Essential Advice For Being An Excellent Leader

When you’re running a business like Charlie Bouri, or are taking charge of a big project, you need to learn how to be a good leader.  Some people think that you have to be a natural at management and leadership to be able to do it well, but you can easily learn skills that will help you become a better leader.  If you’re going to be in a leadership position, follow these tips to ensure that you’ll be the leader that you need to be.

Avoid Blaming

Playing the blame game in a managerial situation is sure to result in a lot of missed opportunities.  Your employees may have messed something up, but in the end everything comes back to your managerial skills.  You don’t have to avoid mentioning someone else’s mistakes, but you shouldn’t immediately set out to pin a problem or setback on someone.  If you consistently get angry and blame your employees for problems, they’ll be less likely to come to you when there are actual problems.

Cut Your Losses

Nobody likes admitting that they’re wrong, but sticking to something that clearly isn’t working to seem competent is a big mistake.   When you find out that original idea you had for a project isn’t going to work, don’t stick with it and hope that it’ll sort itself out later.  If a new hire you brought on has been turning in inconsistent and bad work, don’t give them a few more months to figure things out when it’s apparent that they aren’t doing a good job.

Lead By Example

If you tell your employees that they should work hard and put in extra hours on a project, they won’t take your words to heart if they see you taking half days three days a week.  Being a manager shouldn’t put you above your own rules, and if you practice what you preach your employees will notice it.  Obviously there are some exceptions to this rule, but if you want your employees to trust your leadership skills, you’ll need to show them that you’re more than capable of living up to your own standards.

Three Things That Spell Certain Disaster For Family Businesses

There are countless successful corporates that started out as family business, but there are also many more family businesses that fizzled out before they could make it big.  Alexander F Bouri found significant success in the cement business, but other family business owners haven’t been as lucky.  It takes a lot of work to run a family business, and keeping a balance between your work life and your home life can be difficult.  There are a lot of reasons why some family businesses don’t make it past their first year, and if you want to run a successful family owned business you should try to avoid making these mistakes.

Nepotism

This is one of the biggest reasons why family businesses fail.  If you’re going to run a business with your family, you need to hire people based on whether or not they have the ability to do their job, and not if they share your DNA.  Hiring, promoting, and managing your employees based on their bloodlines can lead to failure, and resentment from non-related employees.  It could also lead to your favorite family members/employees slack on the job because they know that they won’t have to face the consequences.

Emotions

It may seem harsh, but the phrase “It’s not personal, it’s business” has no place in a family run company.  Separating your emotions from your work can be very difficult, and the task becomes even more difficult when you’re managing your family.  Having your emotions interfere with your business can lead to several problems.  Your employees could take your emotional decisions as a sign of weakness, or a sign that their boss can’t handle what would usually be simple situations in a non-family owned establishment.  It could also cause some of your family members/employees to resent you if they think you’re acting too emotional.  Try to reign in your emotions when you’re dealing with business.  If you don’t, you could be setting yourself up for failure.

Refusing outside help

Unless you have a huge family with members that are experts in your industry, you’re going to have to hire people who you aren’t related to.  Refusing to hire employees who aren’t your family members can end in disaster.  It’s impossible to start a business from the ground up without skilled help, but there can be risks when you hire people from the outside.  If you have a business that’s full of feuding family members, your other employees will get sick of working in a hostile environment.  Don’t refuse help from other people, and make sure that your non-related employees feel like they’re being treated fairly.