Running your company from the front is easier said than done. Business leadership takes guts, but also a measure of patience, careful planning, and reliance on great team bonds. Success in a leadership role is the ultimate synergy of competing personality types and management styles in order to create the most efficient and motivated team possible. Take it from Christopher Sarofim, vice chairman of Fayez Sarofim & Co.
Knowledge truly is power.
Christopher Sarofim is one of the first to speak on the power of a knowledge edge. As an investment professional dealing with high net worth clients, Sarofim knows that knowledge sells. It’s the key to success and personal growth in both business and personal spheres in life. Learning everything you can about your particular brand and industry of business is essential to continued growth in your sector. Whether it’s the world of finance like that of Fayez Sarofim & Co., or something else entirely, building a wealth of knowledge that can be leveraged to make firm business decisions in all regards. Knowledge is essential to creating sustainable growth that will buoy your company into the future.
Utilize a powerful goal-setting framework.
While constantly learning about your business space is crucial, so is learning to leverage your work capacity to its full extent. Utilizing OKRs to help bolster your company’s productivity is a great way to increase output and really energize growth across all sectors of your business model. OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a framework for goal-setting and target hitting that boosts productivity almost overnight.
This decision making paradigm was popularized by John Doerr and Google during its foundation years. Essentially, it relies upon the identification of a few long term objectives and overarching goals of the company. After these objectives are determined, your team must evaluate milestones along the path to this success, creating three to five “Key Results” for each overall objective. Key results should always be binary “yes” or “no” evaluations that lead toward the completion of an objective. As well, an OKR framework is an adaptive goal-setting environment. Generally, if your team is able to reach 100% completion then your framework was set to low, so midstream adjustments to the parameters in the method of key result alterations are welcome.
Trust your team.
Finally, building a trustworthy team is essential to promoting a solid business that has roots in the past and space for expansion that extends long into the future. No man is an island, and even the savviest of us eventually come to need the help of others around us. You must begin early on to develop a core team that shares institutional values and corporate direction with you and your brand. A core community within the senior leadership of any business is essential for fielding new ideas and creating the overall business environment to which your employees will strive. These are simple tasks that a single chief executive cannot achieve on his or her own. This is something that Christopher Sarofim and his firm know too well.
The core of a business is made up of a diverse and varied team of individuals in senior leadership that all bring unique experiences and backgrounds to the table in order to craft a robust business strategy designed with long term aspirations in mind. Looking to the future with the help of your trusted team around you is an essential part of business leadership. Looking to tackle the whole puzzle on your own is a recipe for failure.
Business leadership is about a fusion effort of a number of different approaches. Getting it right takes flexibility and a blend of intelligence that anyone can develop with a commitment to excellence.