Chuck Norris can win a game of Connect Four in only three moves.

It’s easy to play it safe in business.  We set safe goals.  Make what we think are safe hires.  Playing it safe can only take us so far.  To stretch yourself and your business, you need an impossible game.

Having an impossible game and stretching yourself shouldn’t be confused with being reckless.  If your impossible game is to jump off a ten story building and live, well, good luck with that.  That’s extreme but impossible games are those projects that just don’t seem reachable for us.  You may lack the knowledge to get it done or the skill or the team or the money.

In a recent Memo, Roy Williams had this to say about being normal:

“No one wants to be average, but everyone wants to be normal.

How about you? Will your need to be ”normal” condemn you to a life of screaming mediocrity? You’re familiar with the phrase, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…” but the truly frightening part is the thought that follows, “and go to their graves with their songs still in them.””

This struck a chord with me because I know that I have succumbed to that line of thinking in the past and it keeps us from playing impossible games.

Think about your impossible game.  Do you want to be on TV?  Have a best-selling book?  Be world reknowned in your specific area of influence?  Eradicate malaria?  Feed the hungry?

Our Core Blueprint focuses on this question as part of your businesses’ vision.  The first step is to identify your impossible game.  The next step is to put together the plan.

Jim Collin’s latest book Great By Choice talks about how highly successful companies don’t necessarily take the biggest risks.  In fact they are more cautious than other companies.  One thing that they do to avoid big risk  is to fire bullets which are small measurable tests to see if a company is on the right track with something.  When enough bullets have hit the target, then they fire a cannonball.

After you have identified your impossible game, think about what needs to happen to get started.  What knowledge do you need to accomplish your game?  What resources (financial, material, etc.)?  Who do you need on your team? What preparation needs to be done (this is where you may start firing some bullets)?

Having an impossible game to play doesn’t mean you have to be reckless but the great companies that Jim Collin’s studied maintained greatness by capitalizing on the big opportunities when they presented themselves.  Are you trying too hard to be normal?  Are you taking something great to the grave?  It’s time to fire a cannonball and win that game that you thought was impossible.

Let me start by saying that I can sympathize with business owners who don’t write things down.  I get that people don’t want to feel like they are put in a box and that written goals can feel like you are sacrificing your ability to live freely and creatively.  But let’s put that bullshit to rest, shall we? I guess sympathy time is over.

Let’s start by thinking about some areas in your personal life that we are apt to wing.  Ask yourself the following questions:

When was the last time you went on a real vacation? Not visiting family or a couple day jaunt.  A vacation.

Do you ever tell yourself that you should spend more time with your kids?  When was the last time you played a game with them?  Took them sledding?

When was the last time you went out with your spouse?  Hung out with some friends?  Went and had a beer to catch up?

How are you doing with these questions so far?  Probably some of them you are doing great and others maybe not.  Maybe you aren’t doing a great job with any.

Now let’s take a look at areas of your business where you may be winging it:

Are you spending time working on your business?  Not in it but on it.

Do you have a clearly defined direction for your business that your entire team knows and understands?

Do you have criteria in place that allows you to say no to requests and opportunities that may not be a fit?

Now how are you doing with these questions?  Perhaps some good.  Some not-so-good.

When you aren’t being intentional about things, then things can slip by the wayside.  Lack of intention does not allow for creativity and freedom, it produces neglect and bondage.

If your life looks anything like mine then you probably have kids, you have a business or you are in a place of authority in your current job, you have church or other civic responsibilities, you are married and you have hobbies outside of work.

With all the things on your plate, can you really afford to wing it?  It’s too hard to wing it.  Our lives are too complex for that.

Setting objectives is a great tool for planning your year but being intentional helps you in other areas as well.  For instance, a great point that resonated with me because I am terrible about this is in celebrating wins.  Rich Christiansen shared this key to success in his new book the Zig Zag Principle.  When you accomplish objectives do you have time set aside to celebrate the win?  This is key to keeping you, your family and your team refreshed and positive about what you want to accomplish.  It’s a great teamwork activity as well.

