The Solution for Sustainable Success: Trust Your Instincts

by Eric Herrera

I work with entrepreneurs every day. The successful ones have tapped into a sort of formula that allows them to obtain success they can sustain. They’ll start by evaluating their natural strengths — their instincts — and how that impacts the way they lead a team. Here are the components:

Find out how you do things. The most successful business owners I work with start by understanding their natural strengths — how they instinctively get stuff done — and how that impacts their productivity. Once somebody knows her “MO,” as we refer to it at Kolbe Corp, she can figure out how to prioritize better, delegate more and spend valuable time doing the things that make the most impact on the business.

Make your team as productive as possible. “Dream teams” don’t just happen. Once leaders and managers understand their own personal strengths, the next step is to help team members find out how they naturally operate on an instinctive level and how the team can work together. It’s amazing when a leader takes the time to really understand her team and realizes that she has the right people — they’re just in the wrong roles. Or she has too many people who have the same natural strengths and she needs to bring in somebody new to help balance things out. But the obvious question becomes, “How do I find the right people?”

Don’t guess when it comes to hiring. Stop guessing. Instead of taking a bet on how well a prospective new employee will perform based on a resume and an interview or two, the best managers hire based on natural strengths. They ask, “How is this person going to problem solve and how is he going to help or possibly detract from the team I have in place?” Hiring is expensive. It takes a lot of time. A bad fit can kill the productivity of an entire team. The best leaders I know take hiring very seriously and invest in hiring according to natural strengths.

Remember the personal. Everything can be running smoothly at the office, but if things aren’t great in an entrepreneur’s personal life the business could suffer, too. Remember that true success is the freedom to be yourself at home and at work. When the two meet, that’s when productivity peaks. If things are stressful with a spouse or romantic partner, it may be because of differences in how both people naturally act, not just personalities clashing. The same goes for kids — if they’re stressed or parents aren’t understanding why the kids are acting a certain way, we can help identify their instinctive abilities, which, in turn, may improve the family relationship.