In order to allow excellent marketing to “happen” business owners must create an environment and develop a leadership style that enhances its growth. Below are some of the most important of these. Leaders must act as catalysts for change by:

• Adopting and communicating an attitude of service.
• Demonstrating ideal behaviors and tolerating nothing less.
• Understanding and encouraging healthy conflict.
• Creating a climate where truth is heard and valued.
• Confronting the brutal facts of reality.
• Making sure the right people are hired, not just people.
• Placing their employees’ ambitions over their own.
• Becoming and staying constantly curious.
• Never forgetting their passion and vision.

Below is a list of my own 10 Fundamental character traits that Fantastic leaders consistently demonstrate. They are:

• Fair: Good leaders arm their subordinates with the resources necessary to ‘win’ first and then judge performance accordingly. They trust and empower their employees and insist on the truth at all times.
• Fostering good relationships with colleagues, vendors, customers and employees.
• Focused on prioritizing and achieving their objectives. Additionally, they have set clear goals by breaking them down into smaller, unfrosted ‘executionable’, measurable goals. They differentiate between long- and short-term objectives and ensure that employees understand the part they play and their responsibility for making it happen.
• Firm: Leaders are firm, but kind. These traits are not mutually exclusive. Leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate.
• Feedback providers: Leaders must have the courage to provide employees with continual, specific feedback – whether positive or negative. They should also ask for coaching and provide an environment which encourages the surfacing of pertinent ‘conflicts’. They insist on the truth at all times and use it to expand peoples’ capabilities.
• ‘Follow-Throughers’: They take a hands-on approach and do whatever is necessary to ensure that agreed-upon activities are happening. This is made easier because they develop and communicate scalable procedures and systematized processes.
• Fit: Leaders must be fit for the job and its responsibilities. They are knowledgeable, hard working, experienced, committed, and competent. Additionally, they are self-aware, authentic and persons of integrity. They keep their egos in check and are humble and self-confident enough to encourage and accept challenges and points of view that are opposite of their own.
• Flames: Great leaders exhibit the passion that fuels the company’s vision…. becoming beacons of energy and enthusiasm. They love what they do and it shows! They are the light that ignites others into action and helps make dreams become realities and the impossible… possible.
• Fun: It’s okay to laugh and be a little silly at work… and studies have shown that it actually has a beneficial effect on employees’ attitudes and the amount of work that gets done. Take your work seriously, not yourself.
• Flexible: Stuff happens! Welcome change, expect change, and prepare for change.