Monthly Archives: April 2016

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How Smart Thinking Can Improve Your Business, Engage Your Employees and Satisfy Your Customers

Leaders of successful businesses foster innovative work environments where their employees are able to creatively apply their knowledge and strengths to solve their customers’ problems. This sort of work environment is motivating for employees, results in happy, repeat customers that are happy to pay for your services and products. It is a win-win-win for everyone.

Back in the early 90’s I worked for a consulting company that had this mindset. Employees were encouraged to work with customers to identify areas in their businesses that could be improved. We then proposed a number of solutions to deal with these improvement opportunities and the customers would hire us to implement them.

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The Secret To Building A Successful Organization

“As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the whole.” Ed Catmull

 

Here is the secret: Real leaders are teachers! If you are not teaching your staff, you are missing a huge leadership opportunity and limiting the overall potential for your business.

I started doing noon hour training sessions in the mid-90’s. I think the first few sessions I did were on goal setting (based on Les Hewitt’s The Power of Focus) and they were pretty rough (a special shout out to all those who attended and never walked out!) However, the more sessions I ran, the better I got. I then encouraged others to do the same thing and we ended up with all kinds of employee led training sessions.

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Don’t Ignore The Unimportance Of Practically Everything

“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” John C Maxwell

Every business leader continuously fights against an onslaught of the unimportant so that they can focus on what is truly important and what will make the biggest impact for their business. If they let their guard down, they run the risk of being completely overwhelmed by the unimportant.

Quite a few years ago when I was managing a fairly large engineering project, I was introduced to the concept of classifying activities into the quadrants of low importance, high importance, low urgency and high urgency. This was a lifesaver for me as the project scope grew and my workload increased.

However, it did mean that I could not keep everyone happy. There were times when I was confronted by people who felt I was making trade-offs or compromising on some issues. My answer? “You are correct, I am!” I was choosing what was the most important and most urgent while deferring, delegating or ignoring the rest of “the noise.”

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How to Craft a Vision Statement

The most important activity for any leader is to cast a vision for their organization! This vivid picture of what the future will look like when the organization has achieved its ultimate purpose must be so compelling that your staff will bet their careers on your organization and your customers will be inspired to do business with you.

The effectiveness of your vision statement can make or break your organization. It can be the biggest factor driving differentiation for your organization in the marketplace or it can reduce you to just another commodity, slugging it out in the trenches for the lowest priced sale.