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 CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

“We manage things. We lead people.” - Steven Covey -

Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

This ebook will cover:

● The difference between a manager and a leader.
● What to stop doing if you want to lead your
company to achieve your big goals.
● How to take a birds eye view of your business.
● What to start doing in order to become a leader
who is looked up to.
● A ributes you must develop to be an effective
leader.
● What working on your business instead of in your
business means.
● How to get your employees to do all of the
“running” of the business
● How to create motivated teams inspired by your
vision.
● How to encourage your employees to step up to
leadership positions and lead others as your
●
leadership positions and lead others as your
business grows.

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 CHAPTER TWO
What Leaders Don't Do

Once your organisation reaches a certain size, there’s

certain activities that leaders don’t need to be involved in
anymore.

Mark Zuckerberg may have started Facebook by writing

code in his bedroom, but as Facebook exploded he quickly
had to step back from the day to day and focus on being a
leader in order to control and direct its growth.

Alan Sugar started by selling car aerials on the streets,

but as his business empire grew he didn’t continue to do
selling and distribution - he focused on developing those
beneath him so he could lead the business into new
markets.

If your day is taken up with all the day to day work in

your business, you don’t have any time to work on the
business - I.e. trying to grow it, increase revenue, increase
profit, hire the right people, streamline processes, etc.

During your day to day, you shouldn’t be doing the

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 During your day to day, you shouldn’t be doing the
following:

Taking over every time there’s a crisis

Sometimes an emergency needs to involve you a li le.
You might want to drop a line to a client who’s been
affected when your company has dropped the ball, as the
message may be received best coming from you.

However, don’t take over and take the work off of your

employees’ hands whenever something goes wrong. Relax,
let go, and trust them to fix things. Your employees will
gain good experience, it allows them to develop
professionally, and it keeps your time free for strategic
activities. It also shows trust in them on your part which is
crucial for them to step up to leadership positions.

If they can’t fix anything without you, perhaps you need

to look at improving your training and development plans.

Making all of the important decisions

One of the biggest ways to lose a lot of your time is to

make all of the decisions about everything. Always being
the decision maker takes you away from the work you
should be doing. It also encourages interruptions as people
come to you to make their decisions for them.

When this happens, ask: “What do you think we should

do?”

If they say they don’t know, say “Where do you think

you should start?”
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 Doing this trains employees to think for themselves.
They usually have the answer already, but just want your
validation. It is only through continual reinforcement that
you will stop employees from bringing every decision to
you.
Si ing in lots of internal meetings
Meetings can be a massive time waster in general,
especially if you’re only in them to give the OK to
whatever decision needs to be made.
Reject meeting invites unless it is truly necessary for you
to be there. Allow people to make decisions without you
being present.
Doing Administrative Work
Instead of answering the phones, having meetings to
decide internal tactics, dealing with customers, suppliers,
distributors, etc. all day long – you should be taking a step
back from everything tactical, and instead work on your
organisation’s strategy and direction.
Someone who involves themselves with all the day to
day work is seen as a manager, directly co-ordinating
people to accomplish tasks. Acting as a manager will never
give your employees the freedom to step up to the
management/leadership positions themselves.

You have to let go and trust the people you’ve employed

to do their jobs so you can focus on growing the business.
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to do their jobs so you can focus on growing the business.
When you’re leading and not managing tasks, you’ll be
viewed differently by everybody.

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 CHAPTER THREE
7 Attributes of the Leader

Leaders rarely actually tell anyone to do anything. They

inspire people to do it themselves.
Leaders create inspired teams who are motivated to
work enthusiastically to see the vision become a reality.
The leader will regularly communicate and work on his
or her vision for the organisation, ge ing everyone to pull
in the same direction, but they don’t coordinate tasks.
Leaders commonly have several a ributes:

Vision
You may have a vision, but you need to map it out on
paper/screen to really solidify it in your mind so you can
clearly describe it to other people.
It’s crucial for the leader to share the vision, so that
others can get behind and work towards it.

