How To Leverage The 7 Universal Laws

How To Leverage The 7 Universal Laws

by | Jan 31, 2019

Did you know there are seven universal laws that influence everything we do? Great leaders do, and they also understand how to leverage these laws to create maximum impact. Since everything in the world is interconnected, whatever you do has an impact on someone else. It’s merely a question of whether you are impacting others positively or negatively.

The seven universal laws show us how energy operates on a daily basis in our lives.

  • The Law of Perpetual Transmutation of Energy
    Everything is energy and constantly changing

Energy is constantly changing form from one state to another, which means that nothing is as it seems. The human body renews its entire skin every 2-3 weeks, so whilst it appears the same, it is actually made up of entirely new cells. This means, as leaders, we are constantly dealing with change; and it is not something to be feared but rather something to embrace.

  • The Law of Vibration and Attraction
    Everything in our universe continually vibrates and moves.

Vibrations of the same frequency resonate with each other, so like attracts like energy. Everything is energy, including your thoughts. Consistently focusing on a particular thought or idea attracts its vibrational match. Great leaders leverage this law by focusing on what they want instead of what they don’t want.

  • The Law of Polarity
    Everything in the universe has an equal and exact opposite.

In Eastern philosophy, this law is referred to as the yin and yang, and it alludes to the fact that a polar opposite exists for every situation. This is reassuring for leaders when there are challenging times, because it means that things can only get better in due course.

  • The Law of Rhythm
    Everything is moving in perfect rhythm and at perfect speed

When we look at the natural world, everything has a rhythm to it. There is a rhythm to the seasons; they always come and go in the same order. There is a rhythm to the rising and the setting of the sun, and the ocean has its own ebb and flow. Even our heartbeat has a natural rhythm to it; and yet all too often, business leaders try to defy this law. They put their foot to the pedal, working day in and day out, increasing stress levels and never resting and recuperating. In the worst cases, this can result in a heart attack as their heartbeat flat lines. Devoid of a rhythm, the body can no longer sustain life.

  • The Law of Relativity
    Everything is relative

We have become masters at comparing ourselves to others. In business, we compare our financial performance against the prior year, and we often benchmark our performance against our peer group. Team members compare their performance with that of their colleagues, and their personal success with that of their friends. The irony is that this direct comparison is often flawed, because everything is relative based on our own past experiences, personal values, and experiences. There is no such thing as wrong or right, it just is.

  • The Law of Cause and Effect
    For every cause there is an effect and for every effect there is a cause

According to physics, there is an equal and opposite reaction for every action. Therefore, nothing happens by chance and anything you “cause” is the “effect” of something that came before. Good leaders appreciate that what they sow, they reap, so they say good things to everyone and treat others with respect so it will come back to them.

  • The Law of Gestation
    Everything takes time to manifest

Nothing is ever created or destroyed; rather, all new things are a result of something that already exists. There is a gestation period to the creation of everything, and therefore a correct time and place for everything to happen. Many business owners give up too early, before the gestation period has had time to elapse, which is just like digging up bulbs before the plants have had the opportunity to flower

Remember: the universal laws are operating all the time, so ensure you leverage them – because if you don’t, they will operate against you.


Thriving Organisations Have a Heart And Brain

Thriving Organisations Have a Heart And Brain

by | Jan 24, 2019

There are two fundamental requirements that every business owner must consider when building a thriving organisation:

  1. Quality systems, processes and game plans, which I call ‘the brain’ of the organisation.
  2. Quality leadership, engagement and culture, which I call ‘the heart’ of the organisation.

In humans the two most important organs of the body are the brain and the heart, and we cannot survive without them both functioning. Whilst they will work with only a small portion of blood flow, they will be working harder than they should be, and it’s not sustainable long term. I liken this analogy to the way that most organisations are just surviving. They have just enough energy to sustain “life” but no capacity to grow and expand,

Contrast this to what happens when you have an unlimited amount of blood flow, full of fresh oxygen. The brain and heart work in unison at full capacity, and as a result are  better equipped if there are problems. This creates a thriving body (or organisation) which translates into happy team members who deliver greater productivity and profitability, thus enabling the growth of the business.