What’s your plan for the year?  Are you winging it or writing it? It’s challenging to balance family, work and  other activities.  Creating intention allows for  creating the time and space to do the things that are easy to ignore when we feel busy and stretched.

What would your business and your family life look like if you are more intentional next year?

“In Africa there is a concept known as Ubuntu – the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others.” — Nelson Mandela

I Am Because We Are

As your business grows and you start achieving a certain level of success, at some point, you are going to have a team that helps you keep your business moving forward.  For some business owners, running and managing a team is a liability. For others, they thrive in a team environment.

Ubuntu and Its’ Role In A Champion

The word “Ubuntu” loosely means “I am because we are.” This word first came to my attention from Boston Celtics basketball coach Doc Rivers. Coming off a season where the Celtics played terribly, Doc Rivers had the pleasure of attaining two of the greatest players in the league during the offseason of 2007.  Doc already had a great player in Paul Pierce.  Now he had Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen too.  They were immediately dubbed “The Big 3”.

Managing Egos

Any manager or business owner can relate with having to deal with egos (we all have them in various shapes and sizes) on your team.  Doc Rivers had 3 huge egos to deal with and a short time frame to bring it all together and make them gel as a unit.  Doc Rivers had heard the phrase “Ubuntu” at a meeting at Marquette University.  After learning a little bit more about its’ meaning, Doc knew that this was the perfect concept for his new team to base their season around.

We Crave Purpose

The majority of the people on your work team crave purpose.  Daniel Pink’s book Drive states that purpose is one of the three primary drivers for success.  The concept of Ubuntu helps to illustrate that in a teamwork setting, the idea is to work towards a greater purpose.

This is why setting objectives is so important to your organization.  By doing this, you set a purpose for your organization and illustrate that everyone is working towards a greater goal.  No one can reach the objectives of an organization by themselves.  Not the owner or the CEO or the top sales person.

Is teamwork a way of life in your organization?  Does your team work with each other or against?  In 2007, Doc Rivers had to get a bunch of talented individuals to play as a team and make sacrifices while also maintaining their individuality.  The result?  They won a championship at the end of that season.

What can teamwork do for your business this year?

This Bible idiom of separating the wheat from the chaff is so appropriate in business.  When your operation starts to grow, it’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of the day-to-day operations.

Keeping Your Business Focused

Keeping your business focused starts with having a vision of where you want to go and having a strong why for getting there.

When you have that in place, the key to keeping your business focused on high level performance is to set objectives and manage your business using these set of objectives as guideposts to moving towards the bigger vision.

Your objectives are the wheat of the business.  They are the activities that produce income, develop new products, improve systems, etc.

Where Your Employees Fit In

When you have objectives set for your business you now have a tool for getting your entire team engaged in the goals of your business.  You can now take your objectives and plug employees into them and use that to direct what they do on a day-to-basis.

A lot of my clients ask about how to set up performance reviews and how to measure the performance of their team.  When you have objectives set and you have your team plugged into these objectives, you now have a set of criteria with which to rate your employees on.

This keep your team focused on producing the wheat of your business and not worrying about the chaff.  Chaff is the casing that grains are found in.  They are inedible to humans and thus worthless.  You can feed it to animals so it does serve a function at some level.  This is similar to many activities that we engage in.  Things like e-mail, social media and meetings.  They serve some secondary functions of your business but they should never be the focus

A new year is approaching and it’s time to set the direction that your business will travel for that year.  How can you implement objectives into your business effectively?  Will your business be focused on producing wheat or will it be preoccupied with the chaff?

What You Can Do Next

We are having a call about this very topic and giving a tool that we created to help you set objectives for the year.  You can sign up for the call here.  Make sure you sign up even if you can’t attend as we will be making the recording available to all those who registered along with the tool.

