What is the Most Important Thing We Can Do When Leading a Business or Group of People?

By: Dr. Nels Lindberg, Production Animal Consultation

We all know agriculture. We all know animals. But no one taught us how to lead! As we grow in life, many of us get the opportunity to lead a group of people, perhaps as head cowboy, as head of the maintenance department or even as leader of the entire business as a feedyard manager or owner. When these opportunities occur, we are thrust beyond the day-to-day nature of a job and doing normal work tasks, to all of a sudden dealing with people. As we take those steps of progress forward, we often fail miserably. And when we do, the pain of those failures allows thoughts to slip into our head saying, “Man, I’d just like to go back to what I used to do, go home and not have all these problems.” These are natural thoughts to have. We all have them from time to time, especially after a key person quits or after a customer calls and chews on our rear about things out of our control or maybe even in our control.

Many of these events that are engraved in our vivid memory were created by our lack of knowledge in terms of leading. Because we get so focused on outcomes, growth and strategy, we forget about the basics of people, human nature and the culture of the cowboy crew we lead or the whole yard we manage. Before we reach that point, or even if we have, we want to focus on building culture before we ever build and execute strategy. If the culture is broken, strategy cannot be achieved to its full potential.

Culture is the prevailing ideas, values, attitudes and beliefs that guide the way employees think, feel and act. Culture is who we are when we are at our natural best. As Robert Herjavec tells us, the culture of the business is the DNA of the founder. When there is a disconnect between our values and behaviors, we get the pleasure of having more stress and anxiety. That occurs on a personal level, or in our workplace.

The #1 human capital challenge we face today is employee engagement and culture. To help with this challenge, we must create the culture we want by shaping, changing, forcing and constantly talking about it.

The easiest, yet most challenging, way to accomplish this is by creating a set of non-negotiable core values that we live by each day and by showing the observable behaviors they represent. We want our team to know them. We want them posted throughout our business as a constant reminder of those needed observable behaviors, and also for our customers to see to help hold us all accountable to our core values.

When culture and strategy are aligned, organizations achieve goals, amplify successes and have greater impact. Impact is our goal, right!? We want to impact our industries. We want to impact our “tribe”. We want to impact those around us in a positive way each day! What is your impact? We expect it to be great! Our next article will outline specifics on how to write, build and execute your core values so your culture will be so great that your tribe can and will greatly enjoy “winning” at their job and their passion.

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