How to Motivate Employees

How will you motivate employees, improve staff retention, increase productivity, and boost morale this year? All of this can be and should be summed up into one word: TRAINING.

Take for example Derek Christian's business, My Maid Service. He had extremely high turnover, two out of three new employees were leaving, which meant a less experienced and productive staff. The quality of work also lacked and it was having a huge impact on his business.

Once training was introduced, there is now virtually no turnover, his employees and customers are happier, which all translates into loyal customers and a bigger bottom line. Read His Full Story

So, what are you going to do this year? You can still give them a box of candy, but we highly suggest you take a serious look at the coming year and how training can help your company tremendously.

Innovative Leadership is a performance improvement company that provides solutions for today's business, small or large, challenges. Unique programs, products and processes all of which can be customized to fit specific needs of your company is what sets us apart.

Heading Off Employee Burnout

In today's "do more with less" environment, employees are especially susceptible to burnout. So what for signs of excess stress in your staffers. Decreased enthusiasm, increased irritability, sudden changes in performance and high absenteeism all signal possible burnout.

If your employees are exhibiting these signs, use these stress-management options:
. . .Shift some of their work to others temporarily. Often all a good employee needs is a little break. Find someone who can assume some of his/her duties for a short time. After they've recharged their batteries, you'll find they are probably itching to resume former responsibilities.
. . .Encourage people to take breaks, shorter more frequent breaks that is. Several short walks around the block are more refreshing than a lengthy coffee break.
. . .Get rid of electronic leashes. Give them a break from "electronic leashes." Example: Declare a beeper-free, email-free and cellphone-free Friday morning.
. . .Look at the role you play. If you want them to balance their lives, you should be a model. Share your stress-reduction tips. And be careful not to reward stress-inducing behavior. Example: Stop complimenting employees for working long hours. Thank them for the quality of the work they complete.

Adapted from "Love 'Em or Lose 'Em"

Getting Ahead by Slowing Down

by Marci Taub, M.A. and author of Interview Yourself for Working Moms: A Guided Journal

Late work nights. Missed school plays. Sporadic dinner dates. Cancelled self-care appointments. Getting ahead usually evokes images of long hours sacrificing your personal life for the sake of your career. Do you ever fantasize about having it all - growing your career, your family and yourself without wildly tilting the balance from day to day?

I recently re-read my personal journal entries about turning points in my work and family lives. These situations often have required me to choose whether or not to take on more career responsibility and pursue dream projects, as well as to figure out how I would balance my work and personal lives if I did.

When faced with such tough decisions, I've tried a variety of strategies for having it all. Once I launched a "Get Organized" campaign. Three new black, shiny file cabinets, two new "to do" list approaches, and a new high tech office makeover later, I was more organized, but was equally unsure why the texture of my life still felt rough and uneven.

Another time I devised an "Early Riser" plan to devote a couple of hours to quiet, uninterrupted work every morning. It worked well for about a week, until my night owl instincts overthrew my common sense and demanded the return of my evening routine. Getting up at 5:30 a.m. and staying up until midnight quickly took its toll. After a couple of sleep-deprived, grumpy days, both my work and I drooped, and my inner voice, my husband and my children begged me in unison to try something else.

So I turned to what I called my "Boundary Watchers" program. I told myself that protecting my work periods from draining tasks and people would be "the answer" to my problem. I stopped running errands that I could accomplish by phone or on-line, and started only dealing with people who said and did mostly kind, uplifting things. I reclaimed about an hour of previously-squandered time and immeasurable amounts of energy a day. In these respects, this approach was a success. But it wasn't a panacea. My latest project looked like a half-eaten sandwich -- my ideas being endlessly chewed, not swallowed and digested, leaving me hungry for more.

What did I learn from these experiments? Getting organized, designating time, and prioritizing tasks and people are all good first steps. To really get ahead while balancing your life, it takes a powerful, multi-strategic approach. The ironic secret of the following advanced strategies is that they help you to slow down - get perspective, rejuvenate yourself, and live deeply.

They allow you to progress at a comfortable pace in all areas of your life for the long haul. So you get to cross the finish line with your head high, smiling at an annual marathon, instead of sprinting across the finish line stooped and breathless at a quarterly race.