Great relationships start with great questions.  This is true in life and in business.  When you meet someone for the first time the goal is to learn as much about them as you possibly can.

You gain this information by asking questions like:

Tell me more about your business?

What draws you to that area of business?

What types of people or businesses work with you?

What are your hobbies?

How long have you been doing it?

Where are you having success?

What’s been the biggest challenge?

What types of people are you looking to connect with?

Why do I want to ask these questions?  First I want to understand their business and where they are at in their business.  I also want to see what they are interested in, personally and professionally.  Then I want to see what they need.

Why do I want to know what a new connection needs?

I want to see how I can create value for that new connection.  Not value someday but value right now.   When you give someone value upfront, it shows that you are interested in creating a relationship with some substance and that you are someone who is willing to give before you receive.  You may even show that you are willing to give even though you will never receive.

Why would you do that?

Because that new connection has friends who may need you someday.  Building connections is all about building that social web.

If you want people to be invested in your success then invest in their success first.  Dollars follow value.  Success follows building great relationships.  Great questions will get you there.

Productivity and organization are hot button topics for business owners.  As your business grows, so does your responsibility and your stress level.

How do you manage your day so that you:

• Complete projects in a timely manner
• Handle the essentials of your business every day
• Have less stress in your life
• Keep your professional life from interfering with your personal life.

Most of these concerns center around where employees lack in the areas of productivity, goal setting and overall organization.  The question is always, “How do I make these employees better?”

For some business owners they may be talking about the single employee that stands out for their poor performance.  Today, I am not talking about that business owner and that employee issue.  I am talking to the business owner who has several employees that are underperforming and that has seemingly created a culture of mediocrity in their business.

The key word here is culture.  As a business owners you are the central point to the culture in your organization.  Not your employees or your customers.  You.

With that being said.  If you are concerned about how your employees are being then ask yourself how you are being.

I love working with small business owners. Sky’s the limit for them.  They have a great mindset and they are willing to take risks.  However, I have also run across a ton of business owners who consistently fly by the seat of their pants, don’t keep a tight schedule, can’t follow through on projects and are disorganized.

These attributes are cute, until your business grows.

Think about this.  If you are disorganized, lack specific objectives in your business and are all over the place with your focus, why would your employees be any different?

You are the standard of your businesses culture.  You set the tone.  It’s a lot of responsibility but fortunately, as a business owner, you have never met a challenge you couldn’t handle.

What should you do now?

The main thing to do now is to tighten up your game.  Start setting objectives for your organization, get your time management on point and get focused.

When you do that, then you can expect your employees to follow suit and get with the program.

If you are interested in making significant positive change in your organization, take a look in the mirror and ask yourself what you can do to lead that change.  Don’t worry, you’re a business owner.  You can do anything and I mean that.

PS….Are you concerned about the habits that you have as a business owner and want to create a productive culture in your business?  Join me and 30 other awesome business owners as we work on creating productive habits that create a winning business.  Join us in Salt Lake on February 1-4 for the workshop.

Connections come from different groups of people with entirely different intentions.  For customers, they want to know how you can improve their lives.  For employees they want you to help them feel a sense of purpose and importance.  For partnerships, they want to know how you can help them move their business forward.

These are all completely different conversations that need to be managed.  The irony is that with all the ability that we have to mass communicate, our society demands one-to-one conversations more than ever.

In today’s world, you need to respond to people who comment on your blog.  The public wants you to engage them on Twitter and Facebook.  If I raise a concern, I want you to respond to it.  Engagement isn’t just polite.  It’s vital.

Yet for all we know about what today’s social network wants and needs, there are still businesses that set up social media accounts and don’t use them.  There are still plenty of businesses that have people comment on blog posts that don’t reply.  There are still plenty of business that leave perspective clients at dead ends in their business.

