Help your people be successful

What if you went in to work today with this idea in mind – “I need to help my employees (team members) be as successful as they can be here”.  What if you wanted them to perform better for them, not just for you?

Would your attitude change?  Would your words and tone of voice change?  

When you are there for you, people know it. When you are there for them, people know it. 

When you have a team of employees who are succeeding at their work personally, you have a team that is winning!  

Be there for them.

What "Active Pursuit" does to us

Without burning goals we are actively pursuing, a measure of light disappears from our eyes and our souls lose some of their source of energy.  With an obsession, new life springs forth in us, giving us the daily spark we need to pursue the goal, simply because we are pursuing it with full commitment.

It doesn’t matter what you have or where you are, but where you have decided to go that gives you light, hope and optimism.

Are you in “Active Pursuit”?

Don't waste a good setback

It went wrong?  It failed?  You blew it?  Someone else blew it?  Ok, fine.  You’re closer to success!

You can’t succeed without failing first.  When you mess it up, the world gives you feedback so you may make the changes necessary to win.  If you ignore the feedback, or give up, you lose.  

So when it goes wrong, learn fast, adjust, and try again more intelligently.

Stretch farther

Imagine for a few minutes that you had to grow your business 5X bigger in the next two years, and your life depended on it.  Start writing a plan.

What would you do?  What would you sell to whom?  How?  How would you market?  Who would you need on your team?  What would you have to offer your customers? What else would have to happen?

This is a good exercise to do alone, and then get your key people around a table and do it again. Really give it a full effort.

Now, growing 20% this year isn’t so hard. Is it? 

Be the future you now

What kind of company do you want to have in two years?  What kind of leader would you have to be then?  What would you do?  What would be on your daily calendar?  How would you talk?  How would you show up each day?

Be that person now.

Leadership development

Leadership development is self development.

What kind of results you get as a leader depends on what kind of person you are.

Work on you.

ROI on meetings

If you break down the payroll cost of everyone in your meeting to ten minute increments, and figured the cost of a meeting, and you went to accounting for approval to spend that much, they’d ask “what are we getting for it?”

You have to plan a meeting so the value of the meeting is greater than what it cost.  That is to say the cost of not having the meeting is greater than the cost of having it.

Plan the meeting to create, build or recover value in your organization.

Productive Meetings

Meetings are leadership in action. Or they can be a waste of time.  

Do you plan your meetings, or just have standing meetings each week because you always do?

Follow Your Passion – Wrong?

Classic advice – follow your passion. Here are the problems with that –

1) Young people have no idea what their passion is. They haven’t tried stuff yet.

2) Your passion may be unmarketable. Some things are best left as hobbies.

3) If you get a job doing what you love, it does not mean you will love the job and the circumstances you do it in.

4) If you’ll be a sole proprietor (self-employed) there is still the business side to deal with.

5) Being an entrepreneur and running a business has little to do with loving what the service or product is. You won’t likely be doing “IT” anymore when you try to build a business that does “IT”.

Do you need to like what you do? Yes. But if you’re a business owner, you need to love leadership and team building and systems and training (because that is what you’ll be doing), not so much the craft or product.

Solitude

We need periods when our brain is free from the input from other minds.  

We can process what we already have, resolve things, and file issues away up there.

No TV, no radio, no others; just quiet or nature.  Take some time to be alone.