Before you can be a leader who inspires greatness in others, you must be working towards greatness yourself. You truly have to practice what you preach and show your team that you’re going to continue to grow and learn alongside of them! Once you have committed to continuously learning, you must encourage, see, acknowledge, and support others on your team.

Encourage others to be great. It is nearly impossible to inspire others if you are a pessimistic person with a negative attitude. Instead, you should be your team’s biggest cheerleader! As a leader, you should be enthusiastic, encouraging, and positive. When you approach the day with a positive attitude, others will follow your lead!

See. You need to be actively looking for moments of greatness in your team. As a leader, you are often looking for the downfalls and thinking of ways to correct or prevent them. When you have the mindset to only look for improvements, you often overlook moments of greatness. Continuously remind yourself to see greatness in others!

Acknowledge. Once you have seen a noteworthy accomplishment, you must acknowledge that occurrence. We recommend acknowledging these moments by speaking that person’s love language. How do you know someone’s love language? Observe how they treat others. Is your receptionist someone who always brings others a birthday coffee? Their love language is gifts. Is your salon manager always complimenting others work or clothing? Their love language is positive affirmations. Get it? Good! No matter the love language, you want to show your team member that you appreciate their hard work!

Support. You must be willing to support others to advance their greatness. For instance, if you know that one of your Stylists really enjoys curly haircutting and has continuously been working to get better at it, you can pay for her to receive advanced education in curly cutting. If you know that someone on your team has a desire to go after something, be the one to support that. In the end, we all rise when we lift each other.

If you are lucky enough to be in a leadership position, keep encouraging and supporting your team—we all need great leaders! To get more industry advice to grow yourself and your team, make sure to follow Beyond the Technique and listen to the weekly podcast!  

Do you have other ideas, thoughts, and questions about being a salon leader? Check out our sister company's private Facebook group to bounce your ideas off of other industry pros--we will see you there!