Today’s business environment requires more intentional communication.  You can’t build relationships without having a plan.  Here are some questions to ask yourself about your communication:

For Business Partnerships:

What do you want from the relationship?  Do you know and understand what the other person wants?

For Employees:

What does your employee hope and dream for?  Why do they work for you?  How often do you discuss their progress?

For Customers:

Are you on social media platforms?  If so, do you have specific plans on how you will engage the public and what the next steps are?  Have you defined your loyalty loop?  How can you keep you customers engaged in your business after they have made a purchase?  What can you tell them about your industry that they may not know?  I could go on but I will stop here because I think you get the point.

When it comes to building meaningful relationships for your business, ask great questions about what it is that these relationships want and need from you.  Stay connected.  Take every opportunity to stay in touch that you can.  Have a plan.

That’s how you build meaningful relationships in your business.  That’s how you create intention.

How do you build relationships in your business?

When your business is newer and you haven’t established rules and parameters for how you work with clients, it’s easy to create some bad habits in your relationships with your customers.  These bad habits can be due to any of the following:

• You don’t anticipate the rules that need to be put in place with your clients.
• You are nervous to pay down the law with the people that you work with.
• Lack of organization.
• You don’t worry about problems that arise due to a minimal amount of business.

Setting expectations up front helps ensure that you are setting the right context for your clients up front and it reduces the amount of friction in the relationship.  This leads to clients that are highly satisfied with the work that you do.

When I first started consulting, I would have issues with cancelled appointments and in some cases outright no shows.  Since the majority of my income, at the time, was based on how I used my time,  cancellations created issues for me that I knew I needed to get a handle on before it became a serious problem.

Since then I have been able to set expectations for my clients much more effectively.  Now there are no surprises for my clients and they understand what needs to happen for our relationship to be as productive as possible.  This has improved the following with my clients:

• Better attendance for appointments.
• Less friction with my clients over a lack of understanding of the policies.
• Better communication.
• More effective coaching.
• Better results.

Many times, issues with a client in our business is typically due to poor communication with that client.  Particularly with setting expectations upfront.  Here’s something we did recently in conjunction some work that we do with Freedom FastTrack to serve their/our clients better.  You can check it out here.  This simple page helps us to communicate up front and save time in the process.  Want smooth sailing while working with your clients?  Follow this one tip for setting expectations up front to ensure that it happens.

What are some ways that you set expectations with your clients?

Don’t get me wrong I love working with people to solve problems in their business.  It’s what I do best.  However, there are certain instances or relationships that give me pause at times.

I had a former client who used to treat me and my team like they were hired help.  They, as some people tend to do, had the attitude that if they paid someone for work then they could treat those people however they liked.  Their mindset was that they owned us.  We were property to them.

The ironic thing about this story is that the client hired us to help them with their client relations.  They work in a service industry where people don’t come to them unless something bad has happened.   This puts them in a touchy spot to begin with.  They had a hard time building solid client relationships and they wanted to know what they could do to fix this.

During the process of working with this client, it immediately appeared that they thought that since they gave us a check that we should just figure this situation out and that they didn’t want to be bothered with the problem.  Their mentality was “Don’t come back until you have a solution for us.”  Again it was that ownership mentality.

This put a real strain on the relationship as we don’t work like that with clients.  We don’t work for them but with them to help identify the solution that best fits the client.  In the end, this relationship with our client was not successful as we could not seem to find a way to get on the same page.

One lesson that I learned from this experience was in setting the right context and expectations at the beginning before we ever took a check.  Screening your clients up front is so important to ensure that you are working with clients that best fit your business.  In this case, we did a poor job communicating our expectations of the project up front.

On the flip side of this is a need for business owners to have some emotional intelligence with how they deal with consultants, contractors and employees.  I put myself right in there with them as there have been times where I have also been guilty of treating contractors poorly.

