Bringing people together in a group and getting them to work together is never a very simple, straightforward practice.  The main reason for this is that we all have different set of experience as well as a different set of values that we utilize when working.  This is especially hard for business owners who wonder why their employees aren’t the same as they are.

If you have ever been or are currently in a leadership position or run a business, you know how exciting it can be.  We want to get started and change the world.  We’re smart, we work hard, we care deeply etc.  Things get difficult for us when we start working on changing the world with our teams.

• We start to realize a few things in the team process:
• Not everybody is at the same level in their careers.
• Not everyone is as excited about the project as we are.
• We aren’t easily able to mold people in our image.
• Not everyone has the same work ethic.
• Not everyone shows up to work with the same level of preparation.

As a new leader or business owner, this is a tough concept for us to grasp.  This idea of differences.  We would like to think that because of where we are at that our way is the best and only way.  Of course, it’s not.

The truth is there is really a lot of potential that resides in the differences that we all have.

This is one of the specific tenets of Soul Purpose.  The fact that everyone values things differently and approaches work in a different way can be a good thing for your organization.

The question is, “how do we tap into this and make it work for our business?”

The first thing to do is to work on being more accepting of your team’s differences.  It’s important to embrace the differences in your team as much as possible and in a manner that makes sense.

Once you are ready to embrace, take some time to get to know your people on a personal level and start understanding what it is that they value.  When you understand their values better you are more able to work more effectively with them and understand what drives them.

Last, don’t be afraid to point on your team’s uniqueness and celebrate it publicly.  The mission is what’s truly important to any organization.  The journey to the mission can be done in any manner of ways provided that it is ethical and makes sense for the business.

What are you doing to celebrate your team and their individual values?  How can you better come to the realization that your employees don’t and won’t view things in the same manner you do?  I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

When looking at doing better the first thing you need to examine is how you are being as person.  Before you can change your actions you have to make a commitment to yourself to change the way you are and also be willing to see your world through a different lens.

Leadership can be a challenge whether you are a business owner, a manager or a parent.  What’s the right balance of support and toughness?  How do I get the best out of the people around me?

What really made me think about this topic with regards to business was at a workshop that we run for business owners.  We spend a lot of time talking about relationships and the subject of employees always comes up.  Once you get business owners talking about their employees, you are likely to hear some of the following statements.

My employees are lazy.

My employees don’t seem to care.

Why can’t my employees just get it?

Young kids today are just bad workers.

These are just a few of the comments that you will hear.  The truth is that maybe their employees really aren’t doing that well and there really are bad employees.  However I never once hear business owners talk about how they can do better with regards to leading their teams.  I never hear them ask, “What am I doing wrong?”  It’s always their team.

Penelope Trunk wrote an interesting piece for BNET on how employees need to approach their work.  I respect the article and the place that it was written from as it talks about the employee taking responsibility for the direction of their careers.  I agree with that but I will say this, leaders are leaders for a reason.  Employees are employees for a reason.

Leaders are supposed to handle things better than their employees that’s why they are in the position they are in in the first place.

If employees were that good at holding themselves accountable, they would already be a business owner or a leader somewhere.  The reality is that they are probably not good at doing this currently.

So this puts a lot of responsibility on the leader and it starts with self analysis and a willingness to accept criticism.  If you can continually ask yourself what you can do better as a leader for your people, you will drive much better results for your individual team members as well as your organization as a whole.

How can you do better?  You can ask this of yourself as a parent, as a manager, as a business owners and even as an employee.  If you keep asking yourself this question and don’t allow yourself to filter the results, there’s no question in mind that you will be better for yourself and put yourself in a position to get the best out of people around you.

Growing our businesses is hard enough without having to worry about the more seemingly inconsequential aspects of our business.

Take for example the process for hiring people for your business that I talked about a couple of weeks ago. When your business starts out, you wish you needed to worry about hiring more people. You are mainly satisfied when you can pay your own bills let alone helping someone else pay for theirs.

When you look at hiring a little deeper, you realize that the time for hiring more people in your business is the time where your business is stretched with operating at its current level. You need to alleviate that pressure by hiring some help to take over some of the responsibilities that you or someone else is handling.

It seems to make sense to wait to worry about this until you are faced with a hiring decision amid times of growth.  However, if your business is outgrowing your current operation and you have never dealt with this before, it can be an extremely stressful time. In this case, are you really going to be able to pull together an effective hiring process?

The answer is that you can but how effective and well thought out will it be? Hiring the right staff is important do you really want to throw that together in the spur of the moment? The answer there is no.

Hiring aside, this is the case for many of the different operational aspects of our businesses. We always wait until we need something to begin looking for them but by that time it’s too late and you run the risk of not making as good of a decision.

If there are areas of your business that is not in place, take some time to develop a framework for how you want them to look when they are fully developed. You will thank yourself for it later.

Making hiring decisions for your small business can be a nerve racking affair.  How do I find the right people?  Where do I go to look?  How do I approach them in the interview without sounding desperate?  These are all questions that we have asked, or will ask, during the course of running our businesses.

It’s challenging to be a small business owner who has a business that is growing and needs the right people to get the business to the next level.  As a small business owner, you probably don’t have an extensive budget with which to bring in top talent.  That means you have to be creative.  Beyond salary, what do you have to offer?  Do you have a compelling vision?  Is your company positioned for massive growth?  Do you have an opportunity to make a wide spread difference in the community?

Great (and authentic) answers to these questions can be the deciding factor on whether or not you will bring on the talent you are looking for.  If your business is up and coming, it stands to reason that there are also some up and coming talent who are looking for the opportunity that your business has to offer.  How creative you will be in this process is critical.

Crafting a creative offering is just one challenge however.  Another challenge that you face as a small business owner is the competition in the marketplace.  You are not only competing with large businesses to land talent, you are also competing with other small businesses just like you who are also looking for ways to creatively position themselves in the minds of the talent pool.  As a business owner, you have to figure out how to separate your business and what you have to offer from everyone else.

If being creative and working in the competitive landscape of hiring talent isn’t hard enough, as a business owner, you also have to find time to participate in the search for talent.  You have to do some research on where to find the talent.  You need to work on crafting wants ads for talent.  You have to know what kind of person you are looking for.  All of these things take precious time that you don’t necessarily have.

Understanding the challenges that you face as a small business owner when looking for talent will help you develop strategies to overcome them. These practices will then create a powerful landscape for your business to hire talented people and allow your business to thrive.

Having hiring practices for your business is critical to the long term growth of your business for 3 reasons.  The first reason is to ensure that your business is complying with the law.  The other 2 reason have to do with building your team effectively and efficiently.

Without further ado, here are my top 3 reasons to have hiring practices for your small business.

Reason #1-  Legal Issues

There are several legal issues that surround proper practices for your small business.  One of those being how you bring those employee on.  It’s important to understand what you can and can’t say in an interview for instance.  It’s also important to have the necessary disclosures for them when they start.  Forms such as non-compete, non-disclosure etc. should the employee terminate down the road.

How you deal with employees once they are part of the team is important.  Do your employees understand that their employment is at at-will?  Meaning they can quit or be terminated at any time.  How do you handle disciplinary issues?  Do you document employee interactions?  Have you covered topics such as sexual harassment?  Having any employee manual is a great way to ensure that these policies are in writing.

Ultimately proper legal practices keeps your business from going under from a law suit, having your customers stolen from a former employee and helps to ensure that you have recourse should a former employee share trade secrets.

Reason #2- Allows you to build an effective team

When you have hiring practices in place, you have a better idea of who you need on your team and what skills that they need to bring to the table for a given position.  In his book, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber talks about mapping out the organizational structure of your company as you want it to look at the peak of its growth.

Putting this structure in place not only helps you assess your needs but it also starts the discussion, in your mind, about what type of people would fit best within your organization.  You can start answering the question of what types of personalities you think would work best on your team.  You will also increase your chances of landing top talent because you are more clear about the needs of your business and how potential employees fit into that.

Reason #3- Your hiring is more efficient

Picture this.  Your business starts growing and, as with most entrepreneurs who experience rapid growth in their business, it’s always faster than they thought it would be.  In any event, you need employees now.  The question becomes, if you don’t have hiring practices in place already, when are you going to have time to get this done?

The answer is you probably wont have time and you will throw something together as quickly as you can but definitely not as quickly as if you already had an employee growth plan in place.  Not only are you not efficient but since it’s thrown together you also violate reason #2 above.  The good news is that this scenario can be avoided with a little preparation.

These 3 reasons for having hiring practices for your small business are hopefully reason enough for you to get your hiring practices in place for your business if you don’t have them in place already.  I am curious to hear from business owners about their own experiences with hiring for their business.  What recommendations would you make for small business owners?

Image used courtesy of GlennPeb at http://www.sxc.hu

For all my talk previously about systems and processes, they are worthless if you don’t have the right people to run them.  Personnel is a tough area for small business owners due to a lack of experience in the personnel development process.  There are 5 mistakes that small business owners make with regards to personnel.

