FOUNDATIONS OF success

Leadership consultant Marcus Haycock gives his four foundational principles of success for individuals, teams, and businesses

As a successful and aspiring medical aesthetics owner, practice manager, or employee, you’ll appreciate that the industry is rapidly changing. Intense competition, new consumer trends, and a shift to greater regulation present opportunities and challenges for you. Having worked in the medical aesthetics industry as a business consultant, manager, and leader, I fully understand the demands placed on everyone’s time.

Throughout my 30 years of corporate experience, I’ve always been passionate about coaching, training, and leading teams and individuals to achieve more than they ever thought possible. I now work as an associate director for a world-leading people development organisation specialising in leadership and management training.

When you become aware of this simple but compelling concept, you’ll achieve more in your work and personal life. Imagine getting an hour back each day and achieving more in less time. This is not a pipe dream but a tangible reality that can be yours if you apply the four foundations of success. By doing so, you can look forward to a more productive and fulfilling work and personal life, filled with the satisfaction of achieving your goals.

Let’s distil 65 years of people development experience into four foundational principles. These principles are not just fancy theories, but practical tools that will keep you on track to achieve more than you thought possible. You can trust in their effectiveness and start applying them with confidence, knowing that they are designed to equip you for success.

1. Clarity of destination

Every person, team, and organisation must establish their precise direction of travel. We are all on a journey in our lives, and when we are clear on the destination, we can eventually arrive there by combining the principles of the other three foundations. When we have a clear sense of direction, we develop a clear picture of success for ourselves, our team, and our business.

Paul Meyer, one of the founding fathers of the personal development industry, stated that success is goal-directed action. This clarity of destination empowers us, giving us a sense of control and confidence in our journey.

2. Clarity of purpose

The second foundational principle for success in business and life is having clarity of purpose. The highly popular management guru, Simon Sinek, discusses understanding your ‘why.’ He wrote two best-selling books on this subject that are worth reading. He is quoted as saying:

• “We don’t necessarily find happiness in our jobs every day, but we can feel fulfilled by our work every day if it makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves.”

This sense of fulfilment inspires and motivates us to keep pushing forward.

COMMUNICATING YOUR ‘WHY’

Another critical point is that when you effectively communicate your why to others, you are likelier to create a strong connection with them. He also said:

• “People don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it.”

To achieve success, you need a compelling motive and reason to drive you forward. Have you ever started something, a project, a hobby, or an activity only to discover that you didn’t quite finish or maintain interest? Often, if the reason or purpose is not compelling enough, we tend to lose enthusiasm and motivation.

If you manage and lead teams, it’s also critical that you communicate a compelling reason for taking a specific course of action. What is the bigger picture? How will this add meaning?

Having worked in pharmaceuticals and healthcare most of my life, I can relate to how well some companies communicate why they do what they do. I recall the time in the late 1990s when the pharmaceutical company I worked for launched a new drug for hospital consultants into a niche healthcare market that affected a small percentage of the UK population. My fatherin-law was suffering from a debilitating health condition. I felt empowered to act as a hospital sales specialist representative. I gained a strong sense of purpose to do whatever it took to indirectly assist my father-in-law through the healthcare system and ensure that this new drug was approved by the local hospital formulary where he received specialist care. I did this in record time, and it made me realise that intrinsic or internal motivation is more powerful and longer lasting than external motivation, such as recognition, awards, and financial bonuses. The drug in question made a big difference to my father-in-law’s quality of life, and it felt great to have made a small contribution to assisting his personal healthcare needs.

Never underestimate the power of identifying with your “why”. When you commit to anything, develop compelling reasons and motives to achieve the desired outcome.

3. Effective processes

Having established the direction you’re heading in and a compelling reason why you want to arrive at your destination, the next step is to ensure you have the proper process mapped out. This starts with goal setting. A paradigm shift occurred when

I understood that true success is not focusing on your end destination at all costs. Success is goal-directed action. This understanding helps us stay focused and determined in our journey.

You are successful if you have worthwhile goals and are progressing towards them. Understanding this concept is pivotal for maintaining motivation and resilience when roadblocks are put in your way. To quote Paul J. Meyer:

• “If you are not making the progress you would like and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.”

If you do not have clearly defined goals, human beings become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia. Research by Norton and Kaplan in their book Balanced Scorecard highlights that 50% of the average employee’s time is spent on non-productive work. This statistic is shocking; however, knowing this is the case, if you find yourself not mapping out daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals, the opportunity for you to improve is immense. This is where foundation number three, “Process,” comes into its element.

DEVELOPING AN EFFECTIVE PERSONAL SYSTEM

The most successful people develop an effective personal system. They know where they are heading, have a compelling reason to reach their ideal destination, and can map out specific milestones and check-ins to ensure they are still on track and heading in the right direction. Each check-in milestone can be a particular goal – when reached, this powers more optimistic and resilient behaviour. Over time, we become focused on achieving our goals, celebrating these micro wins, and keeping a log of them, which drives a powerful success motivation loop.

If these concepts are new to you, fear not. It takes time and practice to become proficient at goal setting, and previous life experiences may have held us back due to negative conditioning, which has created doubt in our minds. Applying the principles of practical goal setting and developing a compelling process and system helps recondition your mindset for success. Spaced repetition over weeks and months creates stronger neural connections in your brain, helping you maintain this positive momentum.

James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, mentions:

• “We don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our systems.” 

With a structured process or roadmap, you ensure that your ideal destination will become a reality, sometimes sooner than you had initially thought.

4. Continuous progress

The final foundational principle is Progress, or the “Slight Edge”, as we term it. Alot has been written about this principle, and there are numerous examples of how embedding a continual improvement philosophy into daily work or personal activities can result in transformational results. The English Rugby Team, led by Sir Clive Woodward, transformed their performance by adopting the Slight Edge concept. It aggregates marginal gains, which means “breaking everything down and then improving it by 1%”.

THE CONCEPT OF KAIZEN

The Japanese have a word for continual improvement that they apply to the manufacturing process within their industries. The word ‘kaizen’ means ‘improvement’ or ‘to improve’.

To make this article more relevant and practical, I want to pose the following questions as food for thought. In your practice, how can you make a 1% improvement in these areas and keep up this momentum over the weeks and months ahead to tap into the law of marginal improvement gains?

• Planning

• Organisation setting

• Prioritising communication

• Delegation

• Time management

• People management.

CONCLUSION

In summary, remember these four critical foundational principles and apply them in your work and personal life, and you’ll be surprised at the positive impact this can have. Reading an article is just the beginning to pique interest; creating lasting change could mean reaching out for further support.

For readers of Aesthetic Medicine, we are offering two free places on Marcus Haycock's Foundations of Success workshop. Click here for more info.