Lessons in Leadership: Successful Leveraging

This Lesson in Leadership addresses leveraging people for career success.

Sales managers experience success when members of their sales team experience both team and career success. Managers and sales professionals can collaborate to leverage each others’ strengths and create success together.

This Lesson in Leadership discusses how teamwork can lead to departmental and/or individual career success. 

In a world where expectations for performance continue to increase, this statement contains genuine value:

The easiest way to be successful in the future is together.

Almost everything of value any person may accomplish in life involves, at some level, other people. Depending on the area of life you’ve chosen to improve, achieving success may indeed include family, friends, co-workers or even us … your managers. Whenever two or more people work together to achieve a common goal, we call that leveraging.

The joy of success can actually be diminished when we don’t allow others to participate and help us. Why? Because we have no one with whom to truly share the joy. As human beings, our sense of accomplishment actually grows stronger when we know other people who care about us have witnessed the hard earned improvement or success. Plus, they in turn experience pleasure because in some small way they helped us to achieve our goals. Because they care about us they actually derive a certain amount of satisfaction from our successes.

A load is more easily moved when everyone pulls in the same direction.

As managers we ask all employees to accept personal responsibility for the work that they produce. We believe without the personal commitment from each employee to his or her job, higher levels of productivity may never be reached. What you may be unaware of is, we don’t expect you to travel this road to greater productivity and achievement alone. We’d like to help.

We win or lose … together.

Our success is tied to your success! So it’s actually in our best interest to help you with your career. We are aware that sometimes you might feel a little uncomfortable sharing with the boss what you might feel are your shortcomings. But what we’d like you to understand is we have shortcomings, too. We’d like you to know we often reach out to peers, other departments, friends, and even our own supervisors for assistance because we’ve learned that goals are frequently more easily accomplished with a little help. If there is a challenge in attaining true and effective leveraging, it may arise because everyone isn’t focused on common goals or working in the same direction.

If you reach out for assistance and meet with resistance, it could be the person you’re asking doesn’t realize the same value you do in your request. You see, he or she may be focused on his or her own needs, objectives, or plans.

Teamwork creates momentum for success.

If we all work together the likelihood of mutual success and the achievement of our personal and business objectives become more probable. This concept, when combined with the value of forging stronger interpersonal relationships on the job, puts us all in a much more likely position to obtain greater satisfaction and achievement. These accomplishments generally occur with less stress and offer more genuine value to others. You never know. You may be the missing link someone around you is looking for to best serve his or her own initiatives and without you he or she may struggle and fail.

Mutual Commitment is the bond that binds effective teams.

We understand how easy it is to become singularly focused on the task of the moment or the challenge of the day. We, too, sometimes find ourselves engrossed in our own needs, difficulties, and desires. It’s human to be concerned about yourself and those closest to you first. And yet, it’s only when you step outside yourself and allow your efforts to be combined with the efforts of others that you begin to achieve greater results. Like the many individual strands of a rope, which pull the weight of burden more easily, or the fingers that work in cooperation and harmony with the hand to grasp any object, so the team works best together to accomplish any goal.

“TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More” –Unknown

Our ability to work more closely with you to obtain our mutual successes can be enhanced by you. We believe you have great potential and yet many who have possessed potential have fallen short of their capability because they chose to stand alone. Should you desire to simplify your life rather than complicate it, we can offer assistance. When you choose the support of management and the team and then in kind offer your support to others, you begin to realize the power of leveraging very quickly.

Synergy: the combined sum is greater than its parts.

When two or more things, people, or organizations work together the result is often greater than the sum of their individual effects or capabilities. This is synergy.

This concept should inspire us all to work together in order to achieve a common good. The common good can be the mutual commitment to and the achievement of individual, team, interdepartmental and company objectives. One of the consistent by-products of retaining this type of mutual commitment is a more productive, happy, and fulfilling work environment.

The bottom line is, your job actually gets easier when you help others and allow others to help you!