Mistake #1: Not defining roles for the partners in the business.

This applies even to the individual business owner.  It’s important to decide what roles that you will play in your organization both short term and long term.  It’s especially important with regards to partnerships.  I have personally seen the damage that is done in business when roles aren’t clearly defined for all of the players.  The Coaching Millions blog recently went over some solid guidelines for effective partnerships.  If you are in a partnership currently or are thinking about, define the roles of the partnerships as soon as possible.

Mistake #2:  Poor or nonexistent hiring practices.

When you are building systems and processes for your business don’t overlook the personnel aspect of the business.  Once you define what personnel you will need, it’s time to figure out how you will do it.  This includes having sound interviewing practices, doing background checks, reference checks, how to turn down candidates, where you go to find talent, job descriptions, offer letters etc.  A lot of small businesses try and wing this and look to hire people when a pressing need arises without little thought of the long term needs of the business.  Having the right practices will help to ensure that you get the right people and that you follow the correct labor practices when doing so.

Mistake #3:  Not knowing what you want or what you need.

As your business grows, you will need new people to keep your business  moving in the right direction.  One of the first mistakes that is made is not having a game plan for what position you want to hire for first once your business starts growing.  Beyond that, once the position is decided upon, chances are you haven’t really thought about what characteristics and attributes you want a successful hire to have in the position so you word your job description with generic and overused terminology that suggests that you aren’t sure what you want.

I’ll give you an example of this from Craig’s List:

I am a busy executive looking to hire, train and mentor an individual to learn my business. The person will be:
-Professional in appearance and demeanor
-A Highly motivated, teachable self-starter
-Be overly ambitious
-Possess the highest level of moral integrity
-Be looking for a long-term career,
-Have a highly flexible schedule
I am a demanding, aggressive senior executive who pushes people to their limits, but with that comes great
rewards. I will only personally train one person, so I am highly selective. I will teach you how to grow a successful
business with a high value residual income.

This above job description doesn’t even say what the job is. You can’t be this careless with your job description and expect to get the right people for your job in an efficient manner.  Someone whose worth hiring would look at the above job description and pass immediately.  It’s important to make sure that you figure out who you need first and what an ideal candidate will look like.

Mistake #4: Using faulty logic when hiring or promoting in your business.

In college I was involved in a fraternity. My favorite reasoning in the fraternity came when it was time to elect new officers to positions for the next year. For instance, we elected a guy for activities chair even though he never came to any activities. The logic? If we put him in charge of activities, he will come to them. The result? Not only did our activities suck but he never came to them either.

Another example is for our historian who takes pictures etc. We had a guy in our group who wanted the position and was an avid photographer. Who did we elect? A guy who didn’t even own a camera. The logic? We wanted to get him more involved. The result? That year may as well have never happened because there is no record of it anywhere.

I thought that my fraternity was uniquely stupid in this area until I got into the workforce and saw that places of business hired sometimes for terrible reasons as well. With small businesses it’s usually happens when they hire family members because of family pressure. The logic? Your brother just hasn’t done anything because he hasn’t been given the chance. The result? You find out right away why he hasn’t been given a chance because he is an idiot.

Sometimes we put good performers in other positions to make them more “well rounded” and then watch as we kill their career by putting them in a position that doesn’t match their skills. Kolbe has a C index that they use to match what you want from a position to what the skills of the candidate are. It’s a great tool to see how someone’s skills really match with what they are going to be required to do.   In your different roles you want to put them in a position to do what they do best and grow, you don’t want to stifle them by trying to help them be more well rounded.

Mistake #5:  No training program.

Small business owners seem to really learn this the hard way.  Initially a business owner is doing the majority if not all of the tasks in his business.  This is a great time to start putting best practices down on paper so that you can more easily train your replacement in this area.  Not giving an outline to an employee isn’t necessarily the key to them performing but it’s good to let employees know that you support them.  Having a training program is a good way to help them feel supported.  At the very least, it tells the employee you have thought through their development in the position.

Those are my top 5 personnel mistakes.  The great thing  is that these can all be easily fixed within your organization.  Some areas such as interviewing may take some time to get properly educated but shouldn’t be anything too extensive.  If the hiring process in your organization has holes, now is a great time to start patching them.

What personnel mistakes make your top 5?

When it comes to confronting someone about a specific issue my number one rule is to keep it business.  What do I mean by keep it business? I mean that no matter what situation I am confronting or person that I am confronting, I am following some of the basic guidelines listed below:

• Confront the behavior not the person.  By sticking to the actions that you have a problem with, the receiving party will more likely be open to what you have to say.  This is especially important when you are terminating someone’s employment.
• Stay on topic-  Have you ever been confronted by someone who just rambled about every issue that happened in your office whether you had anything to do with it or not?  It’s a huge waste of time.  Outline your topic for confrontation, get in and get out.  This is the best way to ensure impact.
• Don’t make generalizations-  We are typically really bad about this with our spouse.  Don’t start sentences with “You always…..”, unless you want someone to get on the defensive in a hurry.  As soon as you make a generalization about someone’s behavior, you have lost credibility in the discussion.
• Don’t take it personal-  When someone defies orders or breaks protocol, leave your feelings out of it.  Their behavior is not a personal affront to you and you shouldn’t take it that way. If you are angry at someone, don’t confront them yet.  Get a handle on your emotions before you talk with that person.  When you do talk with them, don’t start a sentence with “I feel like…”.  At work, I don’t give a damn about your feelings, I care about the mission.  Your feelings don’t write checks, doing business does.  Stick to the facts, talking about your feelings makes the situation about you rather than the issue.
• Look for solutions-  In the end, you should confront so that you can find a common ground and some solutions to the issues that are being confronted.  This is a great time to build rapport with someone and get buy in from a difficult employee.  Looking for solutions ensures that the meeting is productive and ends on a positive note.  Make sure the person you are confronting knows that you care about their success.
• Confront in private-  If you have an issue with someone, confront them in private, not in front of the whole office.  This rule also applies to your kids, spouse etc.  Confronting people in public shows a lack of respect unless it’s a debate. There is also a tendency for leaders to confront the whole team about an issue that came up with one person.  Don’t punish your whole team for the poor performance of one person.  This has zero impact on anyone.

Good confrontation can be a powerful tool for your business.  It allows you to coach individuals to their highest levels, get maximum productivity for your business and allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on with your team.  As you can see above, there are several reasons to keeping confrontation from becoming personal.  Those reasons can be anywhere from morale and performance to legal issues and customer service.

The one way to do this incorrectly is to make it a personal confrontation and that opens you and your business up to a lot of issues that you don’t need to deal with.  Let go of your ego in these situations and take some more advice from EPMD and keep things Strictly Business and keep the personal stuff out of it.

Employee morale is a sensitive thing and your leadership will go a long way to dictating if the morale is good or bad.   Yesterday I gave two scenarios of confrontation to illustrate what can happen when we choose to confront or not to confront.   The bottom line is that when we confront right away, it sends a message to your team that you care about doing the job right.  Generally speaking, most people respect that if the confrontation is handled properly.

Another thing about morale and timely confrontation is that sometimes as a leader, our first analysis of a situation is not correct.  I know that I have personally had situations where an employee did something that caused me to think they had lost their mind.  Upon sitting down with that employee later and hearing their reasoning for their actions, it was not crazy at all.  I felt like a jerk for thinking so poorly of one of my own team.

In terms of impact, being timely with your confrontation allows you to confront poor performance while it is still fresh in everyone’s mind.  Anyone who has been in a leadership position has tried to confront a situation well after the proverbial statute of limitations has run out on confronting that particular situation.  If you haven’t experienced this as a manager, then you probably have definitely experienced this in a relationship with a significant other.   When we aren’t timely we lose impact in that after a while we forget the details and overall the conversation becomes awkward and forced.

The third area that timely confrontation impacts positively is in the area of your business mission.  When we fail to confront, timely or otherwise, we allow poor performance to become the standard for our business.  Projects are never completed on time, customers are unhappy, excuses become common place etc.  As a business owner, no one is going to be truer to your business mission than you.  It’s up to you to ensure that everyone is working towards that goal.

The last area that is positively impacted is performance.  When you are timely with your confrontation, you get a better performance from your employees, from your business and even from yourself.  No one hates the leader that made them better and helped them achieve their goals.  Everyone hates the leader who has no spine and therefore allows people to fail without saying anything.  Timely confrontation allows you to correct small problems and ensures that they don’t turn into big problems down the road.

Those are my 4 key reasons to be timely with your confrontation.  What are yours?

We spend a lot of time talking about how to avoid confrontation.  On the flip side, we rarely talk about how to confront people to create positive outcomes in the workplace or in your business.  We fear confrontation so that we don’t hurt people’s feelings or rock the boat.  When it comes down to it, it’s much easier to be the “so-called” nice guy/gal rather than be the jerk.  However, let me run you through a couple of scenarios and you can judge for yourself which you would prefer.

