To get the Best results, you need to work with the Best people.

While this may seem obvious, subtle reminders like this are sometimes just the motivation you need to take action and reach out.

Over the past few weeks I have engaged with some of Africa’s leading financial service brands and Marketers.

What struck me as interesting is that across many different corporate cultures, business objectives and personal goals there are very common themes that every business man and women can learn from.

Here is a summary of these suggestions that ever business leader regardless of industry or business size can consider to improve their own business results:

1. Know Thy Self

You can’t improve what you don’t know. Be vulnerable to your weaknesses and be humbled by your strengths. Don’t focus on your competitors focus on new markets and opportunities. Share this knowledge with your teams so you can help each other succeed together.

2. Be Open to Collaborate

Your business outputs are not the sum of your team and suppliers contributions but the average. Make sure that you collaborate with the best staff and business partners to ensure that you deliver above-average results. Work to develop an open and mutually beneficial relationship build on respect and results.

3. Ask ‘What if I did the Opposite?’

Humans are creatures of habit and naturally risk obverse. By asking this simple question, you will be amazed at the potential solutions to business problems.

You need to be ‘Disrupted’ in order to ‘Disrupt’. This culture needs to be adopted from the CEO down to the Marketing intern in order to be relevant and implemented.

4. Listen to Customers & Experts

Your customers are the blood in your business and consultants are like doctors. Listen to and engage with a cross section of your customers regardless of your existing segmentation biases.

Furthermore get a fresh perspective by engaging with experts that may provide value by looking at your business and challenges from an untainted viewpoint.

5. Measure & Optimise

“What you measure usually gets paid attention to. What you pay attention to, usually gets better.” Seth Godin.

There are a tidal wave of business ‘Measurement’ quotes such as my favourite:

‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

This is with good reason. You should pay attention to them. However don’t be paralysed by analysis, as the intangible measurements are as important to the tangible ones. Define your own measurement and have a plan to optimise your business and marketing performance against these benchmarks.

6. Share

Have a ‘Growth Mindset’ instead of a ‘Scarcity Mindset’ and look at your bad business experiences and share them. Since the story from the bad experiences are always more important than the good ones. Being vulnerable attracts good people that want to help and be open to this help. While this might be difficult in a Corporate world, having a culture that embraces ‘Sharing’ is a key success factor.

I hope this helped as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you.
I look forward to engaging with other like-minded Business Leaders, CEO’s, COO’s, Managing and Marketing Directors & Marketing Executives in the future.

As my favourite old African proverb goes: “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”