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By sharing the Company Vision, creating a safe environment to call out issues, and working weekly to solve them, a company gets better day by day. Customers are happier, and employees are engaged and feel a true sense of ownership for quality and performance. What could be better than that?

When I was a leader in one of my own businesses early in my career, I had the misfortune to discover that my employees had nicknamed me “Hurricane.” It was NOT a compliment! 

Part of what earned me that nickname was the rage I felt when I had to repeat myself several times with my employees. I thought telling people something once should be enough! I hired really smart people, so when they didn’t seem to remember things I’d told them, I thought they just weren’t paying enough attention to what I said, and that made me furious.

When I start working with a new client, one of the first questions I ask is, “What is it that keeps you from being successful? What is it you must overcome for your business to grow?” Recently, someone answered that question with, “The voices inside my head.”

I knew instantly what he was talking about. I hear the voices, too – we all do. They say things like:

“I don’t have enough experience.”

“I’m not charismatic enough.”

“I’m not a good leader.” 

“My peers are all doing better than me. I must be broken.”

Running a business is a wild ride and there are a lot of surprises along the way. But I think the thing that surprises me most is that I have learned more about business and leadership in the last five years than I did in the previous 30 years.

This is part two in a two-part series of the five most surprising things about business that leadership teams need to learn. (You can read part one here.)