Scenario #1

You have been working with a company for a couple of years.  You aren’t sure what direction your career is headed but no one has really talked to you about doing poorly so you figure that no news is good news.  The only feedback you get is the occasional, hollow sounding, “good job”.  Your manager is a real “players coach”.  He gets along with people really well and everyone likes him.  In your mind, you think he is the best manager you have ever had.  Always agreeable, always nice, always telling you that you are doing great.

Then one day your manager calls you into his office.  You see the look on his face and know there is a problem even though your manager is having a hard time spitting it out.  As it turns out your performance has been below standard and the company needs to let you go as a result.  When you ask for specifics, you get a laundry list of things that you have been doing wrong that no one has mentioned up until now.  Unfortunately, you have no time to correct it because you’re fired.  All you get now is a sorry from your manager and box to put your stuff in.  Nice.

Scenario #2

You start with a new firm and you are a little nervous as is everyone who starts in a new position.  Your boss sits you down day one and lays out expectations that they have for you and she also asks you for your goals that you want to attain with the company.  Day 2 you fall short of the assigned expectations for that day and your new boss comes over to your desk after the day is over to see how you did.  She hears how you fell short of expectations and makes you stay that night until you hit the expectations that you have been given.  You drive home that night looking at the hour and a half of overtime that you just worked and can’t believe what a hard ass your boss was on just your second day!

A funny thing happens to you over the course of the next year.  Since you know the score very well and what’s expected of you on a day-to-day basis, your performance has been getting better and better.  In fact, you not only get a raise but you also hear that if you keep it up, you are in line for a promotion.  Your boss isn’t always buddy buddy with you but she has you on track to hitting your goals.

These 2 scenarios certainly seem extreme but as a leader the difference between someone succeeding or failing in your organization is your leadership.   How you confront poor performance is an important part of great leadership. In the end, who would you rather the work for?  The nice guy who helped you get fired or the manager that isn’t afraid to draw a hard line because they aren’t willing to compromise your success?  The above scenarios have varying degrees to them for sure.  These scenarios can also be used in your personal relationships, parenting etc.

It all comes down to creating the right conditions in your life as well as other people’s lives.  Confrontation allows you to not only be more successful but it also allows for the people around you to be more successful also.   You are able to create better teamwork and come up with better solutions to problems.  We will be talking about the right way to confront over the next few days.  In the meantime, what are your thoughts on confrontation? What has been your experience with confrontation good or bad?

My top 2 techniques from making great connections are listening and asking great questions.  If you are like many, you are going to be bombarded with get togethers this holiday season so you will have ample opportunity to practice your networking with regards to these 2 tips.

Listening is certainly not ground breaking but it’s funny how bad we have gotten at listening to people when they are talking.  I love text messaging but it has almost killed our ability to stay focused on people and stay in the moment with our conversations.  Most of us try too hard to multitask when we should be just seizing the opportunity to make a new connection.   Where we really run into problems is that some people are still great at connecting and if you can’t engage them properly and show the person that you are talking to some respect, you risk turning that person off to you.

While listening is the key starting point to building connections, asking great questions is the next step to really deepening the conversation.  This skill comes natural to some and takes practice for others.  I like to approach a conversation with someone new to find out two things:  what they are up to and what support they need in the future.

When I know what a new connection is up to, it allows me to ask deeper questions about what they are doing so I can have a better understanding.  This not only makes the other person feel like you care but it usually teaches me something new about a topic that I didn’t know about before.

By finding out what needs a person may have in the future, this allows you to keep an eye out for opportunities that create value for that relationship in the future.  This is a great way to not only create value and great connections but also a great way to expand your reach by having an impact on your network.

In the digital age where phones can do so much to distract us in our daily lives it’s important to remember that some of the old ways of doing things are still fashionable.  Listening to people and giving them your full attention is one of those things.  What other tips do you have for making better connections?

Our existing relationships can be a great source of inspiration, assistance, accountability, love and friendship.   Small business owners need lots of all of these things.  There’s come a point, however, where you need to make new connections to move yourself and your business further.  This doesn’t mean that your old relationships aren’t important anymore, it just means that you are ready for a new level that only a new perspective and new advice can give you.

This is the point where having a list of people that you want to know is important.  It’s important to prepare your list of people that you want to meet as soon as possible because you never know when you may get a surprise introduction.  Paul Lawrence wrote about one such encounter in a recent newsletter from Early To Rise.   He told the story of a publisher that he was really excited about meeting and knew that publisher would be a great connection for him.  It turns out the publisher wanted a program written on a subject that Paul was not an expert in.  He didn’t let that stop him because he had a plan for how he would handle this request and he accepted the offer.

The thing is, you just never know when you are going to meet someone that can make an impact on your business and your life so you need to be prepared.  For instance, ask some questions regarding why a certain relationship would be important to you.  Can they be a mentor?  Can they be a partner?  Can they get your message out?  You get the point.  So ask yourself why.

Other areas of planning involve understanding your value proposition.  Or in other words, why should this person spend some time with you.  You have to be able to articulate this quickly.  More importantly, have some ideas ready for how you can create value for the connection.  One other thing to consider is the degrees of separation that this person may have to you.  Can you touch base with the person through social media?  Are they going to be at an event that you can attend?  Do you know someone who can make an introduction?

I can’t stress the importance of being prepared enough.  This includes being careful what you wear when you go out.  I have certainly screwed this up a time or two by heading into the office in a pair of shorts and t-shirt with the idea of just going in to pick something up only to find myself being introduced to an individual with a high level of influence.  They may or may not have judged me by my appearance but nevertheless I was self conscious about it.

Think about who you want to know today.  Who’s out there creating massive value in your area of passion and interest?  Make your list today, put your plan together and then work on getting connected.

Why is this even important?  Initially, if you are serious about building high performance teams, you want to have the people on your team take ownership for the assignments that they are given.  When we relegate those duties to people they just do what they are told and that’s it. With delegation, you can give the assignment (the what) and allow the person given the assignment to figure out the plan (the how).

When we relegate we are making sure that we constantly have to be giving our people things to do because they grow accustomed to receiving assignments from us, they aren’t given the authority to go beyond that.  Talented individuals will only put up with this style of leadership for so long before they call it quits.

So what can you do to make sure that you are delegating effectively?  Kent Blumberg has an excellent post on the subject. One of the important steps to delegating is to set parameters for the assignment.  This may include deadlines, budget and other resources that are available to you and what decisions can be made.  Bad delegation happens where an assignment is given but with no boundaries.  In this situation one of two things will happen.  The person or team will either go crazy and just get the job done at any and all costs or they will be scared to do anything because they have no borders.   One of the other tips that Kent gives that is powerful is to avoid solely delegating meaningless tasks.  Make sure that your assignments have some substance so that your team can grow.

If you are reading this and wondering how well you are doing with your own delegation, you can take an assessment here.  This will give you the opportunity to see where you are at and make adjustments accordingly.  If you want to build high performing teams within your organization, delegating properly will ensure that you and your team will perform at a higher level.

What has been your experience with delegation, good or bad?  How have you been able to do this effectively?

The are a few things to consider when you are setting expectations for your team as you look at what the end result will look like when everything is complete.  Will you drive higher sales while minimizing customer service complaints?  Will you get back to clients quicker when they have questions?  How will the team interact?  Are there any foreseen issues that could be created as a result of the expectation.  Issues such as a breakdown of team work, lack of continuity for clients with regards to their experience with you just to name a couple.

When you set expectations, typically you are trying to raise the bar or create some form of uniformity within your organization so there are some guidelines to follow when you are doing this:

Guideline #1:  Make sure that you have buy in from your organization and let them set the expectations.

In this case you may have certain things in mind before you meet with your team but a good leader is subtle in getting the expectations put in place and making it look like it was your team’s idea all along.  If you just dictate expectations, you are going to have a hard time with commitment from the team because they have no ownership.  When you have buy in it’s a lot easier to hold your team accountable as well.  More on that in a minute.

Guideline #2 Don’t set too many new expectations all at once.

Your are human and so is your team.  Don’t try to change the world in one meeting.  Effective change doesn’t work that way.  Figure out 2-3 of the most important needs for improvement (with the help of your team of course) within your organization and focus on just those critical items.  You may have 15 areas that you want to fix but you must resist the temptation of trying to fix it all because you will fail.

Guideline #3 Hold people accountable.

What’s the best thing about the whole team creating the new expectations?  They created the plan not you and it takes away excuses with regards to how they were set up.  Make sure that if you set a new direction for your team that you are the leader of this new direction.  As the leader, you must drive the new behavior not only by your actions but how you hold other to the standard.

If someone is off track and doing things in a manner that is not congruent with the expectations, you must course correct with that person immediately. (There is a proper way to confront as well but we will save that for another discussion.)  It’s not enough to course correct once, you must also be consistent and course correct every time.

