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Bite the Bullet

July 19, 2010 in Leadership with 5 Comments

BiteThe Bullet 300x290 Bite the BulletKnow what you want to achieve. Make a list, if you wish, of the qualities you want to have as a strong business leader. Believing in yourself, knowing who you want to be, is key to success.

Take a moment today and make a list of both short term goals and long term goals.

Now take it a step further. Beyond knowing what you want to be, you have to know which actions will take you there. Your actions have to reflect your confidence in yourself. To become a strong leader, you have to know what kind of leader you want to be and then know how to achieve your ends…produce results…staying true to that idea.

By formally defining your goals and dreams, you are taking the initial steps in turning them into a reality.

After a brief thread of comments on Facebook between an old friend, Jennifer Oakes, she reminded me of a Stoic I studied for a Greek Mythology class once; Epictetus, who uttered his famous line “first say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do” in the first century BC, began his life as a Roman slave. But, that didn’t hinder him. He was determined to stand out from the crowd. He studied the Stoic philosophy and in a few years founded his own philosophical school in Greece, where he achieved fame. Epictetus believed that, despite adversity, you can be a master of your own life by harnessing strength of will and self-knowledge. Epictetus might very well have originated the familiar refrain we hear today: “Bite the bullet.” Regardless of how it’s said, you simply need to get the job done. Just do it.

Ask yourself: “What am I doing today that is creating my tomorrow and how can I make it better?”

Credit Given When Credit is Due

July 13, 2010 in Business, Featured, Leadership with 9 Comments

Give Credit To Your Team2 274x300 Credit Given When Credit is DueA real time player is not concerned about individual credit. Like a true leader, he or she knows that they would not have deserved the credit without the other team members input. And a true leader knows that the credit will come in the long run… that having been part of a successful team will put him in line to be on other successful teams, or earn a promotion, or simply make him or her more valuable when it comes to looking for new objectives.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. – Harry Truman

It’s hard not to care who gets the credit. And even though it takes everyone’s concentrated efforts to get the job done, you need to feel positive about your work even on those occasions when just a few get the credit that perhaps the whole team deserved.

Together Everybody Achieves More

A good team leader will make sure to credit the whole team. When announcing results of a team’s efforts, the leader will emphasize how hard the team worked together, and what each employee contributed to the bigger effort. Don’t worry about team members who didn’t work as hard as they might have or that others might have wanted them to–they will be penalized when they are not picked for a new team. It doesn’t matter once the team’s work is done; it matters for the next time around.

How do you make it known who gets credit when credit is due?

Trust Your Team

July 13, 2010 in Business, Leadership, Quotes with 24 Comments

trust your team 215x300 Trust Your TeamAlthough motivational words never hurt, sometimes you just have to step back and realize that it’s not just you who needs care and feeding in your daily work life. It might be time to start thinking about those you work with…your teammates, your staff, and your colleagues. You want to get the most you can from these people, because all of you want to deliver the best work possible.

Stay engaged with your team and it’s leaders. The big picture and strategy is the common objective.

I think when Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great” he was expressing his belief that establishing trust in any relationship is the place to start. Getting others to trust you stems from your trust in them. This is a foundation of a good team. You can build on loyalty and trust and get spectacular dividends. Treat your colleagues to reflect your belief in them and their talents. Never miss an opportunity to tell them how great they are, and after a while, they’ll not only beleive it (becasue they are great), they’ll prove themselves great.

Pay close attention to your actions. Attitude reflects leadership.

Keep the team spirit high. You’re the catalyst in this equation. It is your task to bring out the greatness in others by treating them as valued players in your mission. Inspire them by your example, and they will in turn inspire others. It’s a winning formula.

How are you maintaining trust within your team?

Inspire Your Team to Innovate

July 8, 2010 in Business, Leadership with 7 Comments

Inspired Innovation 300x198 Inspire Your Team to InnovateHighly motivated people are the reason that any organization can develop a successful product or service. But what motivates them to begin? Is it the compensation, or do they have tons of pride in what they do? Harvard Business School professor Bill George believes that the pride felt by inventing something valuable cannot be matched. When he said “competitors will eventually copy an innovative idea for a product or service, but an organization of highly motivated people is very hard to duplicate,” he is clearly stating that an environment of innovation is much more motivating than an environment of copycatting. Creating a better mousetrap is a big step down from designing the original invention.

Let your team use it’s unique attributes, not just it’s traditionally trained skills

Let your team feel pride in their work by allowing them to be unique. Don’t always send them off to repeat someone else’s success. They should be able to experiment, innovate, and create success of their own.

Breeding this kind of atmosphere entices the best people to come to work. Most creative thinkers don’t want to do the same-old, same-old their entire career. They didn’t spend four or more years in college, accumulating tens of thousands of dollars to be a mimic. Almost everyone dreams of putting his or her unique stamp on the world, and this alone creates the motivation for success. So give your highly motivated industrious team the time they need to come up with something great.

How are you inspiring your team to innovate?

