Competitors, at some point, will eventually creatively swipe your idea, your latest product development or the way you’ve adapted delivery of your customer service recently. Especially if it’s brilliant.

However, creating a team of motivated people, who collectively share their intellect, values and motivation towards achieving a common purpose will always deliver that unsurpassed product, service and experience over the long term. And thats very hard to duplicate no matter how hard your competitors try.

Spot on again Seth. Go and buy the book too, it’s worth every penny.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html

I’ve mentioned these before but if you are prepared to be challenged, want a different perspective or an insight into what is really happening, you can’t go amiss with these books:

The Long Tail – Chris Anderson 

Tribes – Seth Godin

Futurewise – Patrick Dixon

Beyond Branding – Edited by Nicholas Ind

Building Great Customer Experiences – Colin Shaw and John Ives

The Brand You 50 – Tom Peters

Certainly worth the time and effort!

Just following on from the previous post…..

People want to be part of something that matters, that what they do is meaningful and has some significance and they want to know what contribution they are making too! That also includes you. This is about getting your team to respond rather than to react to problems. There is a difference.

If the MD isn’t good at change and his managers are not good at leading, no wonder employees try and stop it from happening and no wonder they get demoralised.

The first realisation is that people now only want to work on stuff they believe in, understand and find meaningful. In fact that was always the case its just we didn’t have enough passionate leaders to create it. Now we don’t have any choice. These kind of people want to know how it benefits them as well as the business. How it stimulates change, how creative it is and whether it embraces a ‘better way.’ The job of the leader is to engage their people on a journey, on a plan, on a route that they are fully motivated towards. In the future, it will be these things that will bring about a competitive advantage not products!

Leaders are great connectors, they can understand people quickly and they understand motivation. They have the ability to inspire people. They are not process orientated but lead from the front, galvanising support, creating ideas that drive the people in the business towards its goal. They are not interested in authority and can’t abide ego centric people.

One of the most significant problems with people who manage a small business is they are wholly task driven. They focus on the day to day operations and tasks without identifying and inspiring their people to the long term view, what the business is aiming to achieve. That’s coupled with not clearly communicating what that means for their people and how that benefits them! Creating purpose is the road map, the vision, the thing you gather at work every morning for. Nothing happens effectively without purpose, it presents a clear plan for the long term and looks at possibilities not problems. To start you off focus on:

-       What is your core purpose?

-       What is your dept’s core purpose?

-       What are your peoples core purpose?

-       How does that purpose add value?

-       What will it take for you to drive people towards the purpose?

The point is this, if you don’t know in one sentence what you businesses purpose is, how the hell can you people deliver it. What is your department’s value creating proposition in terms of leading your team and customers?

It’s the most significant problem that small business owners face….not having enough time, spinning plates and juggling balls. Well, we can’t do everything and when we try, we fall straight into a huge chasm and little gets done. And, if we don’t watch it and keep it in check, we end up working in a unfocused, distracted and fragmented way. Indeed, it’s one of the most significant contributing factors to limited growth in a small business.

Work doesn’t come from thin air, it comes from the commitments you make. To reduce your work you need to reduce our commitments. You need to draw a line in the sand between outstanding work and today’s work. 

Try this….list all of the tasks that are outstanding, how long they have been outstanding for and how long they would take to do if you had no other work. Calculate it and then you know what you are up against. Put it to one side and then start each day with the first task on the list. Eventually, depending on how many outstanding tasks you have, the list will go!

If you’re team distrusts you, if they feel under confident in your abilities, if they suspect a management centric motivation, or, they are of a cynical persuasion, they will nearly always resist change, particularly, the more disruptive the idea.

One of the critical skills of a leader isn’t delegation (far from it) it is to build trust. Trust is all about your intentions. Being open and honest. Doing what you said, inspiring and being passionate. Having conviction and being consistent. It’s also about your abilities. Showing confidence, achieving what you said you would. Being optimistic. Having great credibility and a reputation to match that is recognised outside the company too!

Building trust through a deliberate use of intentions and abilities, allows change to happen naturally, transparently and quickly.