It could be argued with great success that relationship capital is the most important form of capital that you can have.  Rich Christiansen recently reminded me of this.  Ultimately when you lose money, you can always make more.  When you burn relationships, it’s much harder to win those back.  You don’t have to worry about that if you treat people like people.

When it comes to people you know and trust, you don’t even have to specifically know them.  If I have a partner that I know and trust that recommends someone to me, then that is good enough.

I mentioned recently what happened to my consulting firm, The Business Blueprint, when we weren’t ready for the growth we had experienced.  We broke one of my 7 components for hiring contractors.  We hired people we didn’t know.

Hiring people you don’t know can work.  The question is, are you willing to risk your client’s success and your reputation on a coin flip?

When you hire someone you know or that someone recommends strongly, the results are always much better.  Ultimately, you get projects done faster and easier.  Some people try and cut corners by hiring someone on the cheap at elance or craig’s list.  We have used these services to varying degrees of success as well.  However, if the project is important enough, we will not risk using an unknown person.  At least that’s the hard lesson that we have learned.  No amount of cost savings is worth it.

As you work on various projects in your business, keep your eye out for people that you notice that do a great job.  If you are looking for people to help you on a project, ask trusted associates if they know anyone.  Another place to look around for great contractors is in your social media circles.

Fast and easy.  That’s how I like my projects.  Hiring only people you absolutely know and trust is a great way to ensure that your projects remain as headache-free as possible.

So I went ahead and picked up a PS3.  As a gamer I really only like playing sports games.  Madden, College Football, NHL Live etc.  If EA sports puts it out, I probably like it.

All this sounds great right?

Except that I usually don’t play it when I am hanging with the family so my best time to play games is in the morning.  The problem with that is that it cuts into my power hour time.  Morning is a time that I typically carve out for building a relationship with God, for working on my not getting any younger body and working on my business or educating myself in a specific discipline.  Cutting into to that time has serious consequences for me.

So what does God have to do with productivity?  If I feel like I am losing touch with that relationship then it starts to create a void in my consciousness that keeps me from being present in the moment with other people.  I always use this time as an opportunity to express gratitude and keep myself thinking abundantly rather than worry about what I don’t have.  As a business owner, there’s plenty to worry about.

So now I have worry that I am trying to carry myself and a great outlet for stress is working out.  Except I am not doing that either unless you count  workout that my thumbs are getting from gaming.  No stress release and I don’t have as much energy.  This lack of energy is productivity killer #2.

As a business owner, you have to schedule time to work on the business.  Business that do this are much more successful than businesses that don’t.  When I am not working on my business then my business suffers as well.  I am not working on objectives or strategies and not looking for opportunities to build relationships.

So who’s to blame for all this?…….EA Sports.  Just kidding, it’s me.

So I took my power hour back recently and I feel much better and more connected to God and to myself.  The by-product is that I am also better for my clients and for my family which is also cool.  I still game but now I just have to pick my spots.  Don’t get me wrong my gaming wasn’t all for naught.  I did guide the University of Utah to several football National Championships on NCAA College Football.  Then my wife had to inform me that it wasn’t real.  Oh well, at least I still have my business.

What does your morning routine look like? What gets in your way from doing a morning routine?

We have a forum in our My Business World coaching membership where you can look at productivity tips as well as share productivity insights.  Check out our premium membership for 30 days at no cost and get your productivity on the right track.

Smart business owners know how to use and manage their relationship capital.  Smart business owners know that without a team to implement their ideas, their ideas are meaningless.  If they don’t have the right circle of influencers to help them spread the word about their product or service then no one know about it.

Think about the relationships that you have had in your life, what was good about them?  Who is behind you and gets you?  Who has influenced you?

There are several ways that you can use relationship capital for your business.  Here are a few of the most important:

Mentor/Coach:  We can all benefit from people’s expertise who have been there and done that.  Mentors can give you the pages from their playbook on what has worked for them and what hasn’t.  They won’t keep you from making mistakes but they can help you make fewer mistakes.  Don’t be afraid to pay to be mentored as well.

