Leadership That Transforms: Driving Growth in Midsize Companies

The quality of your leader and leadership team can determine the success of your organization, especially when you’re growing your business. But the question remains: How do effective leaders benefit a business? Strategic planning plays a pivotal role in equipping your leadership team with the tools and insights required to make informed decisions, but the leaders themselves must be prepared to tackle the hard calls and communicate the big picture.

Qualities of a Business Leader
Many qualities can create a strong leader, and there is no “one formula” that will ensure a strong and healthy team. However, there are a few traits that are definitely beneficial:

Strategic Decision-Making: Leaders working to drive their organization forward must make informed decisions. This involves understanding their organization’s purpose, confronting reality, understanding and mitigating risks, and setting a business growth strategy.
Adaptability: In a rapidly changing business landscape, strong leaders must embrace change and pivot when necessary. They must encourage innovation to stay ahead of the curve.
Effective Communication: Communication is imperative to building trust, fostering collaboration, and aligning teams. A leader that doesn’t effectively communicate with their team will struggle to succeed.

What Makes Leaders Successful
As mentioned above, there’s no “one formula” tied to creating a successful leader. However, understanding how you and your team work—independently and together—is a great start to creating a healthy dynamic and ensuring success.

One method of understanding this is the Working Genius assessment from Patrick Lencioni, where you’ll learn the types of work that give you joy and the work that drains you. This assessment is 20% personality and 80% productivity and people who understand their genius show up to work happier and are more effective.

A successful leader is not made up of any specific Genius, however, it’s how you use this knowledge of yourself and your team that can determine your success. Leverage your team’s strengths, and help cushion where they feel challenged. Delegate tasks that you know you’re not strong at. Utilizing this information will help you build a strong foundation for your team and your organization. 

Remember, it’s not one magical trait that makes a leader successful—it’s how you support and build your team, and the actions you take to create a healthy dynamic!

Diversify Your Business Through Effective Leadership
Another challenge leaders can face is ensuring their organization’s offerings stay relevant and purposeful. An effective leader will want to ensure they’ve set the organization up for long-term success, and future-proofing is a required part of that.

The Product/Service Life Cycle Curve is an exercise that helps us identify where we need a refresh. It looks at all your offerings and divides them into four stages: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. This maps the health of your product/service pipeline and will help you grow your business.

The key question: Is your product/service portfolio spread across all these stages, or is it mainly in the Maturity phase? Having a mix across the board isn’t just about variety—it’s about building resilience and ensuring your organization can sustain and expand.

In essence, the Product/Service Life Cycle Curve will help you spot stagnation in your offerings and will guide you through how to diversify a company.