Dynamic Flow

So how do we improve the blood flow in the organisation?. Good communication is the bloodline of any successful business, and if communication is slow, then the organisation cannot flow. In larger businesses, departments often struggle to cross-pollinate relationships because individuals don’t know who their colleagues are, only what they do. In the worst cases team members actually sabotage the growth of the business by with holding essential information from colleagues and competing for resources.  These problems are mitigated when team members appreciate and understand their colleagues on a more personal level, and so can empathise with what is happening to them. When this occurs the team members become more highly engaged because as in the words of Theodore Roosevelt: “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

‘Group Activation Systems’

For a long time it was believed that just the business owner was solely responsible for creating team engagement, however we now appreciate that everyone in the business is responsible for creating team engagement. Without actively engaged team members, the leadership message becomes heavily diluted, and motivation will quickly fades. The heart of every organisation is its people and their contribution so we need to turn our attention to our team members and how to get them engaged through the application of new, innovative and inclusive methods. Company training is the least desirable way for team members to learn. Instead we need an all-inclusive Group Activation System that is neurologically designed and proven to reactivate team members.

Research has shown that 90% of  today’s business leaders think an engagement strategy has a positive effect on business success, yet only 25% of them have a game plan to execute this!. In today’s competitive world, your people are your competitive edge. Old school business strategies and ‘knowledge dumping’ training programs are no longer sufficient when it comes to employee activation. The game has changed. Have you changed your game to keep up?

As a valued client  I am delighted to offer you complimentary access to a brand new online video book (worth $97) that contains exclusive content from four leading engagement specialists. Each chapter focuses on a key element of employee disengagement: helping you to understand what it is, and giving you the tools and tips you need to combat this phenomenon head on. The result? You’ll be ready to re-motivate, re-inspire and re-engage your team as we head into 2019 and beyond.

To access this resource simply go to https://www.engageandgrow.com.au/video-course/ and use the code JF2 to get complimentary access.

Your team – and your business – will thank you for it.

Are You Playing Whac-A-Mole in Your Business?

Are You Playing Whac-A-Mole in Your Business?

by | Jan 17, 2019

During the Christmas vacation the moles have come to live in my horses’s field.  Every day I go up there and more mole hills have appeared.  At times it seems like they are invading the field!

And their presence has reminded me of a game I used to play when I was growing up called Whac-a-Mole.  The aim of the game was it hit the lights on the board every time they lit up and each time you did this successfully you scored points.  And whilst this was great fun it never really solved the under-lying problem as the moles were still there in the background.

And this got me thinking about business.  How often are you playing Whac-A-Mole in your business? Dealing with all the incidents that rear their ugly head and are front and foremost in your mind, rather than looking at the under-lying problem that is causing this.

After all the mole hills are a result of a mole infestation.  Just whacking the mole hills has not addressed the problem of the moles living under the field in the first place. How often in business do we just focus on treating the symptom (in this case the mole hills) rather than the symptom (the real reason the moles have come to live in the field).

When I look at my business and that of my clients I often see this.  The business issues that take all our time and attention are the ones that are front of mind and all too often we invest valuable resources attempting to solve them, rather than looking at what caused the issue in the first place.

Often when I speak with business leaders they bemoan the fact that their team members are not pulling their weight and are not operating productively.  They try to solve this problem through team building events when actually the underpinning problem is that the team members are not engaged and the business culture is not supporting the team members to grow and contribute.

So what business issues are you playing whac-a-mole with?  What can you do to really understand what the underlying cause of the problem is and then go about “treating” this rather than the symptom.

And if employee engagement is the real challenge in your business right now, why not grab yourself free access to this newly released video book, which contains ten lessons on how to improve employee engagement.  You can get yourself a copy by signing up at https://www.engageandgrow.com.au/video-course/.  If you use the code JF2 to access this Videobook course for FREE! (for a limited time).

3 Misconceptions about employee engagement

3 Misconceptions about employee engagement

by | Jan 12, 2019

As a manager, you naturally want to do the right thing by your employees. But what if your well-intentioned efforts to promote engagement had the opposite effect? Sometimes, we think we’re making things better, when in reality we’re sowing the seeds for further disengagement, simply by not listening to the needs of our employees. 

