One of the hot topics of conversation in business these days is how to effectively use social media for connecting with prospects and referral sources, and for promoting our work. We have all heard about companies leveraging social media as a tool to extend their networks, but how?
This article in McKinsey Quarterly, written by Jacques Bughin, Angela Hung Byers, and Michael Chui, deals with the benefits of planned and targeted enterprise-wide use of social media, we at IMPACT think it is extremely useful to start thinking about getting strategic about the social media game!
Harvey Schachter's article in the Globe and Mail gives three great tips to improve your listening skills.
As coaches, we cannot emphasize enough how important it is to listen, at different levels, to what is said and what is not said. This listening is the key to asking powerful questions- which is the best way to develop people, and to develop business.
Take a minute to give this a read, and think about how you can show others you're listening.
From profitguide.com, Greig Clark shares his discovery: there are five fundamentals of running a successful business, and they live where the rubber meets the road. None of them are earth-shattering, but they can be tricky to apply.
What do you get when you spend 40 years in and around entrepreneurship? In my case, 10 black, three-ring binders are an important part of the answer.
Let me explain. I lived my first 20 years of self-employment as an entrepreneur, building College Pro Painters. I spent the next 15 as a venture capitalist, with a few of those years at the helm of Arxx Building Products, one of the investments in our VC fund. Since stepping down as CEO of Arxx five years ago, I’ve worked as (or, at least, evolved into) a “trusted advisor” to entrepreneurial businesses. And for each of the companies I’ve worked with, I’ve compiled a synopsis of each business in a black, three-ring binder.
I recently leafed through those binders in search of the best business lessons of my past 40 years. My discovery: there are five fundamentals of running a successful business, and they live where the rubber meets the road. None of them are earth-shattering, but they can be tricky to apply.
1. Focus, focus, focus
It’s easy to say, yet so hard to do. I recently read a book on the Facebook story, and this principle leaps out above all else. Facebook placed relentless focus on building a user base, campus by campus, and continually making the program friendlier. As wild as I feel for saying this, Mark Zuckerberg was right not to put short-term focus on raising revenue.
To put the importance of focus into greater relief, consider Paul Martin: a superb finance minister but a weak prime minister. In the former role, Martin focused like a laser beam on reducing the deficit and building surpluses. As prime minister, he dared not disappoint any people, so he ended up disappointing most people.
A CEO I’ve known for a long time told me that his biggest job is to be Dr. No. Only by turning things down does he let people know what really is important.
My brother Paul, a longtime entrepreneur who is now a consultant in Vancouver, tells me that the biggest problem he sees in business is that people start many things but finish few. “I’ll get to that next week,” they say. Next week never comes. His advice? “Complete something.”
2. Time management
It’s the kissing cousin of #1. We have two finite resources in any business: time and money. We budget the heck out of money. Time is even scarcer, but we treat it more shabbily.
How a CEO spends his or her time is the biggest signal to staff of what is really important to the company. A good technique for aligning your actions with your priorities is colour-coding your time planner with those priorities in mind. One of the CEOs I work with, Jeremy Behar of Cirrus Consulting Group in Toronto, knows good people are the key to the growth of his business. So, he shades hours in his day planner green to denote the time he will spend recruiting people or developing his existing employees. That way the task stands out visually to him.
Another trick is to be proactive, applying Steven Covey’s “put the big rocks in first” principle. Go through your calendar months ahead and mark some “green space” in every week to block off time to tackle your most important priority.
3. Horses for courses
Or, as Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great: “Get the right people in the right seats on the bus.” But how can you tell when you have the “right people?” It’s never easy. My first boss, Scott MacDiarmid at General Foods, used to tell me the thing he liked about me was that when he asked me for “A,” he got A or A-plus, and on time; he never got a B or C with an explanation. In business, table stakes is understanding what is asked for and delivering it. Greatness is taking it one step beyond that, being proactive and what I call a “life force” in the business. Someone who is an “energy multiplier,” not a drain. It is so great for entrepreneurs when they feel that they are “not alone” in trying to grow the business or push the envelope.
