Business owners I have met commonly know what they should do but most of the time they lack the courage to make the decision and act. I see this so often — an owner knows exactly what he needs to do to expand his organization or handle a particular staff member, but chooses to do something else; something easier to face, something easier to confront. This choice, in essence, makes him do the wrong thing. A real leader is one who does the right thing for the group even if it doesn’t win a popularity contest.

If you formulate a positive plan, if you get agreement on it from your staff, if you are not weak about your orders and if you follow through and get compliance, you will expand.

We find in a less courageous leader an inability to issue an order and probably more importantly the lack of the ability to get compliance to that order. These are two vital abilities that any leader must possess. The ability to make the call and the ability to make sure it gets done.

If you were able to face things in your organization without flinching or avoiding, if you were able to make the tough decisions and knew you were at least 51% correct in those decisions, if you were able to get others to get the work done and enforce compliance to your orders, you would find you would become significantly more successful and you would sleep better at night.

What do I mean by that? Let’s say you are looking at trying to solve a problem and you work out the solution. But the solution, however simple, is difficult to face. Perhaps it requires the termination of a staff member. Perhaps it requires changing how you have always done things. Perhaps it has the possibility of upsetting someone. So you choose to do something else. Something less right, or something more wrong. And when it doesn’t turn out exactly the way you want it to, you look at this and although you might feel frustrated, you apathetically write it off as experience.

But if you have the ability to face it, if you have the ability to tell that staff member something that you know might initially upset him/her and in the end gain the agreement of the staff member that it is the right thing to do, you find that the stress associated with not facing something, is significantly higher than just facing it.

Have you ever lain awake at night trying to figure out how you were going to handle a particular staff situation?

Perhaps you have someone who is basically causing trouble whenever you are out of the office for a day or two. You find you are always calling in to check on this staff member to see if he or she is causing any difficulties or problems for others in your absence. You think about this person all of the time. Basically you know you should fire this staff member, but you lack the courage to do it. Your group is looking to you to handle it. You lie in bed at night and think it through and what you dream up is something way more difficult to handle than just walking in and telling Joe that he needs to knock it off or he is gone.

The solution is simple – make the call and get it done. If you do that you win, your business wins and your staff issues will become a thing of the past.