Here are three common ways employers incorrectly try to tackle disengagement – and three ways to rectify them. 

1. Ticking boxes

One common mistake employers make is doing something just to tick the ‘training’ box on their end-of-year reports. They know they have to offer training of some kind, so they conduct a random session that might have no relevance to workers’ day-to-day jobs at all. 

What you should do instead is train them in something that will benefit them professionally, and interest them personally. Dr Britt Andreatta states that training programs should arise from a partnership between employees and managers; you need to speak with them to work out what they need, and what they see in their future career path. 

2. One-size-fits-all

One step better than ticking boxes – but by no means, a great model of employee engagement – is the one-size-fits-all approach. Here, an employer knows what the workplace issue is – maybe it’s that employees are having trouble communicating, managing complex projects, or understanding a thematic area of their work. So they organise training that broadly touches on this topic. 

The problem here is that the broad training program does nothing to get into the specifics of the problem that the person, department or company is facing. The manager assumed that training employees in project management skills was enough to solve the problems, without realising:

  • How much initial knowledge or experience employees have
  • What goals the company wants to address
  • How this will benefit everyone in the future

By considering a few critical questions before training, the employer can ensure what their staff learn will be relevant and useful – and ultimately, keep people engaged at work. 

3. Using the wrong incentives

Companies often use salary increases to try to motivate their employees. They think that surely with an increase in take-home pay, their workers will be more engaged in their jobs, produce better outcomes and stick around for a longer time. 

Salary is only part of the picture when it comes to employee engagement, according to a recent report from Aon Hewitt, 2017 Trends in Global Employee Engagement. While a competitive pay packet is important, employees respond more to intrinsic things than how much they earn. Respect, opportunity to learn and being included in decision-making process are much better ways of connecting employees to their jobs.

As an Engage & Grow Coach I’m committed to helping you engage your employees to create productive workforces and happy and satisfied workers. Please get in touch if you’d like some help engaging your team.

Six Ways To Create An Engaged People Centric Business Culture

Six Ways To Create An Engaged People Centric Business Culture

by | Dec 6, 2018

Yet again the most recent Gallup statistics paint a very dire picture of how low employee engagement levels are across the world. In the UK only 10% of employees are highly engaged which is marginally worse than the global average which is 15%.

Imagine what would happen if as business leaders we were able to double or even triple this. The impact on productivity, profitability and general levels of employee happiness would be demonstrable, and I bet a ripple effect would result in a better planet for all of us. You don’t get to be in the 100 Best Companies to Work For, for 19 years in a row, just by luck.

But how do we learn how to improve employee engagement and put people at the forefront of the business.  A great solution is to learn from companies who have consistently been voted in the top 100 places to work.  JM Family Enterprises is one of the largest, most innovative and diversified companies in the automotive industry. Based in Florida, its principal businesses focus on vehicle distribution and processing, finance and insurance, retail vehicle sales, and dealer technology services.

Stephanie Slate, Director of Talent Acquisition at JM Family Enterprises, shares one of the ways they create great levels of employee engagement is by referring to their people as Associates and not employees. This makes people feel that they work with the company and not for them. It instils a culture of inclusion and participation.  (Personally, I hate the word employee as the word derives from the word employ, which means to use and to my mind this infers that we use our people, which simply is not right).

Secondly, she attributes the high associate engagement score to the fact that the company put People First. Everything the company does supports this culture including the recruitment process, where only people are hired who fit into the culture. Even if someone has amazing technical skills they will not be hired if they are a cultural misfit.  This is a philosophy that both Zappos and Google also follow. In fact, they even encourage people to leave after 30 days by offering them a paycheck for doing so. This quickly weeds out anyone who has slipped through the recruitment process and does not align with the company culture.

Companies like JM family Enterprises, Zappos and Google take cultural fit so seriously that they will train Associates in the relevant skills needed for the job, as long as they have the right attitude and are a great cultural fit. After all the skills needed for different roles are changing at a rapid pace – think Facebook and Instagram didn’t even exist 15 years ago – yet the company culture is like its DNA and lives on long after different technological fads have been and gone.

Here are the six ways that you can create an engaged people-centric culture.