On the other hand, when the person is not right, you will know. But, like most entrepreneurs, you might be “slow to fire.” Don’t be.
4. Clarify roles
This is all about getting the right seats on the bus. Everyone needs to know what they, and they alone, are responsible for. The “one throat to choke” philosophy is still a good one, although perhaps a bit graphic. At Cirrus, a little box appears under each person’s name on the org chart, containing that person’s top three deliverables and metrics. This allows strategies and plans to be quickly checked against principles #1 and #2: do the tasks reflect the focus of the business, who will perform those tasks and how will anyone know those tasks are being performed?
5. Measure, measure, measure
Make those top three deliverables the key performance indicators for each manager. Put them on a one-page “dashboard” and review it regularly and relentlessly. An example is the weekly RAG (results at a glance) at College Pro, which remains that company’s most read report. When my stepson Jon was a star manager there, he used to check the RAG every day to compare his performance to his targets and that of his peers. When you get the numbers right, the numbers don’t lie—and everyone knows it. Good people will self-manage to make their numbers.
Are these principles simple? Yes. Easy to stick to? Maybe not. Tack this page on your wall, and consult it frequently. If you can’t follow this diet, find a coach or advisor who can help you. It works.
In nearly 30 years of serving Canada's entrepreneurial business community, PROFIT has earned a position of prominence with growth companies, the entrepreneurs who run them and the businesses eager to serve them. Through its range of products and services, PROFIT delivers practical growth strategies, case studies and access to peer groups that help entrepreneurial companies get bigger and better… fast.
PROFIT magazine: Published six times per year and boasting circulation of 101,000 and readership of 373,000, PROFIT delivers the highest composition of business decision-makers and managers / owner / professionals amongst all PMB measured English-language magazines in Canada
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Accounting partners know how to multiply and divide. Unfortunately, they don’t always know what choice to make when it comes to growing their book of business. Seth Godin’s simple example shows the clear choice. I will borrow his language and his logic and tailor my example to the professional services firm.
Let’s say you have a list of 30 prospects (made up of current clients and other potentials with whom you haven’t worked yet but would like to). You have a choice to make.
1)You can create stories and options and benefits that naturally spread from this group to people they know, and your core group can multiply with 30 growing to 60 and then 600 (Some partners succeed in building a name for themselves by becoming a subject matter expert and becoming known through speaking engagements, writing etc. It takes some great stories, options and benefits to make this work).
OR
2)You can put the original group through a sales funnel, weed out the ones that don’t fit your “ideal client” type and monetize the rest. A 30% conversion rate means you just turned 30 prospects into 9 new engagements.
Multiplying scales. Dividing helps you make this quarter’s numbers (and keep your equity partner status!). We know you are great at math but let us know if you need some coaching help on this equation.
For the feedback providers among us, there is ample available advice on how best to proffer messages and to ensure their effective delivery. However, there's far less guidance to help us when we are on the receiving end of these "gifts" (after all, aren't we always hearing how feedback is a gift?).
The purpose of this post is to start a conversation among us, to consider how best to take in the feedback messages we receive — not just at this time of year, but all the time.
Get rid of your vacation policy. Stop tying compensation to performance. Pay more to your people than the market demands. Drop the self affirmations and doubt yourself instead. Forget about annual performance reviews. And for goodness sake, pay more attention to your “To Don’t” list than your “To Do” list. Daniel Pink’s recently released Flip Manifesto (available gratis here) offers 16 pieces of advice that run counter to what you might have heard elsewhere and will certainly contradict how your own firm/ company is set up. This is precisely why it is worth the 30-45 minutes it will take you to read it. I liked it so much I have printed it out and highlighted it for a VP (R&D) I am coaching right now. I have chosen to use the paper and ink (85 whole pages worth) because I know he will never get to it if I send him the electronic version and I believe it is something he needs to read right now.
How about you? Is it time to flip some of your long held beliefs?
Wendi Campbell's fantastic advice was featured in this month's CA Source Newsletter. See the link above or read her article below!
