with your company will be able to tell if you're just pretending to be someone you're not, Handal says. That could make them question what else about you might be inauthentic. Have a passion for funky shoes? Wear them. Are you an enthusiastic and hilarious presenter? Get them laughing. Use your strengths and personality traits to develop your personal leadership style, Handal says.

4. Earn respect.

When you conduct yourself in an ethical way and model the traits you want to see in others, you earn the respect of those around you. Leaders who are perceived as not "walking their talk" typically don't get very far, Handal says. This contributes to employees and other stakeholders having pride in the company, which is an essential part of engagement, Handal says. Also, customers are less likely to do business with a company if they don't respect its values or leadership.

5. Stay curious.

Good leaders remain intellectually curious and committed to learning. They're inquisitive and always looking for new ideas, insights and information. Handal says the best leaders understand that innovation and new approaches can come from many places and are always on the lookout for knowledge or people who might inform them and give them an advantage.

"The most successful leaders I know are truly very curious people. They're interested in the things around them and that contributes to their vision," Handal says.

When Steve Blank appeared

When Steve Blank appeared on the cover of Wiredmagazine nine years ago, his company then, Rocket Science Games, was expected to revolutionize the videogame industry. At the time, Blank didn't let the skepticism of critics faze him.

"I thought I was a genius," he says. Three months later, when he called his mother to let her know he was about to lose $35 million in investor funding, he wasn't feeling quite so genius anymore.

"I had lots of choices, including that I could have quit," he says. "Learning from that failure for me was one of the best experiences of my life." And learn he did. In 1996, Blank founded the startup E.piphany, which went on to earn $1 billion for each of its investors.

In the past 10 years, says Blank, the culture around entrepreneurship has become increasingly failure-friendly. Serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley hop from one failed business to the next and billionaire entrepreneurs like Richard Branson wax on publicly about their failures almost as much as their successes. Still, "no one likes to fail," says Blank. "We are hardwired for success."

But what if you could actually use failure to help you succeed? Here are five keys to start failing your way to success:

1. Call failure something else.

When was the last time anyone got hired for a senior-level position without any experience? For serial entrepreneurs, "experience" is simply another word for "failure," says Blank. By labeling a failed effort an opportunity to expand your knowledge base, you're framing it in a more positive light, allowing yourself to add to your credibility as a more seasoned entrepreneur.

2. Use failure as a stepping stone.

With every failure, identify what you know you did wrong and be conscious not to repeat your mistakes. This will bring you one step closer to success, says Steve Siebold, a Palm Beach, Fla.-based consultant who works with corporations and entrepreneurs on mental toughness and critical thinking.

"I've never heard [a millionaire entrepreneur] say they hit it right the first time out," says Siebold, whose book How Rich People Think (London House Press, 2010) is a culmination of nearly three decades of interviews. "The bigger they are, the more they've typically failed."

3. Never fail alone.

Entrepreneurs like to be trailblazers. But make a mistake on your own and you might have a hard time determining what went wrong. Having a partner you trust and respect can turn every failure into an opportunity for collaboration. "A good partner can help you determine what not to do again," says Karl Baehr, director of business and entrepreneurial studies at Emerson College, a private four-year college in Boston focused on communication and the arts.

4. Don't hide your failures.

Be proud that you were brave enough to take a risk in the first place. By being forthright about your mistakes, you open yourself up to learning from others.

Baehr's mentor, Walter Hailey, whose insurance company Lone Star Life Insurance went on to become a Kmart insurance company, used to take an hour-long walk at 5 a.m. every morning with a group of close friends to talk about ideas, successes and failures. "By the time they got back to the house, they had solutions," says Baehr. "They had a plan for the day."

5. Redefine what you want.

Revisit and refocus why you got into business in the first place. "Look for your emotional motivators. We are emotional creatures. Logic doesn’t motivate us," says Siebold, who launched five consecutive unsuccessful businesses before he started his current consulting company. For Siebold, that motivator was one day becoming a millionaire, a goal he achieved at age 31. "Most people only half-heartedly decide they want a lot of things. You have to get really clear on what you want," he says. "The question is: How badly do [you] want it?"

More important 1

More important, Issa’s proposal would also do away with the fixed annual $5.5 billion payment that USPS is required to make to pre-fund its future retiree health-care costs. The unions and their congressional allies have long called for the same.

Instead, the draft would move the USPS to a system where it could cover these costs according to calculations of what it will actually owe. This could reduce the postal service’s annual expenses for present and future retiree health benefit payments from $8.5 billion to somewhere between $2 billion and $5 billion.

Issa is still intent on ending Saturday letter (but not package) delivery. His draft proposal would also do away with the USPS’s no-layoffs policy. These are things the unions fiercely oppose. Still, he’s made significant concessions. The question now is whether the unions and their political allies will do the same. It’s likely the only way the postal service will ever be fixed.