A coach can help you uncover blind spots that you have about your business and your life.  Make sure you find a coach that understands you and that you can build rapport with.

Influencers: Who are the people in your industry that are doing what you want to be doing?  Creating value for and relationships with these people can be a huge boost to your credibility.  The best way to build these relationships is to work your way up or over to them through recommendations.   I’ve found that this is by far the easiest way to get in front of people, particularly when more than 1 person has recommended to the influencer that we meet.  When you meet these people be prepared to have a plan for how you are going to create value for them and why you are worth getting to know.

Network of Collaborators: Creating a solid network of collaborators has been a must for me.  Having a great network can really help you expand what you are able to do for people.  When you start building a network, don’t ever stop.  You should always be looking for great people to add to your network.  I have found out the hard way recently that if you don’t stay on your game with your network that it can become a liability rather than as asset.

Relationship capital is more important than ideas and money (although these things do help).  Take a look at your network.  How does it look?  Are you expanding?  Are you looking for ways to create value for others?  Think about the three main relationship groups that I talked about and put together a game plan for expanding your network

What are the most important relationships in your business?

One way our company does this is through the forum feature in our My Business World  premium platform for business owners.  In the forum users can chat about specific issues in their business and get a wide range of different business perspectives to work through it.

Take a tour of our premium membership and get involved in the conversation.

I have spent time running joint ventures for people and through that experience I can tell you there is a right and a wrong way to go about it.  Do it right and you have created a triple win.  A win for you, the partner and the end users of the experience.  Do it wrong and it’s shower time because you probably exploited your end users for a measly profit.

Here are some of my dos and don’ts to creating clean JV relationships:

DO partner with people who are aligned with your philosophy and have a complimentary business: I don’t know how many times I have seen this done haphazardly.  People think just because I am in the self help industry and they are in the self help industry then it’s a perfect fit.  You have to be more discerning about that.

DO NOT partner with someone that you don’t know.  This sounds easy enough right?  It is until you are presented with a serious money making opportunity and then you decide to let it slide.  When you partner with someone, you are endorsing them.  If they suck, you suck.  I have had to learn this recently with some former contractors that used to do work for me.

DO create a partnership where there is a win-win.  Don’t approach someone about a partnership where you can create any value for them but they can create a ton of value for you…unless they owe you one.  Make sure that you can clearly see how everyone will win.

DO NOT participate in those joint ventures where a company brings together tons of thought leaders together for a tele-conference or seminar.  Oh cool, you are on the same ticket as Robert Allen, Robert Kiyosaki and Mark Victor Hansen.  Who are you again?  Is that automatically going to make people interested in you?  Sure isn’t.  These pitch-fests are a huge waste of time usually because they have no focus or direction.  It’s just a bunch of people telling you how to be as cool as them but without actually giving you any direction in how to do that.

DO make sure that you get JV relationships in writing.  I have worked with certain thought leaders who have no problem telling you they will do something to reciprocate for promoting them and then never hear from them again.  It’s like someone told you they loved you, slept with you and then never called you again.  Oops sorry.

DO NOT send promotions to your list that are not in your voice.  Usually when you do a JV where you cross promote you will give the partner a set of marketing materials in the form of landing page copy, e-mails, banners etc that they can use to promote your stuff.  When you are doing this make sure that you are only sending materials to your clients in a manner that they normally would see them.  Send them too salesy of an e-mail and now you have problems because you have violated trust.

Like testimonials and endorsements, joint venturing can be a great resource to get your foot in the door with a new group of people.  It has to fit your vision and make sense to your following.  Above all it has to create that triple win.  If you are thinking about doing JVs to further your reach, by all means do it.  Just be true to yourself and your clients.   Your water bill will thank for it.

On one end, getting an endorsement from a New York Times best-selling author can be pretty cool.  On the other end, too many fake endorsements can just make you look, well, fake.  So how do you get good endorsements?