  1. Show Respect – make associates feel both valued and respected. Encourage the new associates to ask questions, to be curious, and they listen to them. With every new change that comes along, ensure that one of the first questions asked by senior management is “how will this impact our associates?’
  2. Demonstrate Caring – When a company cares about its associates it can show that by offering an excellent benefits package, but the caring can extend well beyond that. It could involve having medical staff and daycare services on-site; or providing support that helps associates in times of hardship. Some companies event have LifeCare Programmes, which is like an Associate concierge service that helps with non-work related issues.
  3. Communication and Connection – Communication is key to ensuring that your associates feel like they work with you and not for you. During the onboarding process, ensure all new Associates get to meet with a Vice President for a day, as well as meet and ask questions with the CEO. This not only helps the communication flow but also helps to make good connections between the new Associates and the Executive Management team.
  4. Encourage Empowerment – Encourage associates to ask questions and to challenge things, although this has to be done constructively and in ways that will benefit the company. Encourage associates to try new things and to learn from their mistakes, rather than to punish or criticize them for it. This helps to create an empowered workforce that is proactive when they see opportunities to benefit the company.
  5. Create Opportunities – One of the key reasons people cite for leaving their employers is a lack of career development and opportunities. When a company takes an approach where they hire for cultural fit and willing to train for a position, and they have five different divisions, there will always be opportunities to either advance or to try something different.
  6. Show Appreciation – Appreciation is one of our most basic human needs, after food, shelter, and safety, and JM Family do a great job at showing their Associates that they are appreciated. They have regular appreciation dinners and awards, and they also have a peer to peer appreciation program which allows people to recognize their colleagues for great work that they have done. Sometimes great work goes unseen by management, but programs like this allow for people to be recognized by their peers and for their efforts to be brought to the attention of the management.

Now for those of you thinking that creating an engaged workforce is a nice-to-do activity, think again. The results are compelling

  • JM Family’s staff turnover rate is 7.1 per cent, which is well below their competitors, which helps to reduce cost, which increases profit.
  • Their staff stays with the company 10.1 years on average, which compares very favourably with the national average of 4.2,
  • Staff are happy to recommend the company, and the majority of new hires come from referrals which help to keep down recruitment costs and ensures that any open positions are filled quickly.
  • The company has achieved record revenues in each of the last five years, with an average revenue growth of around 12 per cent per year since 2011.

So the result is when you put your people first you create an engaged, excited and empowered workforce, which helps to keep costs down and revenues growing, and who wouldn’t want that.

If you want to get more engagement in your team why not grab a copy of our new online training course. For a limited time, you can get free access using the COUPON CODE JF2 at check out. Simply register at https://www.engageandgrow.com.au/video-course

5 Strategies For Leading A High Performance Team

5 Strategies For Leading A High Performance Team

by | Nov 27, 2018

No leader sets out to lead an ineffective team. In fact, many leaders invest a lot of time and energy agonising over how to create the perfect high-performance team that works effectively together and consistently delivers results.

However, there is a problem as many of the strategies leaders have adopted to improve teamwork, while well-intentioned, are not all that effective. Thompson, a professor of management and organisations at Kellogg and an expert on teamwork, clears up five popular misconceptions. In the process, she offers a roadmap for building and maintaining teams that are creative, efficient, and high-impact.

1. Get The Chemistry Right

Many leaders create teams that lack diversity and are too large.  It’s human nature to hire people just like us but that just creates a team of clones and doesn’t help the team leverage the myriad of different skill sets that are out there. Plus when the team is too large it can become difficult to build trusting relationships with your peers.

Teams need to have great chemistry between the individuals.  A team flourishes when each team members implicitly understand each other and everyone is clear on the role they play.  Just think of a soccer team.  The greatest players in the world don’t have to look up before they pass the ball. They just know where their team members will be.  This certainty that your team members have your back creates a safe and comfortable environment in which to function.

2. Create The Right Rules of Engagement For The Team

A challenge for leaders when building teams is how to manage the rules of engagement. The best rules of engagement identify the goal of the team, establish the rules of operation, and define where responsibilities lie. However many leaders struggle with the dilemma of how to define these rules. Do we have no team rules so that the team can be agile, flexible and have autonomy or do we impose a set of rules and risk quashing creativity and innovation?  One of the challenges with the former approach is that no-one steps up to the plate as everyone is waiting for someone else to take action which can create paralysis and so has exactly the opposite effect to that desired.

