When Carl Daikeler founded Beachbody with Jon Congdon, the pair wanted to be sure that the company’s flag-ship product worked.
So the executives joined the test group and used their before and after photos to help sell the product.
Daikeler is chairman and CEO of Product Partners LLC, the parent company of Beachbody, and his commitment to his products and his “never satisfied” attitude has helped the pair grow the company to $223 million in 2007 gross revenue on the strength of in-home fitness and weight loss products, such as Power 90 and Hip Hop Abs.
“The key to effective leadership is looking at what the problem is with your current leadership,” Daikeler says. “An effective leader is somebody who will not just try to do it the way they read about it in a magazine or a book but who will make sure they’re listening and trying new things and learning every day.”
Smart Business spoke with Daikeler about how to give criticism that inspires your employees, not deflates them.
Be a consistent communicator. One of the most important steps in communicating for effective leadership is to stay consistent. That doesn’t mean you can’t still be creative within that consistency with good storytelling, examples or statistics to help prove a point, but people need to know that the direction is not going to change on an hour-by-hour basis.
Look to the people you are trying to lead or the organization you are trying to lead for clues. When a problem presents itself, the first reaction is, ‘Oh, this is a problem. I need to solve this.’ But the most productive first reaction is, ‘This is a positive; this is my organization showing me a problem that is symptomatic of a larger communication or systematic failure that can be solved.’
In order to improve the way you lead, look at problems and challenges as opportunities for not just putting out fires but making organizational improvements and making specific changes and clarifications in what you’re communicating to your organization.
On a more granular level, use commute time to get on the phone. Put on the headset and communicate with management that you may not be communicating with enough. Take the temperature, find out the status of projects or find out what their ideas are.
Use the hidden communication time in commutes and other downtimes to communicate with management in a way that is more efficient than necessarily adding meetings to your weekly schedule.
