A lot of people decide to start their own business because they have a skill or passion for their niche—but that expertise isn’t the only thing you need to run a successful company. From financial management to marketing to team building, there are a lot of other skills required to lead and grow a business, and founders often need to learn these on the fly as they go.
Luckily, for a lot of those areas, business owners have options to fill in those gaps in knowledge beyond becoming experts themselves. If you’re not great at marketing, for instance, you could hire an employee or agency to bring those skills onto your team, or invest in software that can automate the process. The same is true in areas like bookkeeping, tech support, or customer service. In fact, just about every aspect of a business can be taken care of by an employee or expert.
The one area that’s not true is leadership. As the owner, you are invariably at the top of the hierarchy in your organization, and the leadership that you provide makes a big impact on your chances of long-term success. This is true even if you don’t have any employees yet. You still need to coordinate vendors, engage with customers, and serve as the face and guiding force of your company. With that in mind, here are five leadership skills that every business owner should develop, whether you’re a solopreneur or building a multi-location empire.
1. Delegation.
In the intro, we mentioned that business owners often hire people whose strengths complement their weaknesses or who have knowledge and skills to fill in their gaps. The truth is, this isn’t simply a smart idea for a business owner—it’s a necessity.
Running a business takes a lot of work. All of those tasks might be reasonable for one person to accomplish when you’re first starting out but, as you grow, every business reaches a point where it requires more work than one person can reasonably accomplish on their own. Even the best juggler is going to drop a ball or two if they’re trying to keep a hundred in the air at once. Trying to do everything is also what often puts founders on the path to burnout.
Effective delegation is the key to avoiding this. This starts by understanding which tasks related to the business are ones you as the leader need to handle personally and which you could pass along to employees, contractors, or third-party services. From there, you can identify the tasks where you have the least knowledge to pick the best first things to shift off of your plate. You don’t need to have a team to do this—even solo owner-operators can delegate by hiring freelancers or partnering with B2B businesses.
2. Emotional intelligence and empathy.
At its heart, effective leadership means understanding how to motivate and inspire other people. There’s an administrative and organizational aspect to a leader’s role, as well, but this would be more accurately called management. It’s the people side of the equation that differentiates a manager from a true leader.
Empathy is a critical part of this. It means you are able to understand other people’s perspectives and what drives them, both in a workplace context and in a broader life sense. This isn’t just important for business leaders with employees. Emotional intelligence is also how marketers identify their target audience’s values and pain points, and a key ingredient in effective customer service and communication. Whatever industry or type of business you’re in, leading with empathy will help you to thrive.
3. Communication.
One common defining trait of successful business owners is that they excel at conveying their vision to both their employees and their customers. They know how to express what their business is all about, how to align everyone on a team toward the same goal, and how to establish clear expectations throughout that process.
Communication isn’t just about the things you say, either. Effective communication is a two-way street, and business leaders need to be just as skilled at listening as they are at speaking. This, again, applies to businesses of all sizes. Even for those who don’t have employees, listening to customers is the best way to refine your products or services so that they meet the needs of your target audience.
In today’s increasingly digital world, business owners need to have skills in communicating well across mediums. That includes engaging with customers face-to-face, but you also need to understand how to express yourself well in writing, whether that’s a direct message to customers through email or conveying your brand in social media posts.
4. Strategic planning and decision-making.
One of the tricky things about being a business leader: you need to be able to see both the forest and the trees. The day-to-day details and operations of your business are important to keep things running smoothly, but that doesn’t mean you can focus only on the present. Ideally, those daily operations are building toward revenue growth in the future, and ensuring that is the case requires strategic long-term thinking.
Even when you have a leadership team around you, as the founder you’re often the last word who sets the path for how the company will move forward. This makes it important for business leaders to think through the potential consequences or impacts of their decisions so they can plan strategically for their company’s future and take the right steps that will lead them to their goals.
5. Adaptability.
One of the biggest lessons business owners across industries learned during the Covid-19 pandemic was the value of flexibility. The business landscape is always evolving and it’s not always possible to anticipate the changes and challenges ahead, no matter how strategically you plan. Being willing to pivot when necessary—and knowing when and how to do it right—makes your business more resilient, allowing you to turn an apparent roadblock into an opportunity for growth.
There’s an element of strategy in being flexible, too. It doesn’t just mean that you’re willing to change course, but also that you can correctly identify which track is the best one to jump to and how to make that transition with minimal disruption to your business. To do this requires a combination of long-term vision, creative problem-solving, smart goal-setting, and the decisiveness to seize your chosen opportunity before it can pass you by. If you can master that combination of skills as a business owner, you give yourself the best chance of leading your company to its full potential.