Thompson discovered that teams that developed some rules of engagement ended up being more nimble, having more proactive behaviour, and achieving their goals more than teams that didn’t bother. Plus, the process of developing the rules of engagement can improve team cohesion and effectiveness.

3. Create Trust And Be Vulnerable

In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni states that lack of trust is the number one reason why teams fail. So how do you build trust?  By being vulnerable and sharing heartfelt stories about yourself and your experiences.  This enables team members to connect emotionally to each other and is a rapid way of building trust.

As Thompson noted: “It’s somewhat unintuitive that putting out our worst moment in the last six months can actually help our team. Almost all of our intuitions are wrong.”

4. Stop Wasting Time In Meetings

Whilst meetings are a useful vehicle in the workplace to rapidly share information with a number of people, many meetings are poorly structured and rarely achieve the outcomes they were designed to achieve.  Why? Because most meetings are designed to generate ideas rather than evaluate and expand on ideas.

Roughly 25% of your team is great at generating ideas, so encourage brainstorming prior to the meeting and get all the ideas on the table, then during the meetings simply focus on sifting through the ideas and enhancing and developing them.

Also, meetings tend to fill all the available time, so focus on having shorter meetings with agreed outcomes. Often four 30 minute meetings can be more effective than one two hour meeting.

5. Encourage Team Members To Challenge Each Other

Great teams challenge each other and this fuels their creativity and innovation. However, for this challenge to be productive each team member needs to feel that they have a voice and can be heard without any fear of the consequences. When this type of trust and culture exists then the team can become high performing.

If you want to get more engagement in your team why not grab a copy of our new online training course. For a limited time you can get free access using the COUPON CODE JF2 at check out. Simply register at https://www.engageandgrow.com.au/video-course

 

Engagement Not Leadership Is Strategic Way To Win Business

Engagement Not Leadership Is Strategic Way To Win Business

by | Nov 12, 2018

Small and medium-sized businesses are the life-blood of our economy, but they face specific, ever-increasing challenges. The world is in the mists of an employee engagement crisis, with serious and potentially lasting repercussions for the global economy.

Without a doubt, one of the greatest challenges SME’s currently face is the attraction and retention of talent. Intelligent, honest, hard working staff are critical to an organisation’s ongoing success, but now more than ever, good people are hard to find – and they are even harder to hold on to! To ensure employee job fulfilment, loyalty and maximum ROI, the key ingredient that is so often missing is Engagement.

In a recent Gallup poll, it was revealed that only 13% of the world’s employees are engaged at work, and most disengaged employees would change employers right now for as little as a 5% pay increase.

  • The Engaged Employee – Does more than is expected. Works with a passion and feels a profound connection to the organisation they work for. They drive innovation and move the organisation forwards, providing maximum return on salary investment
  • The Disengaged Employee – Does just what’s expected. Is essentially there in body only. They’re sleep walking through their day. Marking time, but not energy or passion, into their work. They provide minimum return on salary investment
  • The Actively Disengaged Employee – Does less than expected. They aren’t happy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day these workers undermine the efforts of their engaged co-workers, often providing negative return on salary investment.

Many organisations believe that strong leadership, and an exclusive focus on the development of their leaders is the key to a winning culture. They are mistaken. Leadership is not the heart of your organisation. The heart of your organisation is its people and their contribution. Without actively engaged employees, the leadership message cannot be heard..

Trained leaders today have been overloaded with leadership knowledge and theory, but too often they are not sufficiently activated. We need to turn our attention equally to our staff, getting them actively engaged regularly through new, innovative and inclusive methods, thus creating shared vision and buy in. It’s called ‘leadership living’ and all levels of the organisation participate together in the workplace. It is an all action methodology, which means all team members will live, breathe and grow together as a united force. It breeds true engagement, uncovers more leaders and builds a powerful and united culture. To ensure maximum impact and lasting change, everyone needs to be involved and everyone needs to be accountable.

