Business: Six Ways to Support Growth and Fulfillment, by Man of Faith

As we move toward an expanded definition of success, following are six ways you can support broader growth and fulfillment, and make 2012 a truly inspiring year.

1.      Serve your stakeholders. Take the opportunity this new year to shift your attitude from expecting, demanding, commanding, controlling (however your leadership shadow takes form) – to serving – your employees, your vendors, your investors, your community, in addition to your customers. This creates a powerful shift in moving from a competitive adversarial paradigm, which just creates lack, to a prosperity based paradigm, which creates abundance. When we serve we receive. It’s natural law.

2.      Expand your balance sheet. We all know success comes from doing the right things, and greater success comes from leverage – empowering your people to do the right things. Empowerment comes through connection, which comes from openness, authenticity and trust. So when inventorying year end “material” assets and liabilities, consider inventorying year end “leadership” assets and liabilities – such as trust, authenticity, humility, courage, motivation; and come up with a plan to shore up your personal leadership balance sheet. The net result will be a clearer path to greater satisfaction, and greater prosperity.

3.      Develop yourself. After you do your inventory – which can be done through a 360 degree survey to uncover your blind spots, commit to changing one thing that will create the greatest leverage for yourself and your business over the coming year. Then find someone, a coach, a colleague or a friend, to hold you accountable. Leadership development is personal development, increasing awareness from the inside out, and making positive changes within the expanding awareness.

4.      Cultivate Gratitude. What are you most grateful for in your business life? Consider starting all meetings with a gratitude. Consider creating an organizational gratitude journal on Google Docs and keeping it alive and growing. Make gratitude a core value. Live that core value. Bring it alive in your culture, and that in and of itself can enable you to overcome adversity and revitalize your entire organization. Gratitude is the most powerful attractor of success and prosperity on the planet. As Lynne Swift says in her book the Soul of Money, “what you appreciate, appreciates”. Appreciate your business as a vehicle for contribution, collaboration, and livelihood and watch it appreciate.

5.      Positively acknowledge others. Developing talent has to begin with believing in people’s highest potential, and then supporting them with skills and training. During the process, it’s vital to catch them doing right. Consider making a commitment to acknowledge your team mates when they do things right. So many of us are programmed to only see what’s wrong, find the mistakes and correct them. Try shifting, and looking for what’s right and acknowledging that.

6.      Recommit to your purpose. The greatest companies in the world have great purposes. Purpose is the heart and soul of your organization. It gives meaning to everything you work toward. Human beings crave connectivity and higher meaning. Businesses that support that can achieve real, balanced, fulfilling success. Businesses that don’t support connection to a greater purpose often become uni-dimensional and destructive, leaving stakeholders uninspired and unfulfilled.

So as you embark on your new year, consider making resolutions that help you transform to a higher level of success. Consider balancing the quest for “more” with resting in the exquisite distinction of sufficiency and amplitude that always exists in the present moment, outside of our stories. And consider growing your contribution through service, gratitude, acknowledgment, personal development and purpose – the vital and so often lacking arteries in corporate cultures across the globe.