If you have ever worked in sales, you have been to a sales meeting.  During these meetings the sales manager (or insert other title here) talks about how this month or quarter we are going to do things differently and he/she lays out a huge game plan for how it’s going to be done.  No sooner do you get back to the office when it’s business as usual for you and your staff and everyone is doing things the way they have always been done without a word from the sales manager about it.  What’s the message that is sent?  He/she’s just not that serious about the changes discussed.

If you want to kill your credibility with your people, don’t follow through on what you say you are going to do.  You do this too often and everything you say to your team will be a joke.

Guideline #4 Follow up and update your team.

There are going to be some growing pains with change and it’s important to have constant feedback on how things are going so that you keep your team in the game.  Many leaders fall short here because feedback and updates can take a lot of work and diligence on your part.  This is why you only set 2-3 new expectations so you are not following up too much.  I think of the hard/easy rule with regards to this guideline.  It may be hard to get your team executing your organizations expectations in the beginning but if you stay the course and see it through you have created a new culture within your organization that in the end allows your team to be more successful.

Setting expectations for your organization is just one piece of the puzzle.  How you follow up and monitor the progress of your team is what really sets apart high performing teams from mediocre ones.

What was been your experience with setting expectations in your organization?  Do you have any other guidelines that you would add to the list?

We have all worked for or with someone who suffered from the curse of knowledge.  This is the boss/entrepreneur who assumes that everyone clearly understands their complete vision after talking with them for five minutes or assumes that you know what they are thinking  just because you work there.

Even though I had experienced the curse of knowledge many times, it was articulated to me in a concrete manner by the book Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.  In the book they give an example of a test that was run where they had one person tap a song that they had in their head on a table.  While this person was tapping out their tune, another person sits there and tries to guess the tune that is being tapped.  Rarely did the listener guess the right tune much to the frustration of the tapper.  The tapper couldn’t understand why the listener didn’t get it.  It seemed so obvious to the person in charge of tapping the tune.  This is the same plight of the leader/entrepreneur.

The vision in our mind is so clear that we think that everyone just gets it.  In order to build high performing teams for your organization, it’s important to get past the curse of knowledge so that you are able to get everyone associated with your business, whether it be internal or external team members, on the same page and driving towards a common goal.  Business owners who are able to do this find that their business is able to get high results much faster and easier than business owners who ignore this.

What tips can you give for articulating the vision of your business?  How has this worked for you in the past?

The first step to managing a disagreement is to define what you actually must agree on.  From there Ed gives 5 Building Blocks of Reality to help you manage the conversation.

1. Information-  This is where you lay out facts.  What are the objective aspects of the issue.

2. Situation- This is the context with which the information was presented or at least your view of it. The background information if the situation is included here.

3. Interpretation- What you see as the conclusion or end result.

4. Approach- How that end result is supposed to be achieved.

5. Beliefs- What you believe personally about the issue.

The approach is start at #1 and work through as many of the building blocks as you need to in order to come to a joint conclusion on what you defined as having to agree on.

This is some food for thought on what you can do next time to keep a disagreement from escalating into an unproductive argument.  The last thing that I feel is important here is to not get emotional about the situation so that you can stay level headed and work through the building blocks.  Who knows, this might even help you resolve an argument with your spouse.

As I said in yesterday’s post,  how well you manage the internal aspects of your business will dictate how positively the public perceives your business.  In the beginning of a companies’ life cycle, the business owner is the foremost dictator of how things play out in their business.  This is why when you consider your companies brand, you identify concisely what you want to be known for.

Once you have done that, you can then identify what you personally bring to the table. Start by looking at your strengths, your weaknesses and what resources you bring to the table.  One of the personal assessment tests that I took a couple of years ago was the Kolbe A index.  This assessment breaks down 4 categories: Fact Finder, Follow Through, Quick Start and Implementation.  It scores you on how heavily you rank in each category and there is no right or wrong to the assessment it just shows how you get things done and how you process information.  One thing I have found with entrepreneurs is they tend to score high in the “Quick Start” category which means they don’t take a lot of time to think about moving forward on an idea which can be a great asset for an entrepreneur.   While they tend to take action quickly I have noticed that entrepreneurs aren’t “Follow Through” people.  Again this isn’t good or bad it just shows how you do things.

The follow through aspect is the most tricky for entrepreneurs.  Because they don’t normally have the attention span to see things to completion, things always fall through the cracks.  They don’t return calls or e-mails on time,  they are frequently unorganized and unprepared for important meetings, communicate poorly and most importantly activities that need to be accomplished seem to pile up.  These areas affect customers, vendors that do business with you, partnerships and employees.  Ultimately being poor in these areas affects your brand as it starts to break the trust that you are trying to build with these different groups.

This is why I mentioned putting a list together that identifies strengths and weaknesses.  Look at where you are weak and then figure out what personnel or system needs to be in place to make up for your deficiencies in this area.  The Kolbe test is one great resource for helping you hire the right team.  A common mistake that I see business owners make is hiring an assistant to help them with follow through and then you find out that the assistant isn’t strong in follow through either.  Math is still the only area I have seen where 2 negatives can become a positive.

There are resources to help you create a great image for your company and insure that your weaknesses don’t become your firms weaknesses and ultimately cripple your brand in the process.

What resources have you been able to use to ensure that your company operates smoothly and your weaknesses aren’t exposed?

I have seen/experienced companies doing this in a number of different ways.  I have seen companies meet in the mornings for a period of time until the plan is complete.  I have been a part of retreats in remote locations or spend 2-3 days going over our plan in a conference room.

I am gearing this to small companies with 15-20 employees or less.  With that being said, it’s important to get as many people involved in this process as possible.  The more people who feel ownership in the plan the better.  When it comes to writing the final plan on paper, make sure that one person writes it so it feels and sounds cohesive.  (Tip from Guy Kawasaki)

While this process can be a great source for team building, the easiest way to kill your team’s vibrant momentum is to not follow through on the plan.  As the leader of the organization, you are responsible for making sure that what is decided on gets implemented into the business.  I have seen too many leaders of organizations ignore this and create a cultural of cynicism that feedback doesn’t matter and neither does planning because the boss is just going to do what he/she wants anyway.  Don’t be that leader that doesn’t follow through.  It will destroy your credibility.

This is just another reason to have a business plan and a great way to engage your team in the process.  When you have everyone on your team working towards the same result, special things can happen.

I don’t make the friends and family point in a MLM sort of way where you list them out and then try and get them in your down line.  I am talking about have meaningful conversations with people that you care about so that you are aware of what it is they do professional and what types of projects they have been working on.  Another thing about this, I only want you to do it because you truly care, not just to further your own professional life.

When we spend a lot of time with people, we take then for granted sometimes.  Have you ever learned about a personal crisis that a friend went through that you were never aware of?  Has a friend ever had a serious accomplishment that you ended up hearing about in the paper?  These things have happened to me and I don’t consider myself to be too crappy of a friend.  (My friends may feel otherwise.)

My point is that your friends, family, past co-workers etc could very well be up to some amazing things that you don’t know about.  Beyond that, they may be up to some amazing things that fit nicely into what you are doing in your business.  This is a great way to get a mentor or have a relationship that can enhance your current business offering.

Next time you are hanging out, make it a point to ask your friends, family etc what they are up to.  A simple,  how’s work going will suffice.  If you don’t know what they do for a profession, find out.  If you know where they work but not what they do, ask.  Asking some questions shows that you care about that person and are interested in their lives.  As an added bonus, it can also be a great way to enhance your business as well.  It’s easy to forget to cultivate our relationships and take things for granted but can pay dividends in multiple ways when we do it right.

The first step is figuring out where to network.  Some questions to ask include; How much time do I have to devote to this?  Do I have a budget that I can spend on networking?  Where are the best places to go for my industry?

Finding the places to network can be the most difficult task during this initial process.  You can start simple with joining your local Chamber of Commerce and start attending their events.  There are other groups that you can join for a fee like BNI, Corporate Alliance (a local Utah group), CEO Space, etc.  In addition to the pay events, there are several places that host free networking events, such as area colleges and universities.  Two suggestions on finding events right now:  Ask business people you know if they network and where and even more scientific is to just use Google and look for events that way.

Once you find events to attend it’s important that you come to these events prepared.  Find out who typically attends the events and what the structure is.  Put together a game plan for what you want to accomplish at the event.  In addition this is where you need to make sure that you are clear about your business and what it does and be able to articulate this.  I have had many situations where after talking to someone for 15 minutes, I have no idea what they do.  I have also gone to networking events with people where in the car they are wondering what they should say when people ask them what they do.  Don’t waste your time and money on not being prepared.  There are great tips available for networking even is you consider yourself to be shy and introverted.  The important part is implementing these tips.

After the event, make sure that you also have a system in place for follow up.  I would be clear about your follow up system before you go to the event not after.  You need to be able to follow up within a couple of days of the event so people still remember who you are.  Make notes on your business cards at the event so you remember what they do and what you want to follow up with them about.  Having a follow up system in place is the best way to maximize your experience and make networking worth your while.

