Leadership is another one of those words that is thrown around with much abandon…but it is absolutely key to success in business. If you run a traditional business you must lead your employees with vision, integrity, and motivation. If you run a home based business in network marketing you must lead your team members with, well, vision, integrity and motivation.

There are many types of leadership, servant leadership, transformational leadership, passive leadership, etc. But for me the most useful and least used comes straight from the corporate world: Facilitative leadership.

Facilitative leaders have a vision, and a basic idea of how to get there, but facilitate the growth of the others in their group in the process. They help their followers to create connections and come up with new ideas. They point their followers in the right direction and then support them in their tasks.

The one difference when applying facilitative leadership to your home business instead of in an office is that your ultimate goal is to help your followers become leaders themselves. In an office the manager is always going to be at a higher rank than their employees, they will always call the shots. This means that the employee is never empowered to make their own decisions, never empowered to see themselves as a real leader. Even if told to make a decision on their own they know in the back of their mind that the manager can either veto it, or that they could get into trouble for making the wrong choice.

In a home based business if you are coaching a team and assisting them in their own business goals, you want your team to take on the leadership role themselves. You want to empower them make decisions for themselves because it is for THEIR business. If you ever find your team members coming to you looking for your approval on something before taking action, you are not facilitating their success. You should be in the role of pointing them in the right direction then letting them learn for themselves and make their own choices.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in home based business owners is once they view themselves as a leader, they view their team as followers. They try to shoehorn their team into the processes, marketing, and even ways of talking that have worked for them. This is incredibly dangerous for your team because you can never achieve lasting success by pretending to be someone else.

So how can you rein it in? It’s so tempting to tell people to simply do exactly what worked for you. But the key component you are missing here is that it’s not what you do that matters, but how you do it. If you are coming from a place of confidence, of excitement, of feeling that you are a leader people see and feel that from you, they want to work with you and follow your lead. If you are trying to copy someone else you are not building your own confidence, you are rarely really excited about how you are doing business and you are constantly in follower mode.

When someone gets started on your team they need the most assistance. This is where they can fall easily into follower mode and never really transition to leadership. A feeling and responsibility for their own leadership must be fostered right from the start for them to create success.

Facilitative leadership is the only way to help your followers become leaders from the get go. Here is a few ways to gently guide them in the right direction:
-Show them the possibilities and let them learn for themselves. Don’t just tell them what you did, but also what other options are out there for them.
-Ask them questions about what they are interested in, what appeals to them. LISTEN and let them talk it through themselves. When you start hearing limiting talk and excuses, stop it right away and get them back to looking for solutions.
-Hold team trainings and let the team do the talking! Of course again you want to introduce a topic of discussion and give your feelings on the topic, but also encourage your team to discuss themselves.

Teach your team how to be a leader themselves right from the start, and then hold them to that standard. Show them what facilitative leadership is so that they can apply it to their own team. When people are coming out of a job they are still in an employee mindset. They may look at you as a boss. They have to understand what it means to be an entrepreneur and that it requires them to think in a different way.

Don’t expect them to be you! Encourage them to use their own strengths and preferences, and become a leader in their own right. You will see incredible results and with each person that you assist in becoming a successful leader your belief in yourself, in your business, and in the rest of your team will become stronger and stronger. As with just about everything in this world, by truly assisting others, you will really be assisting yourself.

Related posts:

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!