Your effectiveness in leadership will come from being around your team. You will have plenty of time at your desk to analyze reports, crunch numbers and work in your CRM, however resist the temptation to anchor down there and invest your time to the team.

You be the thermostat in your department and set the temperature every morning through your actions and by what you say. Your words are so important to the success & failure of your department. What you say, how you say it and why you say things will create an atmosphere and culture either positive or negative based on your choice of words. Think about it. Words are what you are reading right now. Words contain power. Words store within them energy to release into the atmosphere in which they are aimed towards. Words can create peace. Words can create wars. Words are powerful! Life and death are truly in the power of the tongue. Speak words that will inspire, encourage, teach, build up, and inject confidence. Let’s look at the power of words for a moment and see what they do to you when you just read and look at them let alone hear them spoken to you from someone. Don’t just read them to get through this, but behold them, think on them one at a time and let them marinate into your being as you do.

What do these words below remind you of? How do they make you feel when you see and experience them? Who do they bring into your mind when you see them?

• Love

• Warmth

• Fun

• Laughing

• Peaceful

• Calm

• Tranquil

• Exciting

• Rich

• Scared

• Angry

• Hate

• Mad

• Sad

• Crying

• Overwhelmed

• Busy

• Stressed

• Depressed

• Lack

• Confused

Now this exercise was based on us only focusing on 1 word at a time. As I did this focusing on just 1 word at a time I experienced within me a wide variety of emotions, thoughts, memories, and feelings that I used to associate with these words listed above. If we can experience this much impact on just a group of single words alone, disconnected from other words creating sentences, then think about the impact these words will have once they are laser focused statements directed towards us with passion, feeling and meaning behind them. Words are powerful so use them wisely. They will create an environment, a culture and a temperature within your organization. Think before you talk, respond and react.

Talk to your team each morning. Create an open door to yourself so they can open up to you and give you access to help train, coach and teach them.

Stay approachable and be consistent. Consistency is so important. You do not want to be a roller coaster department always going up and down. Stay consistent in meetings, ongoing training, and anything else you say & do.

Recognize your team for who they are. They are people who are working together to accomplish individual & corporate goals every day. Whether they are performing well or poorly never minimize them, embarrass them or make fun of them in their abilities, lack of abilities, skillsets, good month, bad month or anything that would seem to lower their self-esteem.  Although this may not be the most popular way to lead this is very effective and will help keep your team happy and wanting to come to work with and for you. Nobody likes to feel lowered in how they feel or are viewed in any sense of the meaning. Treat them with the same courtesy, kindness and respect as you would like to be treated.

Ask Your Team Questions

Your success is directly related to your team’s success. It’s your responsibility to remove any hindrance, roadblock or distraction negatively affecting their results, energy, morale and efforts. Here are just a few questions that you can ask your team to help discover these possibilities:

• Is there anything slowing you down as you perform your duties each day?
• What can I do to help you perform to your highest capacity?
• Do you have everything you need to do your job?
• What are some, if any, challenges you are facing?
• What is the most challenging objection you hear and would like help overcoming?
• What is your strongest rebuttal to overcome Price? Availability? Convenience? Research? Credit? Hate Buying A Car?
• If you were me what could I do differently to make your experience better?
• If you were the customer what could we do better as a company to make their experience better?