The following is a recap of the highlights from TeXchange Houston’s October 25th CEO networking and dinner seminar.
Question: What are the hallmarks of effective leadership in today’s “Twitter” world?
Art Saxby: The silver lining is that in this slow growth and troubled economy your customers and executives are willing to listen. People are open to new ideas and strategies for 
growth. But certainly, it’s a different hiring environment.
The most critical priority for leaders is to connect the culture to the vision for each employee. Vision casting is the most important thing as an entrepreneur and leader must do to start building and creating the required company culture.
Vision casting is a 4 step process: 
- destination
- explain change
- show the plan
- their role and rewards
Culture is a company’s biggest protection. We have published our core values which are distinguishable and unique to us alone. And we use our core values to hire, train, and if needed let people go. We involve the team in hiring and upholding the core values.
John Younker: Leadership Practices and Principles to live are highlighted in the end of this document in the appendix
titled: “Six Critical Factors for Ensuring Emergent Entrepreneur Success: The Keys to Jumping the Curve.”
Leaders face breaking points as companies grow, typically between $3m to $5m and then again to overcome the $10m hurdle. I call leaders that can overcome these strategic inflection points “Emergent Leaders.”
Emergent leaders have the following skills and attributes:
- Vision. They constantly re-update their constituents and are constantly re-selling the vision.
- Opportunism. They scout, identify, and find opportunities in people, customers, and markets.
- Surrender the Sovereignty. The best leaders find replacements whom are better at the skills and tasks then they were and they delegate to them.
Become your competitions worst nightmare.- Create an entrepreneurial ownership mentality for all employees.
- Play both manager and leader. Knowing when to play manager vs. leaders is critical.
- Know how to build teams. Creating teams through team goal setting and then fostering team cooperation collaboration and sharing is critical.
I use conflict resolution to teach how to become and be a leader. I also teach how to run, facilitate and participate in meetings.
Moderator Garry E. Meier: For the foreseeable future, small business will experience slow growth and shrinkage as a percentage of the overall economy. In fact, small busines
s GDP retracted for the first time since the 1970s. As leaders we must create jobs that attract employees with an entrepreneurial spirit. Employees that will act as owners. Slow growth and shrinkage of small business will not reverse or improve in the near-term based on the election outcomes in November.
The fact is that regardless of the November 6th Presidential Election outcomes the impact on small business has been significant.
- Did you know that approximately 50 percent of new jobs created were not by general business industry, but for government and education?
- Did you know that the “Tax holiday” is over because significant taxes will need to pay for social security in the future?
- Did you know to expect significant 1099 regulation and an increasing tax rate of 2.5% for contingent employees and contractors?
The talent war sparked by wage competition will be the biggest business challenge over the next few years. Can we as leaders manage and attract top talent? That is the biggest threat.
Download the event recap here: Leadership Effectiveness for our Twitter world.
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