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 You should have a clearly defined fifteen year plan
which you refer to and talk about regularly. This should
include employee numbers, revenue, profit, number of
customers, etc. for every year between now and 15 years in
the future.

These numbers can’t be pulled out of the air. Be realistic

and use existing data about your business so far to draw up
the plan. You can’t ‘come down the mountainside with the
tablets’ proclaiming the 15 year plan if it isn’t backed up by
solid data. Get help from an outsourced finance director or
business consultant if necessary to draw this up.
Once you have the plan, the next part is developing a
roadmap with actionable steps that will get you to the 15
year goal. Being able to turn big ideas into executable plans
whilst keeping your team focused on the long term goal is
a crucial aspect of leadership.

Scaling Up by Verne Harnish is a must read and will

help you develop a One Page Strategic Plan. This ties your
15 year goals to shorter term 3-5 year goals, 1 year
priorities and quarterly actions.
Humility
Great leaders have supreme confidence but also enough
humility to keep this in check. Know your weaknesses,
admit mistakes and admit when you need to be improve.
Being open to criticism will make you a be er leader.
“A good leader is a person who takes a li le more than his
share of the blame and a li le less than his share of the credit.” -
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share of the blame and a li le less than his share of the credit.” -
John Maxwell.

Seek out feedback on your own work. Find out what

your employees think and focus on their needs.

Hold weekly 1-2-1 meetings with all employees who

report directly to you. Get others to do this with their
directs too. These meetings are to talk about any concerns
or needs the employee might have, not just to talk about
work. Ensure you regularly touch on employees’ career
plans and development too.
Doing this shows that you care about and are invested in
the happiness, motivation and development of your
employees, making them more likely to be appreciative of
you and see you as a leader.

Self Awareness
Great leaders are in control of their emotions. They
understand and manage them.
Inner-calm and outer resolve comes down to self-control.
Losing your temper easily shows people that you’re not in
control and makes you less approachable. It’s hard for
employees to trust your decision making abilities if you’re
not in control of yourself.

Be aware of your weaknesses and surround yourself

with people who balance them out. If you’re not someone
who enjoys statistical analysis and detail, make sure you
hire people in key positions who do. If you like to make
snap decisions, hire people who analyse all the options
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snap decisions, hire people who analyse all the options
before they decide what to do.

Do personality tests on everyone in your organisation,

and all new hires. The Colour Works provide excellent tests
which give you reports that will astonish you with their
accuracy. Most importantly, these reports contain tips on
how different personality types should work and
communicate with each other.
Profiling yourself will help you to see where your
weaknesses lie, and doing this for your employees will
show you where your business is strong and where it is
weak. This should dictate organisational structure and
hiring plans.

Integrity
Leaders have an obligation to adhere to strong moral
principles. Having strong values, beliefs and ethics allows
others to clearly identify with you.

Your personal values are likely very similar to the core

values of the company. If you want others to hold to the
values of the company then you must show integrity to
your own values every day.
“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It
is the only thing.” - Albert Scwei er.

“If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being

tested, they aren’t values. They’re hobbies.” - Jon Stewart.

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 Commitment
You’ve set and communicated a grand 15 year goal for
the business with the intention of ge ing everyone else
along for the ride. You must be bold and stand by your
ideas if you want anyone else to care in 6 months, 2 years,
10 years, etc.

Continual reinforcement of your commitment is

important. Remind everyone of the journey you are all on
and show how you’re still working towards it. If people
think you don’t follow through on your plans, they won’t
believe you have the drive to take the company (and them)
anywhere.

Adversity will be the toughest test. Learn how to

appreciate the journey more than the destination and you’ll
be able to stand strong in the face of adversity.
You won’t be able to do it alone. You’ll need to place
trust in key people and show loyalty by nurturing them to
become leaders too.

Help Others
Leaders take less of the credit, and more of the blame.

They help others to succeed by placing trust in them.

They encourage people to take more responsibility, and
nurture them to become leaders too.
Personal and professional development of your key
people should be high on the agenda. Don’t treat your
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people should be high on the agenda. Don’t treat your
people as commodities; there just to show up, do a job then
go home. Invest in futures and encourage development
within your teams.

