What’s Your True Motivation for Being in Business?
We’re often inundated with endless media charter about becoming the ‘next Google’ or ‘next ‘Amazon’ business success. The perception that these reports paint can often cause aspiring and current business owners to lose their way and in some instances their personal financial viability by chasing fantasies. There are a lot of perceived reasons and technical explanations as to why this happens, but fundamentally it’s due to lack of purpose and vision for the business. Yes… it’s quite this simple. In working with and among startups and existing business owners, I’ve experienced more than enough businesses that exist for the purposes of just existing. A simple fix for vision / mission waywardness is to take time in the planning stages of the business and THINK!!! The following 2 questions will work wonders and get your creative juices flowing: What do I (we, if you have a team… which you should) want to accomplish with this business besides making a lot of money? AND Where do we want to be in 1 year? 3 years? 5 years?
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Many successful people get promoted into management and quickly find the pressure to be higher than anything they felt in the past. As an individual contributor, it is much easier to control the outcomes of your work. It may not seem like that at times, but you have a lot more control than when you are a manager of people. I am not referring to people that receive a management title and have nobody to manage. A real manager has the authority and responsibility to manage: financial performance (includes holding others accountable), people activities (hire, keep and grow people), and positioning/strategizing the firm or department in a way that provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
In most companies, collaboration is a valuable part of corporate culture. In fact, it’s expected that teams, departments and divisions work and share information together. In some of the best companies, collaboration is well executed with outside vendors, suppliers and consultants. Yet, for some reason, collaboration does not always happen. Many businesses tend to be divided by silos – groups of people who function like clicks.
What have you always pictured your boss looking like? If you are anything like me, you’ve always pictured them as a grumpy old man. Or a grumpy old woman if you want to get all modern. However, there is one thing that I’ve never really pictured my boss as being – younger than I am! However, this is starting to happen. Firms are starting to put Gen-X folks into senior management positions. What should you do if this happens to when you are in the CIO position?
There’s a glass wall between the waiting room and the workshop at the windscreen shop where I took my new car to have its – you guessed it – windscreen replaced last week. I could watch the whole process, if I wanted, while sipping as many espressos as I fancied.
In a previous post regarding business coaching companies, we discussed what such companies can do to help your business. They will work with your business to establish a partnership that will help you reach your goals.
“Chief Bottle Washer” as I’ve often heard it or my personal favorite “This is Where the Buck Stop” denotes the role of servant leadership that most if not all small to mid-sized business owners play. Continuing with the thought that one of the primary objectives of creating, sustaining, and growing a business is to work oneself out of a job, business owners and their staff can either strengthen or weaken the vision and operations of the business by their application of the principles of this style of leadership.
Should you consider hiring a business coach to help you further your business, career or even personal life?
How’s everything going for your team right now? I suspect that like most IT managers you’d say that everything is going “OK”. Yeah, yeah, things could be better, but they are not too bad. You and I both know that that’s an acceptable state to be in; however, you could be doing better. What you really want is for your team to be working together with a great deal of both energy and enthusiasm. What you need is a contest!
I love to learn. I read voraciously, always have since I was a little girl. I pay attention to people, to things in the world, to what is happening. I was raised by parents who valued learning, and I adopted their philosophy. You might be thinking- that is great, so what? Here is the thing, the drive to know can also be limiting.
Does anyone besides me remember the phone system? You could be just about anywhere in the world at any time and you could pick up a phone, call someone, and your call would go right through. The Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) just worked. Now nothing is ever perfect and the POTS wasn’t perfect either, but it was 99.999% perfect which meant that it only didn’t work for about 5 minutes per year. Clearly, despite the importance of information technology, the networks that we’re designing and building today don’t work anywhere this reliably. Why not?
How can you make your business team more productive? Today’s employees aren’t drones stuck in cubicles like a Dilbert cartoon. Your subordinates live in a social media world and expect personal engagement. Here are 5 ways to better relationships with your subordinates:
Some governments and other organisations not driven by profit use versions of program logic or outcomes models. But just because they use a logic or outcome model, does not mean they automatically get great KPIs.
Wouldn’t it be great if all of your employees do what they are supposed to do, and more? Employees have different levels of ‘accountability’ skills and in managing employees; you need to help them maximize this strength. Some people have it and with minimum direction seem to execute all that is required of them. Others get distracted, and at the end of the day, they were busy, but not necessarily productive.
We have seen 2015 to be a year of rise of the Agile and Scrum. We saw increase in maturity of Project Management among the IT Companies. PMI started to focus on Benefits Realization and Leadership skills for Project Managers.
You have noticed that your employee motivation is low- particularly because of stress due to an unmanageable workload. What can you do?
As your business grows, the more necessary your working capital becomes. Working capital is the money your business requires to function. If you don’t have enough, then your business is bound to fail. It’s a fact that many businesses that seem to be thriving are forced to shut down because they don’t have the ability to pay off their short term debts when they are due.
Having completed your project management studies you may feel well equipped to take on anything, no matter how challenging. However, as I am sure you have observed, some projects are more difficult than others. It would not be a good idea to take on something that will have you quickly stressed and wondering if you’re ever going to be successful.
Did you wake up happy today? Did you jump out of bed excited to get to work because your work makes you feel valued, listened to and moving forward in your career and your life? Do you feel unwavering loyalty for your employer? Is your work ethic rock solid? Is this not the type of employees that businesses dream of; employees that are happy, loyal, and have great work ethics? The question is,
The objective of this article is to look at leadership in more general terms. Another article looks at leadership as it relates to innovation in more depth.