So how do we engage our staff, encouraging maximum productivity, loyalty and ROI? It starts with changing habits as a collective, creating a movement. It’s about working as a unified team to change everyone’s individual and collective behaviours. The only way you can do this is through structured, strategic and regular discussions built on shared ownership, individual empowerment, and regular feedback sessions.

Also, traditional hierarchy has to go. The traditional organisational structure is not the most efficient option for businesses in the 21st century. Instead, successful companies are moving to an organisational structure that allows employees to make more of their own decisions and avoid the rigidity of traditional models. Generations X, Y and Z respond and are motivated differently to Baby Boomers.  Equality creates unity, and unity will bring the truth out in your organisation. Think of truth as the splinters that need to be removed from your business. It may hurt, but we need to hear it, otherwise the pain will continue and exacerbate. We need to create an atmosphere for the truth to be tabled discussed and addressed without judgement.

If you want to get more engagement in your team why not grab a copy of our new online training course. For a limited time you can get free access using the COUPON CODE JF2 at check out. Simply register at https://www.engageandgrow.com.au/video-course

5 Ways To Manage Your Energy Levels

5 Ways To Manage Your Energy Levels

by | Oct 27, 2018

No-one doubts that we live in a world that is moving at lightning pace. In fact, the speed of change has never been faster. As a result, the most common theme I keep hearing my clients and colleagues say, is there are not enough hours in the day. How can I get everything done?. I need to learn to manage my time better. I need to become more productive.

Yet ironically none of us can learn to manage time. As a leader, you all have 24 hours in a day – 1,440 minutes. This is a constant which is never going to change.

What you can do however is manage your energy. Energy is the amount of effort we expend into doing something. Approach a task with high levels of energy and you can often get the task completed with superhuman speed. Approach the same task with lacklustre energy and it seems to take forever. I’m sure you can all think of a situation where this has happened for you.

So here are my five tips for managing your energy levels so that you can become as productive as possible each and every day, and so get more done in less time.

  1. Minimise the Number of Decisions You Have To Make Daily
    Did you know that we make over 10,000 trivial decisions every day and that our decision-making ability decreases throughout the day? Therefore the smart thing to do is to focus your energy on the business critical decisions you need to make every day and minimize the number of inconsequential decisions you make. A simple activity like having a “uniform” for work can stop you wasting time on thinking about what to wear each morning. It’s no surprise that Steve Jobs wore his trademark black turtleneck and jeans, or former US President Barak Obama only wore blue or grey suits.
  2. Block and Tackle Your Schedule
    To be more effective make sure you schedule everything in your diary. I mean everything. This means that you don’t have to wake up each morning wondering what to do, that’s already done. You know what time you have meetings, what times you are working on sales and marketing etc. Better still cluster similar activities together and plan your week so you have specific days for different tasks. At Entrepreneurs Institute Mondays is the finance day when everyone has to report on their weekly metrics and Wednesday is a creative day when people work on new projects and ideas.
  3. Avoid Task Switching
    Nothing wastes more time and energy than multi-tasking. Start one task and stick with it for an allocated time without interruptions. That means no answering the phone, emails or jumping on social media. A study by Google revealed that when you switch tasks it takes you 20 mins to get back to the state you were in before you engaged in the interruption. That is all wasted time, as well as energy as you seek to get back into the inspired state you were previously in.
  4. Focus on Activities That You Enjoy
    You naturally have more energy and enthusiasm for a task when you really enjoy it. So set up your team so that you have people available to work on the tasks that you least enjoy, as these will be the ones that deplete your energy. So often you are told to develop your weaknesses but I really believe that if we can focus on what we love then we will get more done.
  5. Eat Good Quality, Healthy Foods
    You need to fuel your body with healthy foods if you are to maximise your energy levels. How about starting each day with a healthy green juice and maybe a brisk walk or some yoga stretches. This will release endorphins that will help boost your momentum for the day.

So next time you take on a task think about what the ROEE, return on energy employed is. Does the task inspire and motivate you or will it leave you feeling depleted and exhausted?. After all, you only have so much energy so use it wisely.

Is Your Management Team Fit for Purpose?

