Most of us are enjoying the vacation months and warm weather — including record heat in many places — yet August signals the end of summer. This is especially true in our businesses, where we go from a more relaxed pace to full-throttle the moment the calendar switches to September. 

Suddenly, the end-of-the-year countdown is upon us, and we only have four months to meet our annual goals. Our calendars get filled with budget reviews, prioritization meetings, status updates and the entire business seems to be operating in race-mode. 

I hear it constantly: “There aren’t enough hours in the day.” 

Do you find it hard to concentrate and stay focused because there’s just too much to do? Do you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about how you’re going to manage everything? Is your calendar booked solid every day?

What if I told you that the #1 roadblock to growing your business is something YOU can control? The answer is simple… DELEGATE!! There is no way you can scale the business if everything depends on YOU. 

You’ve probably been asked the question more than once, “What keeps you up at night?” The intention is to uncover the issues you’re grappling with in your company and to reveal the real pain points.

But have you been asked “What gets you up in the morning?”

As business leaders, we want to recruit and retain the best and brightest team members to execute on our strategic vision. But are we looking at the right factors when building our executive leadership team? Do we really know what makes great leaders in today’s environment?

I’ve worked with leadership teams throughout my career — from building great, highly effective teams at Shelter Mortgage to all the companies I work with in my current role as a Strategic Business Coach. I’ve noticed five common traits in the most successful executive teams, and I share them below as the “Secrets of a Genuine Leader.”  

Could your team make it to the Final Four?

It’s March Madness, and I can’t help but draw parallels between the teams on the basketball floor and the executive teams I see in the business world. They both operate off the same set of basic principles:

1.     Get the basics right. Know your core values and stay true to them. Stay positive and work together on shared goals instead of personal, isolated goals.  You can’t win the game alone.

Apple, REI, Walt Disney, Nordstrom, Starbucks…

When you walk into any of these businesses you immediately feel their company culture. It hits you the moment you step inside. It’s in the way their team members greet you, their level of service and the subtle behaviors you might not even notice.

All of these companies take their cultures seriously. They make trust, transparency, respect and pride all non-negotiable, and these qualities get mirrored in their customer-facing interactions. 

As we enter 2018 and all the promise a fresh year brings, it’s the perfect time for leaders to develop their company’s Vivid Vision.

What’s a Vivid Vision?  Cameron Herold, the former COO of 1-800-Got-Junk who increased revenues from $2 million to $105 million in 6 years, describes it in his book Double Double.  It’s painting a picture of what your business will look, feel and act like three years down the road. It’s not about how you will get there with defined goals and metrics — we’ll save that for the strategic planning sessions with your leadership team. It’s imagining where you want your company to be in three years.  To communicate this picture, you’ll need to envision success and provide ample details, using expressive language.