It takes some time to develop good networking channels.  The key is good planning at each of the steps so that you are not wasting time or money.  Most importantly, put together a good business networking plan and start executing now.

How have you had success with networking?  What has been challenging?  What other advice can you offer to networkers?

I am currently reading The Knack by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham.  This is a book about how to build a business with street smarts and managing change.  One story towards the beginning of the book that really has stuck out to me so far is a story about a woman who wanted to start her own day care center in New York.  The woman had little to no business skills but was determined to get her business off the ground.

The smartest thing that I thought she did was call an experienced day care owner in another state and started asking for advice on how to get going and what types of things that she needed.  Beyond getting a mentor up front, this was the smartest thing that she could have done.  She made sure to call someone who didn’t compete in her market and was this able to have someone avaiable to her to help her avoid the pitfalls of starting a daycare.

As entrepreneurs, this is a critical action step that we can take.  We often think that potential competitors would be unwilling to advise us on our business but that thinking couldn’t be farther from the truth.   In many cases, others in our same industry, even in our same market, are willing to give advice and tips on getting started.

I have been able to have some success on getting some ideas for pricing structure as well as ideas for offerings from people in my industry.  In a couple of cases I have built such a good relationship that we have actually referred each other business.

We have a lot of relationship potential waiting for us to utilize.  It’s difficult to get a new business going especially because we don’t know what to expect.  Building relationships with people in our industry is a great way to shorten your learning curve and get your company some traction much sooner by using this simple strategy.

What got me thinking about this was after I recently read Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. The last chapter is titled The Art of Being a Mensch. Guy wrote a blog post about what a mensch is as well as his 5 guidelines to follow.

His 5 guidelines are:

1. Help people who cannot help you. A mensch helps people who cannot ever return the favor. He doesn’t care if the recipient is rich, famous, or powerful. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t help rich, famous, or powerful people (indeed, they may need the most help), but you shouldn’t help only rich, famous, and powerful people.
2. Help without the expectation of return. A mensch helps people without the expectation of return–at least in this life. What’s the payoff? Not that there has to be a payoff, but the payoff is the pure satisfaction of helping others. Nothing more, nothing less.
3. Help many people. Menschdom is a numbers game: you should help many people, so you don’t hide your generosity under a bushel. (Of course, not even a mensch can help everyone. To try to do so would mean failing to help anyone.)
4. Do the right thing the right way. A mensch always does the right thing the right way. She would never cop an attitude like, “We’re not as bad as Enron.” There is a bright, clear line between right and wrong, and a mensch never crosses that line.
5. Pay back society. A mensch realizes that he’s blessed. For example, entrepreneurs are blessed with vision and passion plus the ability to recruit, raise money, and change the world. These blessings come with the obligation to pay back society. The baseline is that we owe something to society–we’re not a doing a favor by paying back society.

Personally, I agree with everything that Guy talks about above. The one thing that we must be careful about is with how far we go with some of these things. Specifically as it pertains to points 1 and 2. It seems that if we aren’t careful we can end up wasting time helping people who need our help while sacrificing our own time and money in the process. Doing this on a small scale (this is relative to where you are at personally) is perfectly acceptable but how far do you go before you are not helping someone, you are being used.

We have all done someone a favor and then seen that other person turn into the cable guy after the fact. Always wanting more and working to get every last bit of time, patience and energy that we have left.

I have always believed in giving without expectation of return and to help people without regard to how it will benefit me. Entrepreneurs, in general, tend to be giving people.  Because of this I think having a filter for how to manage your relationships would be important.  Is a better question, how will helping this person possibly hurt me? Do I have the time? The resources? How do you manage your relationship capital? Am I off base with my thinking? Would love to know your thoughts.

PS…For more on relationship capital, listen to my podcast below.

External tools

Your boss, if you are employed, is one tool for external accountability.  As an employee we all need help getting to our goals and seeing new directions and good boss can help us do that.

A business coach can help guide business owners in any number of business issues from sales and marketing to building your start up.

Life coaching takes a holistic look at everything you have going on in your life and career and gets to the core of you and why you do what you do.  They are able to blend your professional and personal life to allow you to focus on the things in your life that are most important.

Books: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is a great book to help build the right personal habits.

Good to Great by Jim Collins is not just a great book about organizations but good insight on how we can apply these principles to our lives as individuals.

Winning With Accountability: The Secret Language of High Performing Organizations by Henry J Evans.

These are just a few examples of books that can help us with external accountability.

Retail programs and workshops can give us great insight on accountability as well.  There are a lot of great workshops and programs that exist that can help us develop an accountability plan.

Internal Tools

Goal setting: Or for a business, we can call this business planning.  This is a road map that can make sure we are able to assess where we stand throughout our success journey.  This is a seriously overlooked and simple tool for success.

Morning routine:  We call our morning routine a “power hour“.  Regardless of how we do it or what we call it, the key is to get a routine implemented and do it.

Daily markers: Markers in conjunction with your goals are powerful tools to help keep us on track by reviewing where we are at daily.

Time management:  How we manage our time is critical to dictating how we hold ourselves accountable in other areas as well.  Getting a consistent time management system will ensure that we are doing the things that need to be done in a timely manner.

There is not a one size fits all accountability system.  It’s a matter of trying different things out and seeing what works for us personally.  This takes a little time but once we have it done, it makes a huge difference in how effective we are.

What works for you with regards to accountability?  How have you figured out what works and what doesn’t?

Soul Purpose

The use of a coach is recognizing someone’s unique set of talents and abilities and how they can work for you.  Too many times we try to go the route of the “rugged individualist” and try to achieve maximum results on our own.   The question to think about with getting help for your business, coaching or otherwise, is what would it mean if I were able to achieve the results that I wanted in business in a much quicker time frame?  Is it work a few thousand dollars for the possibility of building a long term profitable business that I own and control?

Utilizing others for your business fosters that sense of team work that is so important to achieving high level results.  It’s why successful entrepreneurs participate in mastermind groups so that they can be around people who can inspire them and keep them moving forward.  Teamwork is a key component.  It allows you to stay within yourself more often and opens up the floor for you to do what you do best within your business.  When you use others to help in your business you are also allowing them to do what they do best and get maximum value out of their services as well.

How have you been able to achieve better results utilizing others to help you build your business?  What are your hang ups for utilizing outside service?  Money? Trust?

I ran across the concept of edit-ability vs. accountability in the book 11: Indispensible Relationships You Can’t Be Without by Leonard Sweet.  The author talks about the colleague who came up with the idea of being edit-able.  The idea is that being edit-able is to be able to accept feedback that can make you better.  Are you willing to let someone else suggest a rewrite into a piece of your life understanding that this is done because they care and not for any other reason?  As a business owners or an employee we may need help towing the line but we also need to be able to accept criticism that will ultimately make us better entrepreneurs and employees.

We have all worked for or with people who feel that they don’t need help and aren’t eager to take suggestions.  Everyone has had the boss that asks you for a suggestion only to talk over you the minute you start giving your feedback.  Their asking of your opinion being  just a show but with no real meaning behind it.  We have all been the victim to our own pride that didn’t not allow us to do the right thing because our ego got in the way.  Being open to suggestions and feedback is a critical piece to our development and our work with an outside coach or mentor.  The more open we are the better and quicker we will improve and get better.

In the end, we all need to have someone on our team that can call us out when we are headed in the wrong direction.  Someone we wont be angry with if they try and edit us from time to time.  Accountability is the force that points out when we are wrong.  Edit-ability helps give us the road map on how we can get better.  Who is the editor in your life?  How have you been hampered by not being open to critique?   How can we better incorporate accountability and edit-ability into our lives?

I am going to talk more about workshops and seminars that you can go to tomorrow to get help with time  management.  Workshops are great and give you great tools but once the seminar is done your training is over and you are on your own.   This is where most of us get into trouble.  Once life starts happening again, it’s easy for us to revert back to our bad habits.  That’s when we need someone to give us that extra push to focus on the things that are most important which is exactly what a coach does.

A coach typically doesn’t tell you anything that you don’t already know, they just give you the blueprint and encouragement to do it.  There are several life coaches and business coaches who also work within the realm of time management and personal productivity.  My suggestion on finding one is to first ask people you know.  I would particularly start with people who are in higher level positions or who are currently successful as they have possibly worked with someone in that capacity or know of people who do.  If you can’t find one word through people you know, try Facebook or Twitter and if for some crazy reason that doesn’t work, you can always use the old stand by Google to search for someone.

Having coaching will help you break bad habits or even help you recognize bad habits that you weren’t aware of.  If you find yourself always scrambling to get things done or constantly in crisis mode, it’s time to make some changes.  Who holds you accountable?  If you have never used a coach,  why not?  If you have, how did it work out?

PS- It’s time for my weekly podcast click the button below to listen and enjoy.