Nurture people to become be er and they’ll reward you

with loyalty, they’ll take on greater responsibility, and
likely have more enthusiasm for the job than anyone you
could have brought in above them.

Communication
Leaders must be able to communicate clearly and with
passion in order to inspire, motivate and achieve results
from people. Having more personal and engaging
conversations with people leads to be er results from
teams.
Communication of goals, vision and plans is important
to ensure your employees understand that you’re
commi ed to taking them somewhere.

Great communicators have empathy, can read between

lines, maintain an open mind, can make complex tasks
seem more simple, and are able to effectively communicate
messages to many people at once.
Communication includes listening too (and picking up
on body language signals). This is important because it will
allow you to spot disengagement, disharmonies and de-
motivation.

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 CHAPTER FOUR
The Core of Your Business

This chapter borrows from Verne Harnish’s brilliant

book - “Scaling Up”. It’s an absolute must read for
business leaders in the making.

One of the things discussed in it is “The Core” of the

company.
The Core is defined as:

● Purpose
● Values
● Competencies

Harnish says these are the three muscles at the centre of

the organisation which should underpin everything
including strategy, goals, hiring plans and events.

Growing companies eventually start experiencing

“culture drift” because it becomes difficult to keep the
hiring and onboarding processes strongly aligned to the
values of the business leader. This is usually when the
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values of the business leader. This is usually when the
company reaches around 50-70 employees.

Having a strong, true and continually reinforced core

(Values, Purpose and Competencies), will ensure the
company keeps its culture as it grows and remain true to
the qualities that made it successful in the first place.
It is critical to discover what the Core of your company
is, write it down, communicate it, test it, and continually
reinforce it on an ongoing basis. Don’t write a nice
sounding, but false, paragraph which is sent around once
and then quickly forgo en.

Core Purpose
Your Core Purpose is why your company exists in the
world. This has to be deeper than “making money”.

All businesses exist to make money, but successful

businesses always have a reason for existing that makes a
positive difference in the world - otherwise they wouldn’t
be successful.

Why would your customers care if you disappeared

tomorrow?

For Netstar, the core purpose is “Helping people

succeed, through technology.”

To find yours, answer the question “What do we do?”

Then ask “why?”. Once you’ve asked why 5 times, you
should be near your core purpose. Once you get to “save
the world”, back up one step.
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 Core Values
It is vital that the core values are true to your
organisation, not “aspirational values”.
The values are not a generic list of platitudes like
“customer service, honesty, teamwork, etc.”

If you can’t think of several stories that are examples of

the core values in play, then they’re probably not true of
your organisation.

Core Values should dictate hiring plans, down to the

specific interview questions that your managers should be
asking. Look for responses that show the candidate
embodies the core values and will be able to quickly
immerse themselves in the culture of the company.
Everyone will have some kind of answer to the questions,
but the right candidates will appear to light up when
talking about something that aligns with their personal
values.
You must continually reinforce the core values. Repeat
yourself a lot! Stick them up everywhere. Get them printed
on coffee cups, set them as the screensaver on everyone’s
computer and plaster them (artistically) on the wall.

Test the values again after a year. See if there were lots of
examples of your employees embodying them. If not, then
they’re probably not your core values.

Core values should enable you to deflect employees who

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 Core values should enable you to deflect employees who
want you to approve big decisions and try to drag you back
to working “in” your company. The right Values should
enable you to say to any employee, “Consult the core
values!” when they ask you what they should do.

Core Competencies, Weaknesses and Trends

It’s essential to understand your strengths so you can
make plans that draw on them.

Your strengths are things your company does well that

are not easy for competitors to imitate, can be reused
widely for many products and markets, and contribute to
the benefits that the end customer experiences.

It’s also essential to understand your company’s core

weaknesses - the things that you’re incapable of doing - so
you can mitigate these weaknesses in your plans.