In the book industry, you will notice many up and coming authors who put out a book and  get a lot of powerful testimonials from people who have already written a well known best-selling book.  What you will also notice about these endorsements is that many times that are by authors who share the same publisher.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Sure I think it’s OK for a publisher to reach out for endorsements from their well known line up to help an up and comer.  What’s not OK is giving out endorsements to things that you know nothing about.  To be fair there are some thought leaders who are careful about this.  However there are some thought leaders who seem to give their endorsement to everyone and everything.

Our society has gotten good at spotting these phony endorsements a mile away.  If you want endorsements from high level people, offer to do something of merit for them to warrant the testimonial.

One tool that we used to create value for thought leaders is the radio show we had on a local AM station here in Salt Lake.  We used this as a tool to help authors promote their upcoming books.  I always made it a point to read the books prior to the interview so that I could ask great questions.  These thought leaders loved the interviews and we always got a copy of the show to them right away as well.  This made it easy for them to endorse working with us.

You don’t have to have a radio show.  If you have expertise in marketing, offer to help them market a project.  There are tons of ways to use your skills to create value that people want to talk about.  Sometimes it’s as easy as getting their ear at an event and sharing your insight that may impress them.

Despite being over done, endorsements can still be a powerful credibility tool.  Just make sure the endorser has something real that they can share with the public about what your bring to the table.

Photo courtesy of immrchris

There are obvious reasons why people don’t buy a product or service.  Price, time, trust, etc.  There are also a whole set of other reasons that people don’t buy our product/service that never come up in normal transactions.  So how do we uncover these hidden reasons?

Yesterday I shared 6 questions that you should ask people who are giving you testimonials.  The first question to me is the most important.

What was the obstacle that would have prevented you from buying this product?

Don’t get me wrong, I like to hear about the things that people loved  but those answers are always more obvious.  When people share with you the obstacles that kept them from doing something, they are sharing of themselves in a much more personal manner.

We have experienced this with our business workshops that we do here in Salt Lake.  People come to our workshop from all over the country so they make sacrifices to be here.  When people answer the question about obstacles that would have prevented them from attending, we learn a lot more about them.  We learn specifics about their families, that they love pets, that they are caring for a sick mother or father, that their business is struggling, that they fear group interaction, etc.

These answers allow us to connect with our clients on a much more personal and in-depth level.  Hearing about a sick relative allows us to send flowers or a card after the event.   We can participate in a relationship that is more real.

On the business side, this information also helps with getting people to our events.  When we know what those hidden obstacles are, we can speak to those obstacles and let the participant know that we recognize the huge commitment that it takes to be with us.  We can also show the testimonials that illustrate the same fears and obstacles that have been experienced by participants in the past.

Are you asking your clients the right questions?  Are you looking to discover what factors might be working against the sale of your product/service so that you can help to alleviate those barriers?  Asking the right questions is crucial to building lasting relationships with clients.

What are you doing or have you done to find out more about your clientele?

Introducing customer service, the most underrated and underutilized marketing and sales tool that a business owner has at his/her disposal.

In the 1950s, Peter Drucker said that “there is no business without customers”.  It seems as if we forget that in this day and age.

We have all heard stories of good customer service, good and bad.

The big question that so many have is, “why can’t businesses get customer service right?”

This is good question and it’s often a question that we can answer for ourselves.  The same people asking the question are some of the same people giving bad customer service in their own business and in their current jobs.   When there is a large problem that needs to be solved, we often look at the problem in its entirety and decide that it’s too big for us.

The reality is that if you want to solve the problem of customer service, follow the advice of the late Michael Jackson and start with the man in the mirror.  If you are a business owner, what’s your companies’ approach to customer service.  You do have an approach right?  If you are an employee, how do you approach customer service?

