Using Consultants in the Thames Valley to build your team.
Understand your weaknesses as well as your strengths.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog around the lessons of a consultant following a breakfast I attended and have once again been reminded of a number of the elements this weekend.
My son is very big on karate and is currently on a programme to take his black belt grading, no mean feat for a 14 year old. In the briefing from his instructor the children on the programme were encouraged to recognise where their strengths and weaknesses lay so they could work on further improving their strengths and develop their weaknesses.
This got me thinking about the leaders’ role and often the role of a consultant. As a leader one of the biggest mistakes can be to believe that you cannot show any signs of weakness, let alone admit you have some. In reality the reverse of true. Great leaders are not good at everything, but what they are good at is understanding where they are weaker and how to plug that gap. In sport this is normally by bringing different players into a team and business is no different.
As a consultant, my role is often to work with boards and teams to understand how they can improve and deliver better ROI and a large part of this work is related to resources. Resources cover people as well as systems and suppliers. One recent project identified a supplier who was not delivering anything close to the results they should have been, I replaced them and results have already started to improve, this led to a stronger team and improved resource that could be built on.
With any team, their strength comes from the whole team and not individuals and a leader must lead by example and recognise where there are weaknesses within the team and with individuals, especially themselves. Our work across the Thames Valley, Buck, Berks and Oxon allows us to work with many different organisations and help to ensure our clients have the strongest possible team in place.
Remember you can’t be great at everything. Learn what you’re great at and focus on that and get other people to help in the other areas.