Get the Most Out of Your Day
It’s easy to say there isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done, but the truth is that most of us just aren’t using our time efficiently. The first secret to time management is to take a look at the big picture and consider what will matter most to you five years from now. By focusing on what really matters, you take control of the clock and begin to manage your time for better results.
One of my clients is a senior manager who wants to make partner at his firm. When he got to the office each morning, he looked at his calendar and saw a sea of meetings — some of them double-booked. Then he spent his few open hours answering questions and coaching members of his team. Since he focused most of his time on internal tasks he did not have enough time to reach out to his clients and network with contacts.
Schedule your objectives first
With e-calendars and workflow tools, it’s easy to let others muddle with your daily agenda. My client realized he needed to take control of his time— decide what he wanted to excel at and allocate his time accordingly. Just as financial planners say that the way to save money is to “pay yourself first,” the way to manage time is to “schedule your objectives first.”
Frame your to-do’s as specific goals
When blocking time in your calendar, be sure to schedule specific objectives and connect the dots with your to-do list. Written to-do lists are an easy way to track and prioritize work.
Written to-do’s should have specific goals. For example, instead of, “Call Marlene at Crystametrics”, write “Call Marlene to set up a meeting about that new project.” Using this strategy, many of my clients find they have more focus, decreased stress, and—as they cross things off their lists—more satisfaction.
Know your priorities
In Stephen Covey’s book First Things First, he offers a number of time management strategies, including how to prioritize your work by grouping it into four categories:
- Urgent and important items like client phone calls and staff retention emergencies. Deal with these things as soon as they crop up.
- Not urgent but important things like planning, business development, and technical reading. These items impact your achievement most, so spend the bulk of your time here.
- Urgent but not important items like internal meetings and staff distractions. Try to spend as little time here as possible.
- Not urgent and not important items like email shuffling and trivial work. Don’t waste any time with them.
Defend your schedule
Once my client had prioritized and scheduled his objectives, he needed to defend the time, so he told his team about his focus on building new business; explained his time strategy and asked them to help him stick to it; limited his open-door policy by setting specific times so his team would know when his door was actually open; and started checking his email and voice messages only once an hour. Sometimes he’d eliminate distractions by working in an empty boardroom instead of his usual workspace.
With these strategies, my client was able to take full control over his time and get the most out of his day.
How organized are you? Take this test at mindtools.com and find out:
Wendi Campbell is a Chartered Accountant and an executive coach with Impact Consulting Inc. Her coaching specializations are personal effectiveness, execution and implementation and engagement practice management skills. Impact Consulting Inc. provides customized hands-on coaching and assessment services and has coaches located across Canada. www.impactconsultinginc.com
It's not just the number of hours we're working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.
What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.
Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you're taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you're driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn't?
The biggest cost — assuming you don't crash — is to your productivity. In part, that's a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you're partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it's because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you're increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.
But most insidiously, it's because if you're always doing something, you're relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.
I know this from my own experience. I get two to three times as much writing accomplished when I focus without interruption for a designated period of time and then take a real break, away from my desk. The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal.
If you're a manager, here are three policies worth promoting:
1. Maintain meeting discipline. Schedule meetings for 45 minutes, rather than an hour or longer, so participants can stay focused, take time afterward to reflect on what's been discussed, and recover before the next obligation. Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.
2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities. Let them turn off their email at certain times. If it's urgent, you can call them — but that won't happen very often.
3. Encourage renewal. Create at least one time during the day when you encourage your people to stop working and take a break. Offer a midafternoon class in yoga, or meditation, organize a group walk or workout, or consider creating a renewal room where people can relax, or take a nap.
It's also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. Consider these three behaviors for yourself:
1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you'll be. When you're done, take at least a few minutes to renew.
2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don't, you'll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that's relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.
3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you're off, you're truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you'll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.
A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you're engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you're renewing, truly renew. Make waves. Stop living your life in the gray zone.
TONY SCHWARTZ
Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything.
A 6 minute video (ish) that describes the marshmallow experiment. It promotes the idea of using a prototype approach to teamwork and design (build it, get feedback, refine, build again…). I think teams can take the same approach to building a meeting format that works for them. Try it, see if it works, refine it, and try again.
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