Encourage Your Team with Passion

July 7, 2010 in Business, Leadership with 5 Comments

employee committment 300x222 Encourage Your Team with Passion The word “commitment” has recently turned into business jargon, a buzzword whose meaning has been lost through overuse and dilution. You want your team to be committed, to “buy in”, so that their passion will drive up the energy level of the organization and produce stellar results. But most employees are rarely committed to the degree you’d hope. It’s not that they lack the essential passion to feel committed (or that they aren’t compensated and rewarded enough). Rather, Australian business mogul, Richard Pratt believed that most of the time they simply don’t understand the goal or strategy to which they should be committed. After a little bit of research, I found that a staggering 95 percent of all employees are largely in the dark about strategy, according to research from Harvard Business School.

Encourage Your Team with Passion and Sincerity.

While encouraging employees to be committed is important, the encouragement will fail it it’s simply “rah-rah” blather. Experienced employees see through this rhetoric in seconds. Instead, encouragement must also include a crystal-clear explanation of the company’s adopted strategy, as well as answers to all the employee questions. And this approach is even more important if the work on the table is a one-off project, the kind of job that is successfully done when the people involved are fully aware of the goals and how to achieve them. If you offer them substantive and valuable encouragement, commitment is sure to follow.

    How do you encourage your team to be fully engaged?

If You Are Drowning And I Throw You A Life Jacket… Will You Catch It?

July 1, 2010 in Business, Leadership, Quotes with 3 Comments

boiler room 300x190 If You Are Drowning And I Throw You A Life Jacket... Will You Catch It?I was talking to a friend the last night who works in sales. Being that it was the end of the month yesterday, it was a good time to review how well his sales department did, as well as take note of what they could do to improve their numbers for next month. The conversation focused on building trust with both the sales team as well as the customer. I’m not sure how, but I some how got talking about the movie Boiler Room.

Ben Affleck plays a character named “Jim Young.” He delivers this pep talk to the new recruits in this movie about a group of stockbrokers working out of a strip mall “boiler room” in Long Island. He’s all fiery and passionate, and Seth Davis (played by Giovanni Ribisi) is hooked. He doesn’t know yet that the firm, JT Marlin, is a “pump and dump” operation. All he knows is that he might become a millionaire overnight.

Young’s ‘inspirational’ message offers a lot of truth. When you’re cold calling, someone is always going to close the deal. Make sure the person is you, and not the prospect on the other end of the line. You must be relentless to avoid being on the receiving end of a “thanks, but no thanks” sign off.

Of course, this is where we part company from the high-pressure, fast-talking sales techniques on display in his boiler room. For one thing, not many sales close on the first approach. The first chat is your opportunity to tip the balance, with you in control making the right points and asking the right questions. You begin to build rapport with the prospect as you explain how the solution you’re offering is the best one for his situation. And you hope that future meetings will build on that rapport and turn into trust.

Turn Every Disaster Into an Opportunity

June 29, 2010 in Business, Featured, Leadership with 23 Comments

Customer Satisfaction 265x300 Turn Every Disaster Into an Opportunity One way to turn disaster into opportunity is to simply show clients or customers how well your company stands up for it’s products and/or services. It is amazing how may times a customer will come back to a company despite having received a bad shipment, a late delivery, or the wrong color order if the company goes the extra mile to fix the mistake.

The best-case scenario is that not only will you have a loyal customer, but you will also have a customer who relates his or her experience to someone else. What could be better than to earn great buzz about your company after you took care of someone when something went wrong?

Make customer service your number one priority. Often people just want to be heard or have something fixed. Remember: they wanted your product or service to begin with, and they still want it…they just want it a particular way!

Most successful businesses realize that every department that deals with the outside world is an offshoot of customer service. Sales, marketing, shipping, and even accounting need to put on their best business face with every interaction. This way, you can turn lots of disasters into opportunities.

How Far Will You Go?

June 28, 2010 in Business, Leadership with 4 Comments

Big Jump How Far Will You Go?How far will you go? How high can you jump? What risks are you will to take to find your destiny…to find what is right for you?

Taking risks isn’t easy. We often have to conquer our fear or insecurities. We have to be ready and eager to jump from the familiar to the unknown. Getting there is often downright scary: What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail?

The only way we’re going to find out is to risk it! If we’re having trouble making the change, we need to look within ourselves to see what is causing our resistance. Overcome it. This is part of having the will to take risks…over coming fear to make that jump into the unknown.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T.S. Eliot

The Noble Prize-winning writer T.S. Eliot was talking about symbolism in poetry he wrote the above-mentioned line, but it applies to every aspect of life. Indeed, the quote has been adopted as the slogan for numerous societies and organizations. Before he achieved international fame as a poet, playwright, and essayist,Eliot worked in a bank. By choosing the path of writing…at best, a chancy economic future over a salaried position at an institution…he was clearly willing to risk going too far to see just how far he could go.

Ready, set, go. . . make that same leap into the unknown!!

God bless. ~ Geoff Snyder

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