The legendary Vince Lombardi once said, “Coaches who can outline plays on a blackboard are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their players and motivate.”
This nugget of locker-room leadership applies to the boardroom too. As a business owner, you can have a compelling vision and solid strategy for growth, but unless your employees enthusiastically buy in to that vision, it won’t get far off the ground.
Previously, we discussed what happens when business owners get stuck in the Founder’s Cap, and believe that they alone must make all the decisions that propel the company forward. Owners often get tripped up by thinking that they have to manage every detail of the operation – after all, no one understands it as well as they do.
When it comes to incentives, what managers believe their employees want and what employees actually want are often different. Ask managers to name the best reward they can offer their people and most will likely say that it’s money. Yet…
As a small business owner, you are likely attracted to working with high-performing employees. Not only are they consistent, highly capable multi-taskers and confident team players, most of them possess the same entrepreneurial drive that prompted you to start your own venture.
These top employees are good for the bottom line. A growing company needs to stay lean, with productivity driven by high achievers who operate on all cylinders during the work day. (According to job recruitment site Monster.com, high performers are as much as 10 times more productive than their average-performing colleagues.)
In 2003, sisters Jenny and Jane DeLaney launched a business that created customized meal plans and shopping lists for subscribers. The concept caught on, and the company grew quickly. When they’d accrued 100,000+ customers, the DeLaneys faced competition and a…
Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, shares a compelling TEDTalk about Martin Luther King Jr. He explains that instead of going around telling people what needed to change in America, Dr. King told them simply what he believed. “He gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech,” Sinek says.
Trends in business come and go, but increasingly I’m seeing an exciting, strategic approach that can accelerate growth—when done well.
I often talk about the importance of hiring experts but I’m not suggesting you should fire all your loyal staff and start fresh. Sometimes you’ve got terrific employees already working for you. The challenge is to retrain someone who has been a Jack (or Jill)-of-all-trades to prepare him or her for a particular role that specifically meets the needs of your organization.