He’s abandoned his plan to create a board modeled after the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) to shrink the postal service’s physical infrastructure. Senior oversight committee aides say this is no longer necessary because U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is moving ahead with his own plan to close as many as 200 mail-processing centers around the country and reduce hours of operation at money-losing post offices.

More important, Issa’s proposal would also do away with the fixed annual $5.5 billion payment that USPS is required to make to pre-fund its future retiree health-care costs. The unions and their congressional allies have long called for the same.

Postal worker unions

Postal worker unions and their mostly Democratic allies in Congress sometimes portray Darrell Issa as a malevolent figure bent on destroying the U.S. Postal Service. They point to what they considered a highly partisan bill that the Republican representative from California introduced in 2011, which would have treated the money-losing USPS as if it were bankrupt and created a commission to shutter postal facilities. The Issa bill received some good press, including a favorable nodfrom the Washington Post’s editorial page. Still, much to the relief of Issa’s foes, the bill went nowhere.

On Thursday, Issa made it harder for his critics to caricature him. He released a draft version of a new postal reform bill. It has some of the same elements in his earlier one—but the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has jurisdiction over the USPS, has softened his positions on others. If he’s bent on anything this time, it seems to be striking a bipartisan deal.

He’s abandoned his plan to create a board modeled after the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) to shrink the postal service’s physical infrastructure. Senior oversight committee aides say this is no longer necessary because U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is moving ahead with his own plan to close as many as 200 mail-processing centers around the country and reduce hours of operation at money-losing post offices.

A growing number

A growing number of states and cities are starting to buy that argument. Last month, Nevada became the 10th state—joining California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington—to ban employers from running a credit check on a prospective hire. Nevada’s law, which goes into effect in October, allows applicants who find out their prospective employers used their credit information to deny them a job to sue the company and force it to hire them.

Eight of the states that ban the practice have done so over the past three years. Chicago also passed a law last year, though the city exempts jobs that require handling money from the new rules. The New York City Council and the New York State Legislature are both considering bills that would severely limit employers’ abilities to use credit reports to screen applicants. At the federal level, Representative Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced a billthis February that would ban employers from using both credit checks and bankruptcy filings when evaluating employees.

It’s hard to know how companies use credit reports to make decisions. The Society for Human Resource Management found that 80 percent of employers say they hired people whose credit reports contained damaging information about them. While a company must tell you whether it is checking your credit report, it doesn’t have to tell you why it turned you down for the job. The Demos study found that one in seven people were told they weren’t hired because of their credit. But because employers aren’t required to let you know why they made their decision, the actual number is presumably much larger than that.

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Think about your daily routine, you might stop at a coffee shop in the morning, perhaps you workout at the gym in the afternoon or go for dinner with friends in the evening. Every place that you visit, and every business you connect with during that day, exists because of an idea and an entrepreneur.  Whether that entrepreneur comes from a family of business owners, or is starting out on their own with no previous experience, running their business requires a set of key skills.  But what are the skills you need and how do you acquire them?  

Your Key Business Skills

Running a small business often requires that you become a jack-of-all-trades.  It is therefore important to know early on the skills that you have and those that you will either have to learn or delegate to others.  The key business skills to consider include:

 

• Strategic Management. Creating a business and strategic plan for your business and making sure you keep to it.
• Basic Accounting. Which records to keep, how to keep them and how to file them.
• Financial Management. Where to find financing and how to manage it once you’ve sourced it.
• People Management. Hiring your first employee and how to manage them.
• Marketing. How to market your business through traditional channels, web and social media.
• Sales. How to complete a sale and look after your customers.
• Operations Management. Choosing and managing your suppliers. 

When considering the skills that you lack there are three avenues you can take: you can hire employees who are strong in those specific areas, you can engage professional business advisors, or you can take the time to learn these key skills yourself.  

The Basics of Business

In acknowledgement of the need for these essential skills, Small Business BC has created a new affordable seminar series to help BC’s entrepreneurs.  The Basics of Business is a combination of courses including:

 

• Branding- More than a Logo
• Powerful Marketing for Small Business
• Getting Your Business Online-A Website
• Tax Tips from an Accountant
• My First Year in Business: A Financial Overview
• Operations for Small Business
• Sales Strategies for Small Business
• Attracting and Hiring Top Talent
• Business Viability 1- The Break Even Analysis
• Business Viability 2- The Cash Flow Forecast
• Social Media and Online Marketing Tactics

Delivered by industry experts with real small business experience, this highly anticipated program covers the 11 essential elements of running and operating a small business in just a few short weeks.  The program also offers a great discount, ideal for those starting out.  At only $349 the package will save you more than 40% on individual seminar registration.

 

“Entrepreneurs who take the time to seek education before launching a business will only increase their chances of success; Small Business BC is doing its part to make sure that’s possible,” says Small Business BC CEO, George Hunter.

 

For more information and dates, visit the Seminars page today.