I don’t normally talk numbers, I find them a little boring if not intimidating (flashback to my school days I’m sure.) I talk a lot about marketing, leadership, strategy, small business, team building and customers. All exciting, challenging and interesting but worth not one jot on their own. On their own, they can lead right down a blind alley with nowhere to go!

There are certain things you need to know about your business, because if you don’t measure it, how the on earth do you know whether any ideas or improvements you implemented are working? Chance is a precarious position to be in and small business owners can be fairly reluctant to measure what really matters. Ask any small business owner how many sales opportunities they had last week, few would be able to give any specific answer. It’s strange, because by asking that precise question and understanding how to channel those opportunities might well increase sales. How would you like to grow sales by 10% next month?

Whilst it’s a little more work, the investment in time is worth the result! And the outcomes can be staggering. Start with something easy such as existing customers…well you know the most about them don’t you? Brainstorm what questions you need to ask, but start with these four:

1. How many existing customers repeat purchase?

2. How many existing customers asked for quotes and how may sales were made from that?

3. How many existing customers did you speak to yesterday/last week/last month/last year?

4. How many existing customers are referring other customers to you on a regular basis?

I’ve just pulled these ‘out of the hat’ but there will be some more fundamental ones. Seek the answers to the questions and then set targets for improvement. Do it right across the business, with your marketing, your people, your customer aquisition strategy, your ideas generation and anything else you feel would benefit.

It’s simple, without numbers your don’t know where you are, never mind where the hell you are going!

It’s a strange word and a perplexing one! On the one hand you need your minimum standard customer service to be consistent right across your business every time you come into contact with a customer. You need your people to consistently come into work each day. You need your marketing tactics to consistently happen throughout the year, yet, the the last thing you want is standard, boring or mediocre activity.

You don’t want repeat business or customer acquisition to remain consistent. You certainly don’t want your people to consistently deliver the same thing year in year out and you don’t want product development to stand still. As usual a difficult balancing act! There is a difference between being consistently average and consistently great!

Perhaps identifying what you want to be consistent in your business through basic standards, a minimum performance level might help. Embed that in your business, make it habitual and ordered, then let your people know where they can concentrate their efforts…..the more creative stuff that makes you great. But don’t let the minimum performance standards run the business or you’ll suck the life out of it. They should be natural, subconsious behaviour. Get that right then you can innovate to being great.

An employer pays his/her employee money in exchange for time. For that time an employee traditionally gets told what to do when to do it and within what parameters (job descriptions). There is a degree of control. It’s been a one sided affair for many decades/hundreds of years….perhaps I’m being a little unfair? But on the whole an employee is at the beck and call of us employers….why?

An employer may be giving a salary or a wage but the employee is giving up their time. It’s just as tangible, just as important as money and of equal weight, yet the relationship in many, if not most businesses, is lopsided. In the past that’s because employees had little choice. The employers factory was the only one in town and there were only a few people at the top who provided all of the employment in the surrounding area.

As this real life scenario rapidly dissolves it’s changing the ‘power’, things are becoming a lot more balanced. Employees have more choice. Employment is not provided by two or three heavy weights. Business is changing, we are selling intellect and less materials, we are managing our employees imagination not production lines and the business world around is changing very fast, small businesses themselves are changing but not as fast and the leaders of those small businesses, on the whole, are hardly changing at all.

We still see the employee as ‘ours,’ that they belong to us and that we say what goes. I’m not advocating breaking company rules or values but there is a shift. Employees really can choose where they work. They will increasingly make choices, understand where they fit and will leave quickly when they don’t fit.

Increasingly, small business owners will need to learn how to lead these changes and provide a working environment that is less centred on one person making the decisions. They must stop managing people and start leading, understanding that the employee has more choice than ever before. They can stop working and go travelling, they can stop working and do a degree, they can stop working and have a break from work and worse of all, they can stop working for you and go and work for the competition.

The balance has to be restored. As employers we must recognise that our employees can do a hundred things instead of being where they are with you right now. The relationship must not be lopsided and less based on control, order, authority and more on change, emotion, trust, influence and motivation.