in Leadership
This is a guest post by Francisco Ramirez, CEO of The ACE Group; a customs broker, warehouse operator and ecommerce fulfillment provider that helps merchants reduce their fulfillment costs. This post was originally published on their blog.
The biggest challenge for new leaders is shifting their minds from doing the work themselves to doing it through others. This is why the most important job of every leader is to grow people; leaders deliver results through others. How do leaders grow people?
Bad managers, good managers, great managers. What’s the difference? I understood the distinction when I was 18 years old. I worked at FedEx Ground, and I was protected by my Manager because I made him look good as a result of my breaking rules that hadn’t been broken but were bottlenecks to unrealized value; I unlocked that value by systematically breaking them!
We’re all biased, so biased that we love to hang out with people who think like us, read stuff that we agree with and do stuff we like to do. It’s all good and well, but what we get in enjoyment we lose in perspective; because that one perspective that we hold isn’t the complete picture of life.
In the world of product design, your goal as the designer is to make the product easy to understand and use. People will get frustrated, anxious, angry and just leave it if it’s not easy to use. Similarly, organizations have to be designed to be to be easy to work with for employees, customers, partners and providers. Of course, most aren’t.
in Leadership, Strategy
What is strategy? When done well, it describes how an organization wins; and serves as a guide to behavior in the day to day operations of the organization. Getting to this point is not easy, crafting strategy is hard. So hard that most company’s strategies are just more of the same; choosing to be a follower rather than a leader. All followers fall into the same strategy traps, and have to pay for it by competing on a race to the bottom.
You walk into a new situation, a new job, a new team, a new everything; how do you approach it? With an open mind or a closed one? Most everyone who gets hired for a job is rewared because they have experience in doing that job; not because they don’t.
in Leadership
What’s your favorite part of leadership? Leaders play many roles, I know many people who say their favorite part of leading is the X’s and O’s; planning and strategizing. While this is very important, it’s not the most important part of leading. What is? For me is about developing other leaders, and making them better.