Retaining your revenue: Leadership and your bottom line

photo credit: Menage a Moi

This is where my inner geek makes an unapologetic entry into the limelight.  See, when you start to talk about leadership with many businesspeople, you get that tight-lipped smile and knowing nod, but the glazed-over look tells the real story which goes something like, “Thanks for the group-hug moment, coach, but I’ve got to get back to my sales projections now.”

This is why I love data.

Give me a solid statistical analysis and a spiffy pie chart and I’m in heaven.  Because I know that for the results-oriented workplace, the value of leadership is all about the bottom line.

A current re-read is The Extraordinary Leader : Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders by John Zenger and Joe Folkman.  The book makes a great case for why leadership is necessary for high-performing organizations, and how effective leaders impact those organizations.

People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers; so it’s not terribly surprising that the research shows the more effective a leader, the less the turnover in their department.  Turnover is expensive.  Couple that with the book’s data that shows that the top 10% of leaders in one company led departments that were almost twice as profitable as their less-effective counterparts, and you have a strong business case for investing in effective organizational leadership.

If you’re a manager, the benefit to being a great leader should be clear and immediate.  You’ve already got staff that are impacted by your actions, both positively and negatively. How can you get a snapshot of your leadership effectiveness?  Answer for yourself these questions:

• What is your turnover rate? How do you compare to others in your organization?
• Does your department meet their goals, whatever they may be?
• Are you at the top of your organization, or somewhere in the middle?
• How might more effective leadership practices impact your results?

Sometimes, improvement is as simple as tracking your results in a particular area.  Give some thought to your organizational impact, and watch your effectiveness rise.

Related posts:

1. Leadership through effective meetings
2. Daily leadership: Incremental choice and relationship building
3. Recruiting and Maxwell’s Laws: Excellence through exceeding yourself
4. Personal power and leadership: The Obama factor
5. Five ways to increase your value by finding value in others

Tagged as: books, effectiveness, Leadership, Management, talent, teambuilding