What Should A Business Leader Be Doing, Anyway?

There are conflicting ideas about what leadership is and how it operates. Of course, that’s hardly surprising. The conductor of an orchestra is going to have a different set of leadership roles, responsibilities, and preparations compared to an infantry officer managing their troops on a battlefield.

Moreover, the idea of a “business leader” serving as one kind of definition is vastly out of date. A person who owns or runs a business may be doing so in the hospitality sector, or they may be building the next rocketship to take us to Mars. Most people think of Elon Musk in that last example, but is anyone actually picturing him designing the rockets himself? 

As you can see, sometimes it’s important to understand the texture of leadership before we begin to define what they should be doing. Yet we can’t avoid that topic either. While there’s much interest in how a “CEO lives in an average day,” and for good reason, most of these videos or articles give us an idea of a superperson who spends every waking moment working, and that’s not always the most realistic approach.

So, what should a business leader be doing, anyway? How do they free up their time? To what extent could this apply to you? In this post we’ll lay out some common conventions and hope they can inspire you to answer those questions for yourself:

Thought Leadership

It’s easy for “thought leaders” to disappear into vanity, but that doesn’t mean the general practice is a bad one. If you don’t confuse this with just “talking a good game,” you can work on tangibly implementing new standards based on principles you think are important.

Sure, speeches, articles, and panels help, but thought leadership has to come from genuine understanding and innovation. That means showing others what’s possible and how to get there – being willing to take that risk in your thinking and not just sticking with what’s worked in the past. So if you’re a business leader, one of your core focuses should be developing and sharing your perspective to guide your team and the industry toward future possibilities. Some figures are entirely known for this

Embodying & Cementing Brand Values

Business cliches may be trite but that doesn’t make them any less true—how you lead is a reflection of the culture you’re building. It’s all well and good to talk about “integrity” and “innovation,” but if you’re not living those values day in and day out, people will notice, and it’ll undermine how staff feel they can behave in your building too.

For instance, if your company stands for customer service, then leaders should make themselves available to handle essential issues or step into difficult conversations when needed, or even just provide autonomy to those that are public-facing. If you want to remove the friction the previous leader of a business added, then finding new ways to provide seamless opportunities, such as Stripe accounting integration, could be worth the investment. Substantive changes like this matter and they’re downstream from your principles.

Pursuing Risk & Responsibility

No leader can really lead without accepting the risk of getting something wrong. Otherwise, what are they leading for? To remain in the comfort zone?

Putting it simply, pursuing risk in leadership means being willing to enter uncharted territory when the reward outweighs the potential damage that failure could bring. We’ve seen this lately with AI, companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all pursuing their own take on it, and some companies, like Samsung, becoming among the first to integrate those utilities into hardware. It might just be having the gall to open the very first seafood restaurant in a town without one. 

This is why leaders are often paid more, because with risk comes responsibility. It’s not wise to throw your team into the deep end without guidance. Smart leaders weigh the consequences and communicate openly with their people, and they also share credit and accept failure on their own shoulders. That might seem unfair, but it’s just part of motivating a team to keep going and working under your instruction because they’ll know you have their backs when the time comes.

Public Outreach & Partnerships

The modern business leader doesn’t work in a vacuum. You need to engage with the broader community, from customers and clients to industry peers and beyond depending on the business you work in. Even a restaurant owner should book their restaurant to help contribute to community events, for example.

This is also different from promotion but not necessarily distinct from it, as sometimes curating structural change or cross-marketing efforts can be the benefit of both, not just for you. A leader is best placed to make these deals.

With this advice, we hope you can inspire a little of your own excellent leadership also.