How You Separate The Wheat From The Chaff In Your Business
It’s easy to get caught up in the not-so-important details of your business. This shows up when business owners swear their e-mail box needs to be open at all times of the day. It also shows up when an employee swears that they needed to redesign a new fax cover sheet for the office. I mean, come on, the old cover sheets were ugly! Separating what’s important from what’s not important is essential in your business. 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
The One Person Most Likely Sabotaging Your Business’ Culture
I just wrapped up a high level workshop with a group of great business owners that covered setting the right strategy for your business as well as coaching your employees for high level performance. One of the questions that I get a lot in any workshop that I do, and this last one was no different, centers around business owners’ concern with how employees handle their work. 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
The Benevolence of Confrontation
I know it’s not often that you hear confrontation referred to as a gift but when used properly it is a powerful management tool. If you are in any type of leadership position, you know there are times when confrontation is essential to your business. So with all the talk about avoiding confrontation, why is confrontation good? 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
How To Keep Your Disagreements From Becoming Arguments
The workplace is typically a veritable hodge-podge of different personality and styles. This tends to lead to passionate discussions about issues that arise in your business. Being able to manage disagreements is an important skill to keep discussions productive. Ed Muzio, CEO of Group Harmonics, talks about this very subject on BNET.com. 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
Personal Time vs. Work Time: Just Be Productive With Both
When choosing a producitvity management system to get things done, don’t just think about what you can accomplish at work. It’s a good idea to also think about what you can accomplish at home as well. It seems that, generally speaking, we place a certain value over getting things done at work but we are cool to wing it when we leave. When you think about it, you probably value what you do outside of work even more than what you do at work. My suggestion is to just be productive in both arenas. The first question to ask, when using a time management/productivity system, is can this system be
