How to Get Your Leadership Edge

Are you frustrated by not attracting enough career or business opportunities? Would you like to know how to stand out from others and get a leadership edge?

The best way to gain a leadership edge over your competition is to do something different, and compete on things that are more difficult for your competition to copy. Below are 3 key areas that you can develop as your leadership competitive edge, which will have you stand out in meetings, as a leader and with potential and existing customers.

1. Mental Buoyancy

All highly successful leaders, business owners and professionals have mental buoyancy – the ability to bounce back mentally when faced with a challenge. They know how to deal with the highs and lows of professional life without stressing, they fight back stronger after rejection, and they build their determination after each set back. In the face of challenges, they maintain a proactive, can do attitude. This trait is the key to their long term success.

While your competition is cowing in fear, anxious and stressed about things outside their control (eg. uncertainties, the economy, new laws, etc), you can stay focused on the things that are within your control and that you can do something about – you and how you respond to other people and circumstances. As a leader, you can maintain a clear vision, goals and strategies and proactively take action to achieve these. For you to do this effectively and consistently, you need to be free from any fears, anxieties and self doubts. Then with a “can do” attitude you can offer solutions; out of the box, creative ways of solving your clients’, team’s and organisation’s problems. Show leadership rather than follow the herd, and you will stand out!

2. Instinct

When Tim Pethick (founder of nudie juice and developer of many brands since then) was asked in an interview about how he makes decisions, instinct or analysis, he replied “Instinct in my view wins every time.” He is in good company. All successful leaders, business owners and professionals make decisions quickly on instinct, once they have all the facts.

Stop over analysing – this leads to second guessing yourself, and often, this is how decisions that are later regretted are made. Instead, develop total trust in yourself and your ability to make good decisions. The biggest saboteur of effective decision making is fear. Fear of making the wrong decision, fear of rejection, fear of being judged, fear of loss of control, etc. Fear is the opposite of trust. It is when you fully let go of your past fears that you begin to fully trust yourself and your decision making. This is how you can then totally rely on your intuition to take advantage of opportunities… while your competition is busy stuck in analysis by paralysis.

3. Relationships

In business, relationships are everything. Regardless of the industry you are in, whether you sell your products, services, skills or ideas, we are all in the business of selling one thing and only one thing – a relationship! When people like each other, they do business together. As a professional, you need to know how to successfully start new professional relationships with your manager, colleagues, team, suppliers and customers, as well as how to nurture those relationships.

As a leader, you will also need to know how to, on an individual level, motivate, influence and get the very best performance from your team (your employees, colleagues, managers, suppliers, partners, etc). You will need to know how to select the very best team in such a way that you can accurately predict their performance prior to hiring them. You will then also need to know how to nurture those relationships and retain them for the long term. How you build relationships is the key to your and your organisation’s success. You can develop strong relationships, unique to you, which no one else will be able to copy.

Get a leadership edge on your competition by focusing on these three differentiators and doing them really well, and enjoy the success that follows.

Dr. Vesna Grubacevic is an author, speaker, media commentator, the founder and Performance Transformation Expert® with award-winning company, Qt. She is the creator of breakthrough behavioural change techniques, holds a PhD, a BEc and has over 35 years’ business experience, including working directly with CEOs, senior executives and their teams to assist them to create exceptional results. Her Amazon best-selling book, Stop Sabotaging Your Confidence, has also been gifted to Hollywood and Australian award winners, nominees, hosts and celebrities. For additional free resources please visit www.qttransformation.com