The first thing to make sure that you do is to leave the conversation that you are having with a specific course of action for follow up.  Letting someone know that you liked what they had to say and that you would like to connect.  You can schedule a time to do that right then and there (not as likely as people don’t always carry their schedules around with them) or you can let them know that you will be giving them a call and then get a rough idea from the other person when a good time may be.  This doesn’t have to be specific it can just be a range or a block of time.  Setting this up ensures that you will actually do it and it sets it up in the other person’s mind as well to be expecting a call.

The second course of action is to make your follow up immediate.  Don’t wait a couple of weeks to follow up with someone.  In this day and age we have access to so many more people that it becomes difficult to remember everyone that we talk to.  This is especially important at networking events where you are exposed to hundreds of people.  In this case it’s not OK to use the method from the movie Swingers and wait 5-7 days to call the person that you just talked to.

Now that you have followed up immediately, the last thing you need to do is speak with clarity and confidence.  Make sure that you articulate clearly what conversation you had with that person and what your idea was for the relationship going forward.  It’s probably a good idea to take notes during times where you are having conversations with multiple people so that you can write down key phrases and ideas from the conversation that you can reference later.  By doing this, you make yourself more memorable to the person on the other end of your conversation and sound more sure of yourself as well.

Having a solid follow up process is key when you are having conversation and building relationships.  Without it, you are wasting your time.  What ideas have worked for you in the past when following up with people?  What success have you had a result of your follow up efforts?

With regards to listening, this incorporates not only what you are hearing from someone in the moment but also any preconceived notions that you already have about this person.  These preconceived notions can stem from previous conversations or actions and appearances.  A good example of this is someone who is consistently unreliable coming to you with what could be a legitimate reason for being late.  Even though the reason may be legitimate, to you it’s just another excuse from a flaky person.

In certain situations, I think it’s OK to filter some of what we hear based on past experience.  However in the context of relationships and conversations in your career or business, we sometimes let our filter keep us from having authentic and productive conversations with people we are meeting for the first time.

One reason we do this is based off of someone’s outside appearance.  You may be engaged in a conversation with someone that may be dressed “odd” from your viewpoint and it totally kills your ability to have a conversation with them that has any depth.  We think that if they dress differently, there must be something wrong with them and therefore look for opportunities to not have a conversation with them because of our own superiority complex.

Another way that we hinder conversation and connections before we get to know someone is when we hear something about that person we are meeting that is negative.  We often allow someone else to influence our opinion about someone before we have even given the realtionship a chance.

In these situations, we  judge people and conversations when we feel that they will not have anything important or meaningful to say.  We refuse to let go if our preconceived notions and allow us to have a conversation in the moment.  How often do limit our relationship capital by allowing filters to dictate what we get from a person?  Usually that filter consists heavily of our own egos.  Has this ever been an issue in the past?  What instances have you judged someone before getting to know them only to realize that they had a lot to offer you personally?

I will talk more extensively tomorrow about listening but for today I will just talk about the simple act of listening attentively.  Listening attentively means looking at the person while they are talking to you and making sure that you are actively participating where appropriate.  I am sure we have all experienced the person who just can’t seem to pull themselves away from their phone to stop texting while you are speaking with them.  They don’t listen to your conversation and then ask a question that you already answered but they didn’t hear it because they weren’t listening.  This drives me crazy and I avoid talking with these people as much as possible because I hate wasting my time.

The second step is to engage the person that you are talking with appropriately.  Ask questions that drive the conversation that you are having to deeper levels of understanding.  This lets the person that you are talking to know that you care about what they are saying.  When you engage people to further the conversation, you also learn more about the person.

Listening and engaging are important tools to getting to know the people around you at a deeper level.  When we engage people beyond the surface level of conversations, we are able to know more about those people.  The more we know about them, the more we are able to build resources to have great relationships and have a group of people put together that can further our careers or assist us in our businesses.  All it takes is a little practice and the ability to care.  It’s really that easy.

PS Podcast time.  Click the button below to listen.

About two and a half years ago I had started contemplating a move out of corporate America and into something else in my career.  Before I get into the story, I want to make it clear that it’s not about me, it’s about having opportunities and not doing anything about it.  So as I am contemplating a move, a good friend of mine hears that I am thinking about moving on from a 10 year career and starts talking to me about partnering with him in business.

That sounds good right?  It was and is.  Where I went wrong is that my friend had been successful with his business practice for about 5 years before we started talking, he was driving a Bentley and the funny thing about it is not once did I ask him what he was doing and have a meaningful conversation about his business.

We lived in different cities and didn’t talk much except for when I was in town.  Even when we got together, we didn’t talk about business. As it turns out, after talking with him, some of the things that he was working on were in direct alignment with things that I loved doing and I had no idea.  It was like my friend lived this life that I was clueless about.  Some of this had to do with the fact that I didn’t want to act weird about his success.  I didn’t want to overemphasize the money.  When you have friends who have high levels of success, friendships can end in a hurry if not managed correctly on all sides.  You have to deal with different goals, envy, resentment etc.  I wanted to be careful to keep things as similar as possible.

My point of the story is this, I knew someone for years who had success and not once did I think to ask that person what they were up to and open up specific dialogue about his business and success.  What a missed opportunity!  The opportunity was not about the money but the utilization of my skills and doing more meaningful work.  If only I had asked the right questions or any questions for that matter, I would have embarked much sooner on a path that would have led me to utilizing my talents more fully and at an ealier date.

When you are engaged in conversation by conscious of the types of questions that you are asking that person.  Don’t wait to have meaningful conversations with people that you know and admire.  Who are the people in your life that you should be having meaningful conversations with and aren’t?  It could be a friend, family member, coworker, boss, a person you admire that works in the same industry.   There are tons of great conversations out there waiting to happen and these conversations could change your life forever.

Who are you not talking with that you should be?  What success have you had with asking meaningful questions in the past?

When you own your business everything is on you.  When you make a mistake that costs money, it comes out of your pocket.  This is hard for new business owners to grasp initially when they have come from corporate America jobs where you are playing with house money.  In the short term you would rather not have this concept learned by making an error in judgement that you pay dearly for.  Mentors can help you sidestep certain mistakes the new business owners make.  The first step is recognizing that there are things you don’t know, that you don’t know. A mentor has been there and done that and will help you recognize your blindspots.  This simple aid can save your business thousands of dollars.  A good mentor is eager to help you avoid making these mistakes and allowing you the fortune of learning from his/her mistakes.

If you work with a mentor in your field (which you most likely should) then you get to take pages from their playbook to make your business profitable faster.  You can learn how to market, structure your offerings etc.  The important thing with this is that you get what you give.  It’s important to find ways that you can create value for your mentor as well.  The better you are at doing that, the better the information that you will receive.

Profitability is the bottom line benefit of working with a mentor.  Keep more money in your pocket with less expense and out more back in your pocket with increased revenue.  Work with a mentor to get your business to the next level that you are looking to achieve.

PS Podcast is here again.  Click on the button below to listen.

To get off on the right foot with mentoring, you need to know what your needs are.  There are three important components to setting up your relationship.  Planning up front on your part, communication throughout the relationship and coaching.  The better you understand your needs upfront the more likely you mentoring relationship will be a success.

In terms of planning, the first question to ask yourself is what are my areas of need?  Is it technology?  Is it leadership?  Once you have identified your needs you can then think about what you want to get out of the realtionship and what you can give to the relationship.

Speaking of what you can get and give.  Communication is the ultimate piece to a mentoring relationship.  Questions to ask yourself are; how coachable am I? What is my communication style?  In what areas can I provide value to my mentor?  How do I want to be held accountable?  In the beginning you want o evaluate your mentor’s communication style to make sure that it is a good fit for you.  Some people like tough love.  Others can’t deal with it.  I can’t stress the importance of making this a two way relationship.  The more you give of yourself and your experience, the more you will get from your mentor in return.  A good mentor will ask these questions and evaluate where you are at.

The mentoring  relationship works best when the mentor lets you decide what the plan of attack is in your areas of need and allows you to ultimately make decisions.  You don’t want a relationship where someone just tells you what to do and when to do it.  You want your mentor to hold you accountable and let you know when you aren’t living up to your end of the bargain.  The coaching aspect will be the key to everything that you implement.

These are what I think are the most critical aspects of the mentoring relationship.  Take a look at mentoring relationships that you have observed in the past.  Like the proverb at the beginning says.  You can spend a lot of time learning things on your own or you can go right to the source and be ahead of the game that much faster.  A great mentoring relationship has the ability to impact your life forever.  What mentoring realtionships have worked for you in the past?  What was good about them?

In the case of laziness, most people I talk to about using mentors mainly shrug their shoulders about the subject.  A lazy person response is usually, “I don’t know”.  This is a weak excuse in the age of Google with so much information at our fingertips.  So it really boils down to effort.  Meeting with a mentor requires us to actually go out and find one and speak with them.

If you lack focus, you may be so busy working in your business that you don’t spend enough time working on it.  A mentor is great for helping you to recognize these areas and create awareness for you.  Make sure that you are taking the time to evaluate resources.  It’s important to take a step back on a weekly basis to see how things are going.  Focusing on the big picture of your organization is critical.

