With the coronavirus pandemic raging through our country over the past year, some of the challenges business leaders encountered were not envisioned. As business leaders, we are constantly evaluating the strengths of our businesses, the opportunities that are available to us as we seek ways to improve our businesses, the weaknesses we must mitigate to ensure our businesses are positioned to maximize opportunities, and the threats we must guard against to ensure our businesses remain going concerns. One significant threat we did not anticipate is a global pandemic that would make almost every mitigation initiative extremely difficult. As CEO of Transcend, my focus has been on human value because it is my deep conviction that the most significant resource in our company is human capital.
Building trust is the most essential form of capital a leader has. However, it often requires thinking about leadership from a new perspective. With all of the strategies and strategic imperatives we put in place, none of them would be valuable if they were not embraced by the employees. That embrace must be created by collaborative trust that must be developed and built. My employees see me as someone who is willing to do anything and everything, I am asking them to do. In fact, they have seen my leadership in action as a servant on the front lines. This mutual trust and collaboration have been essential to our ability to increase the value we deliver to our clients in spite of a deadly virus creating significant staffing issues across our industry.
I focus on developing my leadership team by imparting that the way we lead will not be all about us or our vision and strategy; our ability to make the tough calls and rally the troops; our talents, our charisma, or our heroic moments of courage and instinct. But leadership really is about empowering other people as a result of our presence, and about making sure that the impact of our leadership continues even when we are not present. This has helped to build trust, collaboration, retention, engagement, efficiency, and productivity.
Trust is the fundamental principle we need to make leaders and our organizations better. Our jobs as business leaders is to create the conditions for our people to fully realize their own capacity and power. This is true not only when we are in the trenches with them but also when we are not around. The more trust we build, the more the possibility to increase the value we deliver to our clients.
Written by: Spencer Moore, President & CEO of Transcend Facility Management Company
