Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2015; its remarks on Spanish hiring subsidies and on Spanish small businesses failing at delegation reflect Spain in 2015.
Every skill, trait or talent is welcome when it comes to succeeding in business, just as we can make use of any knowledge we’ve acquired, however useless it may seem at first. But if we have to pick out a few skills or traits that really matter, we should split them into two types: those that help us move forward in business, and those that other people perceive.
For Tom Mendoza, vice chairman of NetApp, the most important qualities are trust, loyalty and sincerity. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” For Mendoza, you must constantly show that you care about your customers and your employees. Today, that is a basic requirement for building successful companies that last. (See: How to get customers to trust your business)
1. Reliability
Nobody buys anything if they don’t trust the person or company they’re buying from. Today, customers need to see something beyond the company’s interest in its own profit. And we’re talking about reliability at every level.
This skill is one of the most important because it is the one people perceive most widely. We like people who say they’ll do something and then do it. If you say you’ll deliver a product on Wednesday and you deliver it on Friday, you’ve already lost credibility, and your delivery times are unreliable.
That’s why Amazon usually tells its partners not to overcommit on delivery times. It’s better to tell a customer that it will take you 12 working days to deliver a product and have it arrive in 6, than to tell them they’ll have it in 4 days and take 6. The delivery time is the same, but the customer’s perception is completely different.
Exactly the same happens internally at other levels of the organisation. When a section head sets targets, they had better be realistic, so they can then be exceeded, rather than very ambitious targets that you then fall short of, because your credibility and the trust the company has placed in you are at stake.
If you become a reliable person, you’ll start getting the most important assignments and projects from the people who know they can count on you. If you let people down often, you’ll be undermining your success at every level. The good news is that anyone can become more reliable. It’s just a question of discipline.
2. Discipline
Discipline is necessary in every area of life. As we’ve said before, people who are disciplined in their personal life are disciplined at work. People who are messy in their office are messy at home, and people who don’t discipline themselves to control their negative emotions in their personal life won’t have that control in business either.
Many people start a business from home, and as many already know, when you work from home you have no set hours. In the end, some succeed and others fail. The difference usually lies in how disciplined each of them was: even without set hours or a boss, they had the discipline to stick to a schedule.
3. Learning fast
The business world moves very quickly, and you have to keep learning. But above all, you have to learn quickly from your mistakes and failures, swiftly drawing the lessons from whatever landed you in a hole.
4. Time management
One mistake most business owners make is not managing their time properly. The 80/20 rule works perfectly in business: we spend 80 percent of our time on tasks that bring in only 20% of the profit. So we should probably focus our energy on the 20% of things that bring in 80% of the profit.
If, as soon as we get to work, we devote ourselves to unproductive tasks, by the time we get round to the tasks that really matter we’ll already be mentally drained.
The day has 24 hours for everyone, so time management is essential to get the most out of those working hours, because being busy for longer doesn’t make us more productive.
5. Communication skills
Every leader must master these 3 communication skills, which we’ve explained before: self-communication, one-to-one communication and group communication.
It’s not the message, but how we put it across. It’s not what you say, but how you say it. Communication is unavoidable for everyone, and even more so for a business owner, because in business we are constantly communicating: with our customers, our managers, our employees, our partners, suppliers, and so on.
(See: 9 things you can do to become a better communicator)
6. The ability to delegate
Small business owners in Spain are failing the delegation test. Most still think that, for their business to work, they have to do everything themselves, and that’s why they rarely manage to have anything more than a small business.
Business owners tend to waste a lot of time on tasks that even a monkey could do, yet they are often unable to delegate those tasks or to outsource services that aren’t profitable for the company.
Being unable to delegate certain functions properly is what leaves business owners with no time to focus on the most productive part of the business. And it’s the first thing a business owner must identify: which functions do I inevitably have to do myself, and which could I delegate to other people? This leads us to one of the most underrated qualities in business owners, which is…
7. The ability to hire
The message shouldn’t be so hard to grasp: “Surround yourself with the best, not the cheapest.” We have seen how great business leaders such as Steve Jobs or Richard Branson would rather leave a position unfilled than hire just anyone. They prefer to pay three times more for someone good rather than hire someone who isn’t up to the job.
The thing is, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. We sometimes ask ourselves why companies in the United States become large corporations in a short time while that doesn’t happen in Spain. There are many answers to that question, but one of them is that in the United States they don’t hire on the basis of whatever subsidies are available at the moment for hiring the long-term unemployed, people over 50 or people under 30. They hire the best.
(See: Elon Musk’s obsession with hiring the best led him to steal an employee from a frozen yogurt shop)
8. Emotional intelligence
Although this concept may seem new, today we know that it is probably the most distinctive trait of successful business people, because there is no success if we can’t control our emotions: our emotional response to failure, to adversity, to confrontation.
Being able to stay calm under pressure is what can define a person’s success in business.
And finally, we could include sales skills, because we are all salespeople in one way or another, and every company survives by selling something. So acquiring persuasion and influence skills, as well as sales techniques, can make your company take off like a rocket. Of course, you can always fall back on our skill No. 7, which would be to hire someone who is very good in that field.
See also: These are the 6 areas of your life you must master to control your destiny
Featured image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