In the end, mentoring is a tool to help make your life easier.  You have access to someone who has a vested interest in your success.  You may think you don’t have time but that thinking is limited.  Mentors can create more time in the long run of your business by speeding up your learning curve and giving you objective advice.  So my question is, what are you waiting for?  Why haven’t you used a mentor in the past or currently?

The SBA has posted a few links on mentoring that you can view here, SBA mentoring, one of the organization that they list is SCORE.

From www.score.org, SCORE “Counselors to America’s Small Business” is a nonprofit association dedicated to educating entrepreneurs and the formation, growth and success of small business nationwide. SCORE is a resource partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

SCORE utilizes entrepreneurs to coach individuals who want to start a business or currently own a business.  You can utilize their services at no cost to you.  You can meet with someone in person or online and you can meet with them an unlimited number of times.

Your Mentoring (www.advancedmentoring.com) is another place to go for mentoring when you need help with your business again at no charge.  You can post a profile there and be a mentor or mentee.  Contact is primarily online but this site has an added feature where you can participant in a sort of online mastermind group with other individuals that share a common interest.

There other organizations where you can find mentoring.  CEO Space is an organization that I am familiar with and when done right can be a good source for mentoring.  The main thing is that we never have all of the answers and a mentor can be someone that can help us regardless of what stage of business we are currently in.

Sole Proprietors and General Partnerships: Money earned for a sole proprietorship are subject to self employment tax which is currently 15.3% on the first $90k in income.  General Partnerships are taxed in much the same way as a sole proprietorship.  The big difference here is that there are multiple people involved to divide income or losses between.

Limited Liability Company (LLC):  LLCs are pass through entities which means that any gain or loss in income from your business gets passed on to your personal tax returns.

S-Corp:  S corps are taxed in the same manner as LLCs.

C-Corp: C-Corps are a separately taxable entities.  As the owner of a C-Corp you can be subject to double taxation when you take money out of the corporation as that money is also taxed inside the entity itself.

Nonprofit corp: In a nonprofit corp you can file for tax exempt status to avoid paying federal taxes.  In addition to federal, there are several states who provide provisions to not pay others taxes such as income, property and state tax.

What entity is right for you from a tax standpoint?  The only way you should make that determination is if you are currently a tax professional.  Otherwise seek guidance here.  Again your business needs to be built on a firm foundation of success.  I have seen businesses fail because of a lack of attention to tax ramifications in their business.

What experience have you had with regards to tax in your business, good or bad?

PS It’s that time of the week for my podcast.  This week’s show continues the discussion about the various positive by-products of being a business owner.  Enjoy!

The presentation was created by Roy Williams of the Wizard Academy and was presented by a friend and business partner Michael Drew of Beneath The Cover and Promote-A-Book.  Compliments of Wikipedia, civic society is described in the following manner:

Civil (Civic) society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups.

We have seen this definition come to life through social media as more and more people are joining the collective discussion.   The Pendulum Presentation presents the need for authenticity in our marketing and everything that we do online and in society as a whole. In the social media landscape it’s not OK to take without giving.  It’s not OK to talk in a grandiose manner on something that you can’t deliver on.  If you are not prepared to give value in a straightforward manner, the only thing you will get is blacklisted and shunned.

We have seen the shift to the civic mindset in business as well.  Competition and squashing your opponent is making way for cooperation and collaboration.  We are seeing the rise in business associations that focus on improving the collective whole of business not the singular interest of any individual.

What are your thoughts about this?  Are you seeing the pattern of a civic society?  What’s the next step as we transition into this stage of our history?  How are you using social media and networking more in the service of others?

When you help someone up a hill, you find yourself closer to the top. ~ Brownie Wise

Service to others.  It seems like a lost art in our “service economy”.  Regardless of how many bad experiences we have with certain business, the companies and people that are finding ways to serve the masses are the ones that are profitable and living fulfilled lives.

We talked last week and this week about value creation and its’ different components.  Service to others goes hand in hand with the value creation message.  If you want to achieve true and lasting success, how you impact people’s lives for the better will dictate your success.  It seems counter-intuitive to think that looking out for others actually serves our interest.  We seem to have a real misconception about what capitalism is all about and how to effectively work within the system.  It’s one of the biggest complaints I have about our current capitalistic mindset.  The mindset is to get ahead, I have to stomp someone else out of the picture.  If you have success, that means there is less for me.  These limiting mindset end up working against us in our business or at our job because we forget about the people who matter; our customer, our teammates and our employees.

A great service story for me is that of Chick-Fil-A.  Is this place not the most friendly fast food place in the country?  While living in north Denver in 2004, I accepted a move with my company to Colorado Springs.  For a period of 3 months I commuted 50+ miles to work each day while we looked for a place to live.  Every morning I took the toll road (E470) and stopped at Chick-Fil-A for breakfast.  On my first visit, I literally thought the kid who was helping me was mocking me because he was so friendly.  It actually pissed me off at first.  It was upon stopping a few more times for their delicious chicken biscuit sandwiches that I realized that this was how they rolled.  I went from suspicious to impressed.  I have had similarly great exeriences with Chick-Fil-A in different cities in different states.  Enough so that I know it’s not an accident.  Service is what they are about.  If you don’t believe me, go to a Chick-Fil-A on a Wednesday night for family night.  The experience is positive and says to me, we care about you teh customer and we most likely treat our employees well too.

That’s my story of service to other in action from the corporate side.  I realize that there are other ways to serve outside of business as well.  We will talk about Philanthropy from a business owner’s standpoint later this week.  How do you create value for people?  This can be at your job or in your business.  What are your experiences that you would like to share about service done right?  How are you helping others in your journey to the top?

PS. It’s podcast Wednesday click the button below to listen to this week’s podcast on value creation.

]]> http://buildyoursoulpurpose.com/what-it-takes-to-get-to-the-top/feed 0 12:37 When you help someone up a hill, you find yourself closer to the top. ~ Brownie Wise Service to others.  It seems like a lost art ... When you help someone up a hill, you find yourself closer to the top. ~ Brownie Wise Service to others.  It seems like a lost art in our "service economy".  Regardless of how many bad experiences we have with certain business, the companies and people that are finding ways to serve the masses are the ones that are profitable and living fulfilled lives. We talked last week and this week about value creation and its' different components.  Service to others goes hand in hand with the value creation message.  If you want to achieve true and lasting success, how you impact people's lives for the better will dictate your success.  It seems counter-intuitive to think that looking out for others actually serves our interest.  We seem to have a real misconception about what capitalism is all about and how to effectively work within the system.  It's one of the biggest complaints I have about our current capitalistic mindset.  The mindset is to get ahead, I have to stomp someone else out of the picture.  If you have success, that means there is less for me.  These limiting mindset end up working against us in our business or at our job because we forget about the people who matter; our customer, our teammates and our employees. A great service story for me is that of Chick-Fil-A.  Is this place not the most friendly fast food place in the country?  While living in north Denver in 2004, I accepted a move with my company to Colorado Springs.  For a period of 3 months I commuted 50+ miles to work each day while we looked for a place to live.  Every morning I took the toll road (E470) and stopped at Chick-Fil-A for breakfast.  On my first visit, I literally thought the kid who was helping me was mocking me because he was so friendly.  It actually pissed me off at first.  It was upon stopping a few more times for their delicious chicken biscuit sandwiches that I realized that this was how they rolled.  I went from suspicious to impressed.  I have had similarly great exeriences with Chick-Fil-A in different cities in different states.  Enough so that I know it's not an accident.  Service is what they are about.  If you don't believe me, go to a Chick-Fil-A on a Wednesday night for family night.  The experience is positive and says to me, we care about you teh customer and we most likely treat our employees well too. That's my story of service to other in action from the corporate side.  I realize that there are other ways to serve outside of business as well.  We will talk about Philanthropy from a business owner's standpoint later this week.  How do you create value for people?  This can be at your job or in your business.  What are your experiences that you would like to share about service done right?  How are you helping others in your journey to the top? PS. It's podcast Wednesday click the button below to listen to this week's podcast on value creation. The Power of People, Your Life Your Purpose Podcast Brandon Allen no no http://buildyoursoulpurpose.com/know-your-why http://buildyoursoulpurpose.com/know-your-why#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:53:19 +0000 Brandon R Allen http://buildyoursoulpurpose.com/?p=184 In business and in your career, it’s important to fully understand why you are doing what you are doing.  This seems like such a simple concept but it ends up being the single most important thing that holds businesses owners and wage earners back from success.  Know your why and you have the first step to knowing everything else about you and your business.

Knowing your why allows you to know your how and your what.  In the article “Top 7 Principles For Transforming Your Business From Mediocre To Great”, http://www.1000advices.com guru/business_success_7principles_dc.html.

it discusses knowing why your business exists and knowing what the end game result is for your business.  These principles are vital to long term success.  If you don’t own your business you can certainly apply these principles to your career and experience greater clarity and success in that as well.