Finally, you need to define any market or global trends

that could have an impact on your business. Think about
things like house prices in your area affecting who you’re
able to employ, technology changes that impact on your
customers and how they use your products/services, etc.

Failure to do this could put you out of business. Just ask

Blockbuster. They failed to identify or embrace the video
streaming movement and have been put out of business by
services like Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Prime, etc.
Read More in Scaling Up
This barely scratches the surface of the strategic planning
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 This barely scratches the surface of the strategic planning
activities you should be doing. Again, I highly recommend
you read Scaling Up by Verne Harnish.
I’ll list the other activities you should do here, but read
the book for the detail. This list doesn’t cover the whole
book, just key sections from three of the chapters.

● The Core - Values, purpose and competencies.

● Recruitment and Selection - Ensuring these are
aligned with your core.
● Strategic Thinking Team - How to select the key
individuals for leadership.
● Words You Own - Mindshare, how you will
capture a ention.
● Sandbox - Who and where your market is, hyper
focused.
● Brand Promises - the financially backed promises
you make to customers that differentiate you.
● X Factor - Finding the differentiator that blocks
competitors and gives you a 10 - 100x advantage.

Much more, including the previously mentioned One

Page Strategic Plan, which will break your purpose, values
and big goal down into 3-5 year targets, 1 year plans, and
quarterly priorities - helping you identify the right metrics
to track.

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 CHAPTER FIVE
Getting Buy-in to Your Company Vision

If you’ve completed the One Page Strategic Plan from

Scaling Up, you’ll have some critical numbers which need
to be hit in order for the larger goals to be achieved.

The importance of communication and reinforcement

cannot be overstated. This should happen on a daily basis
to achieve buy-in for your vision across the company.

Hold daily huddles, meetings of no more than 15

minutes, where everyone in your company a ends
(assuming you’re not so big that this is impossible). You
review the metrics and KPIs that you have identified as
critical to achieving the quarterly goal. Update everyone on
the progress and motivate them to hit the numbers the next
day. At these huddles, everyone is given the chance to
share what they’re currently working on and what
problems they are having.

The Leaders
Choosing your Senior Leadership Team is vital to
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 Choosing your Senior Leadership Team is vital to
generate company wide buy-in to the vision and long term
goal. Ensure you pick the right people. They should be the
people most invested in the company, who can talk
enthusiastically about it and understand the vision and
goals. If you were to create a sca er graph of all employees
with Alignment to Core Values along one axis and
Output/Productivity on the other, these people would rank
highly on both measures.

Once you’ve identified your Strategic Thinking or

Senior Leadership Team, hold weekly and monthly
meetings to review progress towards the quarterly goals
and annual priorities (which link back to the overarching
10 - 15 year goal).

Your job is to develop these people into leadership

figures within the company if they aren’t already, and
motivate them to assist you in dispersing and reinforcing
your vision amongst the people on the ground reporting to
them.

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 CHAPTER SIX
Motivating your team

No one will ever be as motivated to work for your

business as you are. It’s not fair or realistic to expect your
employees to share your motivation.

The key question for your team that you have to provide
an answer to is “What’s in it for me?”

Author Richard Florida surveyed twenty thousand

creative professionals and gave them a choice of thirty
eight factors that motivated them to do their best at work:

These were the 10 most commonly selected, in order:

1) Challenge and responsibility

2) Flexibility
3) A stable work environment
4) Money
5) Professional Development
6) Peer recognition
7) Stimulating colleagues and bosses
8) Exciting job content
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 9) Organisational culture
10) Location and community
If you’re not actively working to ensure all of these are in
place, you reduce the likelihood of creating a motivated
and productive team that buys into your company vision.

Only one of the above is an extrinsic factor that is easy to

fix (money). You can throw more money at your employees
and eat into your bo om line, but if the other factors aren’t
in place you are unlikely to have a highly motivated team,
and you run the risk of your employees becoming
disenchanted and leaving anyway.

Most people only realise 25% of their potential at work.

This means the average employee has the ability to

increase their contribution by 300%. The big challenge for
leaders is inspiring their teams to realise this potential.