Here are my top ten strategies for slowing down to get ahead in your career and your life:

1. Assess your risk: Be honest with yourself about how much risk you're willing to take at this point in your career. Factor in your personal obligations as well as how much risk you really need to take to reach your career goals. More is not always better. Taking just the right amount of risk - without jeopardizing your financial, emotional, physical, and familial well-being - is the key to advancing your career.

2. Ignite your passions: Actively pursue your passions at work. Request an assignment you'd love to do. Explore transferring to another position within your organization or field. If there's no immediate way for you to hold your dream job, pursue your interests on the side - through volunteering, taking classes, reading, and networking with people who do what you want to do, informally and at professional association events. By immersing yourself in what you love, you'll be happier, motivate yourself to succeed, and opportunities will follow.

3. Under-schedule yourself: Rushing through your days and nights with little down time won't help you get ahead; it will just wear you out. And you'll miss spontaneous opportunities to meet people and do things that could help your career grow and enrich your life overall. Pause to review your weekly calendar and make sure you're not too booked to leave room for the unexpected.

4. Be fully engaged: Focus on what you're doing at the moment rather than on what you'll be eating for lunch in an hour; what's going on at home when you're at work or at work when you're at home; or what crisis may be erupting at work while you're on vacation. It's only when you fully live in the present that you'll make significant progress.

5. Leave your mark: Stand out from the crowd by showcasing your distinctive approach to your work. Take the time, for example, to hand-write thank you notes to your clients or to highlight your unique combination of talents and experience that make you the obvious choice for receiving the next big promotion.

6. Learn your way: Knowing how you learn best will give you an edge. You'll absorb and integrate new ideas faster and deeper, making you a star performer. Pay attention to how you seem to learn naturally - by reading, listening, doing, or some combination of these and other methods.

7. Track all trends: Notice how you could incorporate trends about when, where, and how people work into your career both to better serve your clients and to better balance your work and personal lives. For instance, you could begin and leave work earlier, provide on-site services at clients' workplaces, and arrange on-line or teleconferences.

8. Play at work: Take a cue from your children and let work equal play. Decide what the most fun activities are in your work and family lives and transfer the best ones to each world. Make getting to know new people a priority in your home community as much as it is in your workplace, and import activities like storytelling, role-playing, and cloud-watching from your family life into your creative brainstorming sessions at work.

9. Reflect every day: Review your performance as a working mom on a regular basis - gently and constructively - and keep records of these reviews in a journal or folder with letters of praise, thank you notes, ticket stubs from special events, and other mementos of good times.

10. Keep it fresh: Rotate your work projects, leisure activities, and family rituals to keep your interest and energy levels up. Shake up parts of your daily routine, like how you get to work, when you do your tasks, and what you eat for lunch, while still maintaining enough structure and consistency to feel grounded. By regularly energizing your mind, body, and spirit, you'll make it easier to get ahead - and a life.

21st Century Business Women

By: Ann Williamson

When the first generation of women entered the workforce in earnest in the 1970s, they succeeded in the only way they could by imitating men. Authoritarian leadership and tight control was the hallmark of that days businessman, and women were not exactly welcomed into the ranks of management. Well ladies, that was yesterday, and today is today!

Forget what your mama or your boss told you, because following the rules can be bad for your career. Today a CEO/Entrepreneur can no longer maximize her company full potential using a command-and-control style. The 21st century business woman needs to be able to build a vision based on the awareness of economic transformation, then help her partners and staff fulfill that vision. She must draw on a wide range of skills to get to the top and stay there. Following are 7 Key Characteristics that are essential:

1. Sell the Vision. A leader with a fresh, independent plan for her company's growth and future has a distinct advantage in luring and keeping great talent and investors. Vision is not some lofty ideal, but an obtainable concept that is easy to understand and will make the company grow to another level.

2. Reinvent the Rules. While women have traditionally been socialized to please others, the 21st century leader knows that good girls rarely post great returns. The strong managers/owners today not only anticipate change, they create entirely new organizations that respond to shifts and search for innovation.

3. Achieve With A Laser Focus. Go where others fear to tread! Being aggressive and ambitious has long been considered male traits, but they are key qualities for new leaders. Today's business woman has the ability to home in on opportunities that others may simply not see, and then excel in that uncharted territory.

4. Use High-Touch in a High-Tech Era. When a number of leaders are conducting business by e-mail, voice mail, passwords, and PINs, the female entrepreneur succeeds because she guides with a strong, personal, bed-side manner. Today's business woman is just as technologically savvy as her peers, but her skill with staff and customers is high-touch, which gives her a critical edge and separation from the pack.

