Don’t you love the feeling of walking out of your Quarterly session with clear Rocks focused on solving the company’s highest priority issues for the next quarter? And doesn’t it drive you crazy when you get to your next Quarterly and realize that your team has only completed 40% of them?
Does this gardening incident sound familiar? “My son ran over my rosebush with the lawn mower. I thought for sure it was dead! But to my amazement, it came back stronger and more vibrant than ever.” It seems like most of us have a gardening incident somewhere in our past. Aside from teaching your son to spare the shrubbery, there is a business lesson in this gardening incident, too. It’s about pruning for growth.
It’s arguable that the same vision, hard work, techniques and patience that are required to grow a vibrant garden are also required to grow a vibrant business. Just like gardening, growing a business is a blend of science, art, and practice.
Before implementing EOS® in my business, my number one pet peeve was repeating myself. It was frustrating to feel like people weren’t listening to me, and it also seemed incredibly inefficient to say the same thing more than once. And anyone who knows me, knows that I am all about efficiency!
Success comes from making good choices about what to do and what NOT to do. Often our biggest breakthroughs occur when we decide to stop doing something. So here’s something we can all put on our Don’t Do List that will change our lives positively forever: STOP discussing the past!
It’s history. Its only value is in what you can learn to help you make better decisions in the present.
During the check-in portion of a recent quarterly session with a client, several team members mentioned that their Marketing Strategy was “not working”. When I dug a little deeper during the V/TO review, everyone agreed that the Marketing Strategy was correct - they just weren’t sure what to do now that their 3 Uniques™ were defined.
A helpful discipline when giving feedback to someone, or when having a tough conversation to help correct someone’s unproductive actions, is sharing three data points. Data points are examples of what the person is doing that demonstrates the bad behavior.
If you have to confront one of your people for bad behavior – let’s say he or she is treating people in the office poorly – you owe that person three examples. There is truly magic in three. Two is not enough and four is too many. If you don’t give three examples, he or she will rationalize his or her way out of it.
When something good or bad happens, or when we have an idea, we want to share it. When we have a question, we want to ask it. When we are frustrated, we want to vent.
Sharing our news, ideas, questions and frustrations whenever the urge strikes, consumes an incalculable amount of time and human energy, and that matters because many of us say we don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want to accomplish.
Hiring is often cited as one of the most challenging parts of growing a business. When it comes to building your business dream team, right people-right seat decisions are rarely black and white.
For example: when a new position is created, it’s quite common to have a ‘right person’ on your existing team. This person shares your core values and really wants the opportunity, but falls short on getting it or having the capacity to deliver what the position requires. The question becomes: should you invest time and resources to develop that person or fill the position with someone outside your team?
I used to think of an executive assistant as a luxury that only high-powered CEOs in large companies could afford. It seemed silly to pay someone to do something I could do myself, and I figured that it would take more time to explain what I needed than to do it on my own. But as my company grew, I realized that delegation is not a luxury—it's a necessity.
Ever notice how everyone in a workplace knows who the bad boss is—except the bad boss? If you’re supervising others, and you’re frustrated with their performance, it’s possible that the problem isn’t your team. You could be the not-so-great boss.
Disengaged employees cost the U.S. more than $500 billion in lost productivity annually, and most of that disengagement can be traced back to poor leadership and management. From large corporations to small marketing agencies, the impact of a bad boss can have catastrophic consequences to morale, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