Money is exchanged when value is created.  The more value you create, the more earning potential that you have.  Knowing your why allows you to answer the question of what value am I creating and to whom.  To win in business or your career, value creation is at the center of your success.  You can’t get to the value creation part (long-term) if you haven’t discovered why you are doing what you are doing.  What other tips do you have for personal discovery that has made you successful?  How have you been able to discover your why?  When did you discover it?

http://www.smallbusinesstransitions.com/teacher-trainer-coach-executive-coach-business-coach/659/

Why are we so reluctant to hire coaches in our lives?  We act is if this is only relevant to sports.  If you want to be the best we can be at something then you need people in your lives to push you to that level.  You will not be able to do it alone.

To use sports as an example, take the example of Tiger Woods.  Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer on the planet but has several coaches included one for his swing and game.  No matter what level we are at, we can always attain higher levels of achievement.

Not sure how to get help for your business or how to get started? Ease the burden. Hire a coach.

The definition of rugged individualism as defined by dictionary.com: rugged individualism- noun- individualism in social and economic affairs; belief not only in personal liberty and self-reliance but also in free competition.   I have heard that this person still exists out there and have run across him/her several times in the past few years.  Is this how you run your business?

The problem with going it on your own is that we don’t know everything there is to know about setting it up and running it on our own.  Because of this we are intimidated by the process. Small Business owners move forward every day and try and complete campaigns for web development, online marketing, PPC, all on our own.  We tend to work harder and longer on a project as a result.  What are some of the reasons that small business owners behave this way?

3 reasons come to mind.

The first is that a select few think they now everything and really can do anything on their own and better than everyone else.  I believe this to be a select few.  Maybe I am wrong about that.

The second reason is money.  Small business owners will happily beat their heads against the wall just to save a buck.

The last reason is trust.  You could hire an outside consultant or professional to run a facet of your business but how do I know they will do a good job?

There are several ways to overcome the last point so that you are not wasting much needed capital.  Building relationships with individuals in the field you are looking for using social media networks is a great place to start.  Twitter makes it easy to link up with people who have a common interest.  Also, interviewing past clients of prospective consultants can give you an idea of how the company you are looking to hire operates.

For more information on how to build the right awareness and why hiring experts to assist your business is a faster track to success visit: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/six-lessons-from-a-wooden-boy-lesson-fou.php.  The article is about listening to trusted advice and where to go to find it.

Growing your business the rugged individualist way is a slow growth model at best.  In this day and age it just makes sense to work with someone on the outside that is not attached to your business but that you can build a win/win partnership with and that can fill in the gaps of your business.  What has been your experience with working with outside consultants and professionals?

Forward to a story written yesterday about Jon Erisey owner of Power Media. http://blog.cleveland.com/business/2009/01/jon_erisey_of_power_media_says.html The story captures the essence of how a lot of small business owners run their business as Jon states “by the seat of my pants”.  What I really appreciated about Jon’s story was hos self awareness.  Instead of blaming the economy for his problems.  He owned up to areas where he hasn’t been doing the best job and looked for ways to overcome them through planning and innovation.

This brings me to the question that we all need to ask ourselves and the question that I will be examining all week:  What do I know that I don’t know?  It’s important to ask that question periodically and then look for places to find the answers.  It may be a coach or a mentor, it may be found in a book or magazine, it may be found by asking your customers/clients or by asking your employee team.

So what do smart business owner do?  They don’t wait for things to get bad to get a firm grip on their business and if they do, they are self aware and humble enough to recognize what they need to fix and where the gaps are that need filling.  Then they go out and plug those gaps.  What gaps do you need to fill this year?

While I was thinking about this, I ran accross this great post regarding the subject:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/building-relationships-is-more-important-than-building-links-alone/8158/

It made me think about how easy it is to forget why you are doing things and focus on the end result rather than the journey.  For instance the above article brings up the practice of commenting on blogs and why it’s important.  Most importantly it talks about the right way to do it.  Make meaningful comments, read several of the blogger’s posts before commenting etc.  I know I have been guilty of making comments in the past just for the sake of making a comment or rushing through the process.  I realized recently that taking the care to make every contact you have value based is more likely to produce the meaningful relationships we are looking for.

On the “friend based” application side, several times a week, I receive “friend” requests from people that I don’t know and that don’t introduce themselves in the process.  This isn’t a huge deal to me but what ends up happening is that if you don’t introduce yourself to me at the request, I quickly forget and never cultivate the relationship.  It’s not enough to say hello.  If it was I would have had a ton more dates in college. I am not trying to get Ron Burgundy here and tell you that I am a big deal.  

The reality is that I am interested in building a relationship and a simple introduction certainly helps that process and keeps the transaction in my mind.

Keep this mind as you are out on the web 2.0 landscape that the building of meaningful relationships is king in all you do.  When you are connecting with people give them a reason why connecting with you will be meaningful. Create the value that you wish to receive in your relationships.

Both of these questions are important to answer.  More often than not, we go to an event where we are not prepared and are hesitant to approach people as a result.  We often don’t know what we are trying to accomplish and therefore end up talking to one of two people.  Either yourself or someone that you came with.

I ran across these 5 tips for networking and mingling:

http://careeradvice.suite101.com/article.cfm/network_mingle_at_work_events

Take a look at these tips and make sure that you have a well thought out plan for the next event that you are attending.  The majority of people do get nervous when they are meeting people for the first time.  Planning will help you get past that and be the networker that you need to be.

Step 1. Take an inventory on who you already know.  Next to each person list what he or she does.  Circle the ones that will be beneficial to get better acquainted with this year.  In a separate column, write down who you need to know.  This can be by profession or if you have a certain person in mind that may be able to help you, write their name down.

Step 2. Put together an action plan on when and how you are going to approach these people.  You must do this right away.  Do it all at once.  Don’t try and do it as you get to it.  Create the time and space today to make this happen.

Step 3.  If you need to get out and meet some of the professionals that you need, start thinking about where to go.  Professional orgranization are always a good place to go, chambers of commerce, connect groups, local professional clubs etc etc.  It doesn’t have to be a professional club.  There are great networking opportunities within your alma mater, fraternity or sorority and religious organizations just to name a few.  Don’t limit yourself here.  Do you know a great connector or networking?  Call them if you are having trouble.  Again, with this step schedule 2-3 months out and have a plan of action at each event.  Make calls to figure out who will be there and what they are doing and then figure that into where you see synergy with your networking plan.  The point is to be prepared.

With a specific game plan in mind every time you are networking, you will see an increase in results and business as you surround yourself with like-minded individuals.  Put your networking plan together today.  Any other great networking tips out there, I would love to hear them.

What relationships currently exist that are assets?  Who do I want to build relationships with this year?  Where do I need to go to meet these people?  And the last question is,  who in my life is a currently a liability?

Take a few minutes this weekend and jot down the answers to these questions in your journal.  This will be an easy step to take to help you identify existing resources and also a way to forge new ones with effort as the main cost.  This is just one of the many simple steps that you can take to get your 2009 off to a swift and prosperous start.

Are we still talking about business?  We are but we are also talking about human beings as capital for your business.   Calling human beings capital may not resonate with you intially (or never) but I use it to illustrate the importance of building relationships with people inside of your current circle and out.

This spririt of cooperation will be vital to small business survival.  It’s time to make connections that are mutually beneficial.  A story I have referenced a few times regarding the actions of Boston Beer, makers of Sam Adams beer, comes to mind here.

http://appellationbeer.com/blog/sam-adams-sharing-hops-with-smaller-brewers/

Take a look at the relationships that you currently have and take a look at some relationships that you would like to forge.  Social media is a great tool for meeting new people who have like minded interests.  Start using it if you are not.  I would love to hear from the relationship builders out there to know what you are doing to build meaningful relationships in and out of your marketplace.

I was a victim of ignoring all of the resource and opportunity that I came in contact with on a day-to-day basis.  I finally woke up about 2 years ago and asked friends and family a simple question, “What are you up to?”  You may not be thinking that this is ground breaking and it’s not.  I was so focused on daily activities that most of my questions involved where we were going for dinner or when our next get together was.  I never asked meaningful questions about what people were doing to create change in the world.  The crazy thing is that when I started asking, it turns out that I knew some pretty amazing people who also knew some pretty amazing people.  (I promise I’m not bragging, they are most likely friends of mine because of pity.)

When I discovered this, it was like a whole other door opened up in my life.  I was able to create a support structure for the creation of ideas, access to relationships for mentoring, access to skills that I didn’t/don’t possess.  I didn’t pay for much of it up front is the great part.  The even better part is that I have been able to create partnerships that are win/win as well.

Once you get clear on what you want.  Start looking at your resources, particularily with regards to the human capital around you.  Tapping this resource will be key in 2009 to continuing your move forward as an entrepreneur.  No one is successful by themselves.  We all have help along the way.  We just need to know who to ask and how to ask for it.