For some of our readers, you may have started working for a large fitness company near or at peak growth. However, for many of you, you developed a club from the ground up, managing all aspects of your business from day one and slowly allocated those tasks to new employees as you grew.
Leadership roles in any company have their own set of difficulties. Maybe you manage one person, or hundreds. Regardless of how well developed your team may be, it can always be hard to lead people.
It’s important as a leader that you set standards for tasks in your company. If you had at one time handled a certain task, you may or may not feel that a certain person performs the task the same way as you. However, that person is not you, and they aren’t going to perform a task in the same way.
By developing standards of tasks you will provide that person with a reachable objective. Additionally, it will allow you to manage the accomplishment and how well it was performed, as opposed to managing with feelings.
Telling someone you don’t feel they did a good job doesn’t do anything for the individual. It can develop animosity from the employee and lower their self-esteem. Additionally, they may have completed the task without any issues. Your feelings of how it was accomplished are strictly feelings, not managing the outcome.
When you get into managing feelings you will make comments and decisions that may not be reflective of the person or the position. In life, this is something that may just happen from time to time. Even as leaders we have emotions that get thrown into the equation from — we are still human after all.
What will make you a good leader, which I strive for daily, is to define what success is in your company. Give numbers to outcomes, as opposed to feelings. Your sales staff can be fairly easy to monitor in this way. For example, if your salesperson hits $20,000 in sales one month and you’d like them to hit $22,000 the next month, you can easily monitor that progress.
However, if you want to ensure the locker rooms are cleaned daily, you must have a way to manage the task. For example, your definition of cleaning may be different than the person you have in that role. They may go in, vacuum and wipe off countertops. But, you may expect them to also mop the floors, dust the lockers, clean the showers and refill the soap containers. If you don’t manage the task of cleaning locker rooms, you may become highly disappointed when that task isn’t accomplished the way you envisioned.
Take some time and develop a list of cleaning objectives that you can monitor. For example:
• Mop the floors.
• Dust the lockers.
• Check for outdated locker rentals.
• Clean the countertops.
• Clean the showers.
• Refill the soap containers.
By developing such a list, you’ll be able to manage what has been accomplished and provide feedback on certain aspects of the list to improve the task to your liking.
When you develop objectives that need to be completed in a certain way, it helps you to remove your emotions from your leadership, and you can objectively focus on getting tasks accomplished as opposed to whether you think someone isn’t “cleaning the locker room” like you used to.
This is just another way to become a great leader to your team, and continue to grow your company.
Tyler Montgomery is the editor of Club Solutions Magazine. Contact him at tyler@clubsolutionsmagazine.com.