It is not possible to externally motivate someone.

Motivation can be coaxed out, but it still has to come from
within a person. It is therefore up to the leader to provide
the ideal environment for motivation to occur.

A great leader is able to:

● Provide a challenge.
● Give recognition and reward.
● Boost esteem amongst their team.

When these ingredients come together, motivation will

occur from within your team.
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 Great leaders recognise outstanding achievement by
their teams and individuals on isolated occasions and over
longer periods. This boosts esteem. Ensure everyone
knows that their work makes a difference.

When esteem is higher, you’re likely to get more traction

when you set your team a challenge. When a challenge is
met and achieved by your team, it is important to reward
and congratulate them. It is also important to ask “how did
you do it?”

The natural response to a compliment is to shrug it off

and not properly accept it. If you publicly ask individuals
“how did you do it?” you force them to look within
themselves for the reasons why they were able to achieve
the challenge.
You need to allow your team members to view
themselves as a success, desiring to continue that success
and achieve even more.

But, be wary of de-motivating factors that will kill

engagement and productivity:
● Poor working conditions.
● Poor communication.
● Poor compensation packages/benefits.
● Divides between managers/leadership team and
other employees.
● Poor HR procedures.
● Lack of job security.
● Being overworked/lack of resources.
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● Not having access to best tools to do the job.

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 CHAPTER SEVEN
Encouraging your employees to lead

You’re the leader, but if you’re planning on considerable

growth then you need employees to lead too. It’s harder
for you to inspire the people who don’t work with you
directly, so you need leaders at all levels.

Give the right onboarding experience - Employee

onboarding shouldn’t be endless training videos and
shadowing others. It should only be used to orient new
employees and align them quickly with the company
values and purpose.
Ensure new employees have a quick overview of each
function within the business, spending some time with all
of your internal leaders, even if the job functions won’t
cross over. This positions them as leaders to new
employees, and helps the leaders to view themselves as
such.
Give leaders big responsibility - Hand out authority
over important decisions to your employees (hiring/firing,
product development, design, marketing authority, sales
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product development, design, marketing authority, sales
processes, etc.)

You can’t expect anyone to step up to a leadership

position if they don’t have any power and have to come to
you to authorise everything. Placing this power in the
hands of your leaders shows a large amount of trust that
they will be eager to repay.
Be generous with information - Similarly to the above,
trust your leaders with key information about the business,
your customers and markets so they can make good
decisions. Having to ask for information doesn’t allow
employees to take full responsibility and reminds them that
they don’t have your trust.

Be passionate about your vision - When you’ve created

a strong sense of mission within your organisation, it will
start rubbing off on your leaders in training and they’ll help
to spread your vision within the company.

Send your teams on training that interests them -

Rather than telling your employees what you want them to
learn, in your 1-2-1 meetings ask them to suggest training
courses or educational conferences they would like to go to.
This helps them to develop professionally and can also be a
way to reward them. If you let your leaders choose their
training, they’re more likely to pick something they can use
which will help them to lead.

Teach employees to network - Bring your internal

leaders along with you to networking events. They’ll learn
how to forge connections with strangers, how to
communicate, initiate conversations, and ask for things
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communicate, initiate conversations, and ask for things
they need or want. Your leaders in training will also learn
things from people more experienced in business than they
are, or experienced in different areas.

Reward employees with leadership benefits - Tying in

to the above - eventually you’ll be able to send your
internal leaders to industry events and networking
opportunities in your stead. This shows trust and can be a
nice way to reward your employees for stepping up to
increased responsibility (particularly if it involves an
expenses paid trip!).

Give ownership to employees - Trust the people you

hire. Give your leaders in training ownership of their job
functions. That means you report to them on that function
and they make the decisions! If they default back to the
usual position of asking you what to do, you can say “I
don’t know, what do you think we should do?”

If you’re doing leadership right, you’ll never need to

outright object to something. Instead, all you need to do is
say “I’m not quite sure I agree that’s the best approach,
have you thought about X?”

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