Is Your Management Team Fit for Purpose?

by | Sep 19, 2018

As a business owner of a growing enterprise the only way that you can sustain growth and your sanity is by leveraging the power of team. However creating a high performance team is not always plain sailing, even when you have the best support in the business.

The challenge is that many teams are made up of individuals who have different agendas and may not always have the right experience to support the owner in growing the business.

Research by UK accountant Haines Watt discovered that almost one in five senior managers (17%) are actively aware that they have a divergent vision of the business’s future to that of the owner. At the same time, over half (53%) of management teams and business partners are growing a business for the first time.

With so many senior managers working to their own agendas, combined with a lack of experience, business owners can’t be blamed for lacking trust in their teams..

In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni identifies that lack of trust is the foundational cornerstone that prevents the success of a high performing team.

However trust is not the ability of team members to predict another’s behaviour because they have known each other for a long time. Rather, when it comes to teams, trust is all about vulnerability. It’s about being comfortable and open, even exposed to one another’s failures, weaknesses and fears.

Vulnerability-based trust is predicated on the simple concept that people who aren’t afraid to admit the truth about themselves are not going to engage in office politics and antics that waste everyone’s time and energy, and more importantly make the accomplishment of results highly unlikely.

However, the irony of this research is that 52% of business owners find they can’t be open and honest, masking their concerns from their teams because they are worried about exposing vulnerability. And as you know leadership starts at the top, so if the business owner is not modelling the way, displaying vulnerability-based trust then it is hardly surprising the rest of the team aren’t adopting this behaviour.

Unsurprisingly, across the board this lack of trust, honesty and communication leaves management teams siloed, uninformed and impeded from stepping up and taking more of the day to day running of the business away from the business owners. As a result, owners have less time to plan and think strategically, which in turn prevents them from reaching their growth ambitions.

The creates a vicious cycle where the business owner is stuck working in the business rather than on it and consequently often becomes exhausted as they have not mastered how to leverage their time, talent and team to help enable the change they desire.

If you’d like to learn how to leverage your time, team and talent so that you can create a more purposeful, profitable business then please book in for a complimentary consultation where you are guaranteed to walk away with at least one great idea to help you accelerate your business growth.

 

 

 

Get Aligned For Business Success

Get Aligned For Business Success

by | Sep 12, 2018

A recent study by accountants Haines Watt reveals that finding and creating a management team that are fully aligned with the business owners vision and purpose can be really challenging. Often it seems that creating such a team is far out of reach. There are two main reasons why your management team might not be aligned.

  • you don’t have the right people at the management table,
  • lack of clarity of the business purpose and mission caused by a lack of planning, or strategic focus.

The fact is, UK business owners are not spending enough time on their business, rather they are spending a vast majority of their time in the business. This focus on the day-to-day is preventing business owners from planning effectively. And here’s the rub. Failing to plan is planning to fail.

A properly formed strategic plan can ensure businesses grow faster and more sustainably. In fact, our study validated that business owners who are able to step back and focus predominantly on strategic planning are twice as likely to run fast growth businesses.

Developing a fully formed, strategic plan ultimately frees up more time to drive towards a common purpose and innovate along the way. Unfortunately, UK business owners are holding too tightly to the everyday functions of their companies, reluctant to let the management teams, who should be at the heart of the company, take their rightful place.

The theoretical role of the management team is a far cry from reality. The study found that nearly half of business owners are not confident that their business could survive beyond a single week if their team were left to run it. Wow, what a revelation and a telling sign of how little trust business owners put in their team. Imagine too the stress that creates for you, the business owner, when you feel that you are single handedly shouldering the responsibility for the business.

One of the most telling findings in the research was a widespread fear of exposing vulnerability, with business owners refusing to open up to their management team regarding their concerns or future plans. Without enough communication, the result is siloed working, leading to, and exacerbating, a lack of coordination within the team.While the causes of disunity can vary, the result remains the same – stagnated business growth. It is imperative that business owners make the time to identify the aspirations they hold for the business they’ve built. Once identified they can strategically look towards the future and place their management team at the centre of that vision.

If you’d like to get clarity on your purpose then let’s schedule a chat, because without a clear purpose your business will just drift along and never achieve its full potential and you will be unable to leverage the full potential of your team.

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