Here are a few tips for both business owners and employees alike:

For Business Owners:

• Do you outsource your customer service functions including collections?  Should you?
• Do you have a set of articulated standards in place for your business that your team can follow when it comes to service?
• Are there systems present to put people in a position to succeed?
• Do you give your team autonomy to solve problems on the spot?

For Employees:

• Do you have a service attitude?
• Are you thinking about how you can take an additional step with the customer that is unexpected and goes above and beyond?
• Do you understand what your companies wants with regards to customer service?

Those are just a few questions you can ask with regards to service.  I think when we change our thought process on an individual level, we can then inspire the collective to follow suit.  In the meantime, start kicking ass with your own service and bury the other companies that work in your space.  In this day and age, if you want to get the word out about your product/service there isn’t  better tool than using the people who have already experienced what you have to offer and ensuring that the experience they talk to people about is a good one.

What are some examples that you have on great customer service?

In the article Tobak wondered if this was  insane on the surface.  I am wondering the same thing.  I can’t tell if this is a brilliant move or disastrous.  Essentially, it comes down to two competing theories with regards to offering ultimate job security.

The people for a move like this would argue that rewarding with loyalty would pay off in the end and that workers who don’t have to look over their shoulder all the time and worry about their jobs may work better.  Some may indeed work better because of this move.

The other side says that giving workers too much comfort is like giving them a permission slip for mediocrity.  Everyone would agree that all workers are not the same.  Some are better and other are destructive.  One area that is near and dear to my heart where you can see job security= mediocrity is with the Major League Baseball umpires.  They have a strong union and are able to be tenured just like college professors which essentially guarantees their jobs regardless of how their performance is on the field.  I have heard several opinions around the sports world that this is why the officiating in the baseball play offs is so poor.   There have been similar criticisms made of other union employees as well.

So is the concept of jobs for life brilliant or crazy?

Think about any work environment that you have ever been in.  You have no doubt worked with some people who were supremely talented and also some people that were so bad that, if it wasn’t against the law, you would have killed.  Work today is so much about autonomy and creativity that it seems as if we are taking away some incentive to push the boundaries of what’s possible in our worlds of work when we give a certain level of comfort.

My questions to you are:  Can you see this working in America?  In what industries do you think this could work?  How would you structure something like this?  Would love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

PS… You can also listen to the podcast below.

Good idea or not?

Watson’s reasoning for not using a coach is that it would diminish his experience with the game.  In other words, it wouldn’t be fun anymore.  I was shocked to hear a professional athlete talk that way.  He even went so far as to be suspended from his golf team at the University of Georgia for refusing to call his coach, “coach”.  Bubba watson sees coaching as unnecessary and counterproductive.

Is coaching unnecessary and counterproductive?  My first answer would be to define what productive is.   In 5 years on tour, Bubba Watson has made a lot of money but has only won one time on tour.   If just being able to go out and play at a reasonably high level is productive then I guess Bubba is productive.  In sports, overall,  the definition of productivity is winning.   In that regard, Bubba isn’t as productive as he could be with a coach.

The notion that coaching somehow makes an activity work and therefore not fun is challenged by all of the weekend warriors that play golf as much as they can and use lessons to get better at a game they love to play.  For many who play golf, they will do whatever they can to get better as playing better means having more fun not the other way around.  This is true for a lot of the games that we play in life whether it be in business or in our hobbies.  The more we can attain a deeper understanding of something, the deeper our appreciation level for it and the more engaged we become in that particular realm.

I don’t see coaching being any different in a lot of respects from practicing.  It’s widely accepted that practicing is a good thing as well.   A coach can help you get better, uncover blind spots and help hold you more accountable.  If you are stuck at a performance level and can’t seem to get beyond it, then a coach would be a good fit to help you break through.

What are your thoughts on this?  Is Bubba Watson onto something or just foolish?  Would you use a coach to make you better at your profession? Doesn’t collecting a check for something you do, already constitute it being a job?

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?