Recently, a client asked me to read a book, along with his senior management team to discuss the contents and their company. The book was called “Leader to Leader” from the Druker Foundation. Interestingly, the book was a collection of short articles (chapters) by many of the greatest names in leadership and management, including Peter Druker, Steven Covey, Jim Collins, Herb Kelleher, Warren Bennis, Peter Senge, and many others.

After completing the book, the client asked us to go through list our top 5 insights from it. Well, I tried five, but being verbose, I was able to narrow it down to seven. I'll share what I came up with you here:

In summary, Leadership is about….

• Clarity and communication (vision and ongoing dialogue)

• Very genuine human relationships (authenticity)

• Constant growth, as none of this is easy, on the leader or the led (learning)

• A strong belief in yourself and others (faith)

• Resource allocation, including team alignment (marshalling the troops)

• A balance between focusing on the gap (never being complacent) and celebrating regularly celebrating successes (building trust)

• Fostering a deep level of inspiration (and a corresponding commitment to continuous improvement)

An important note here, as many people reading this article may be solo entrepreneurs, this still applies to you. While these concepts take on even more importance when you are directing the efforts of a team (and more complexity!), the concepts still do apply to an individual business person. The more clarity you have on the items above, the more you will be able to “self lead” yourself on your work in your business. Plus in addition to the concept of “self leading” (which is HUGE in small business, by the way), there are often situations where you will be required to lead a team of vendors as well.

But the overarching concept here is to discuss how these principles impact marketing. When you think about them, often the outcome of these positive characteristics is to improve the quality of the company's approach in the marketplace. Great marketing practices are often the OUTPUT of super leadership and team building. A company with strong leadership is better prepared to succeed with customers than one without it.

Another extremely relevant concept is that in the leadership context, these principles are designed to improve the performance and impact the behavior of those inside of the organization. Open this up to marketing, and we see very similar concepts emerge. The goal in marketing, obviously, is to “lead” customers and impact their behavior. The same enthusiasm that leadership aims to access with employees, will also benefit the company by creating a passion with customers.

Based on this, the principles of leadership extend well beyond just “what to do if I have to lead a team” when they are considered in the sales and marketing department. In fact, you may very well find that studying the tenants of leadership has every bit as much impact, of not more, on the company's success in the marketplace as studying marketing directly.

How much is leadership impacting your approach to the market?!?!