5. Challenge or Opportunity. Women are great at turning a challenge into an opportunity instead of using the slash-and-burn approach. They are able to make bold strokes, but they also win the cooperation of others in the organization in making any transformation a success.

6. A Customer Preference Obsession. In this information age, which makes it easier to shop around for the best whatever, businesses must work harder to give people what they want before their competitors do. There is no substitute for spending time with clients to become expert at their businesses and learn their demands. Female leaders are almost intuitively adept in doing just that, and without the client even suspecting.

7. Courage Under Fire. Show me any career woman or female entrepreneur today that is not able to stand-the-heat in any tough-call situation. Their decision-making skills are rooted in a high level of confidence, because they have had to weather and surpass any and all corporate storms they have encountered over time.

It takes a certain mind-set and bravado for anyone to start their own business and succeed, but it is even more difficult for a female entrepreneur. Let us face it, ladies! We have always had to be twice-as-smart and twice-as-confident as any male counterpart in the corporate world. After all, if we can bear and raise the future generation, how can running a successful business scare us?

To read more from Annie and to find the top home based businesses for women on the Internet visit her blog: Annies Home Journal www.annies-home-journal.blogspot.com

Use the “Gap of Silence” more Effectively

I have always used the term “pregnant pause” when I facilitate any sales program where I ask people to sit back and fold their arms and just listen to what the other person is saying. The need for silence is real in most communications, yet most sales people find silence to be threatening to their presentation environment. An article that appeared from justsell.com, the author changed the term from “pregnant pause” to “gap of silence”. This is certainly the term I am going to use moving forward.

The use of this “gap of silence” within a sales presentation is an art and it is important to hesitate in terms of providing a response immediately following what your customer has said and providing the proper response.

The use of this “gap of silence” allows the customer continue on with the conversation providing clarification of their real needs and allow them to offer additional specifics relative to you having the ability to provide a solution. This additional information can be very useful when determining which features and benefits of your product may satisfy their specific needs. It can be an integral component for gaining clarification of their real “prime buying motives”.

Many feel that silence reflects a disconnect, when in reality it can provide a much improved connection between the sales representative and the customer. In fact, it can improve the connection between the employer and employee, and even your relationship with your spouse or a friend.

Remember, listening is the most important skill-set or competency for excellent communication. This “gap in silence” technique can take your listening skills to a higher level. It is important to realize that communication is the connection between two or more parties. Empathetic listening is when you can feel the meaning behind the words and this “gap in silence” can in many cases enhance your empathetic listening while clarifying the meaning and desired outcome.

This “gap in silence” can be used even more effectively if you understand the behavioral style of the customer, employee or friend. Our Communication and Selling Workshops like “Stop Selling…Build Relationships” can help you understand behaviorally when silence may be the best response.

You can sell more by using the “gap in silence” technique and using it more effectively to close the sale when you understand the customer’s behavioral style and how it relates to their “prime buying motives”.

3 Signs of a Dysfunctional Company

Like a car with an engine that can't fire on all cylinders, a business that's dysfunctional may move forward for a while. But eventually it stops running.

Companies don't start out maladjusted, of course. It just tends to happen over time.

"The hallmark of a dysfunctional organization is a gap between reality and rhetoric," says Ben Dattner, a New York organizational psychologist. When resources are not used effectively or fairly, when plans are heavy on talk but weak on action or when barriers to communication cripple performance, you're dealing with a dysfunctional company.

Once diagnosed, the corrosive effects of such problems can be corrected. But make no mistake: It's neither easy nor immediate. You need to be tough-minded about identifying the source, particularly because it often starts at the top, where the power resides.

Here are three telltale signs that your company is unhealthy and some possible ways to get it well again.

1. You've got leaders who fake it.

Recently, management consultant Linda Hanson of Dallas-based LLH Enterprises was called in to help turn around a Houston construction company that had about 50 employees, annual gross revenues of $160 million and senior managers who were at each other's throats.

"People were snarly and mean," Hanson says. "There was in-fighting and lots of yelling. They had lost respect for one another and weren't working as a team." A prime example was the information technology (IT) manager. Although every department depended on him, the other managers complained that he "didn't care about their problems, didn't have time, didn't listen, didn't support them and marched to his own drum," Hanson says.

The atmosphere got really heated when the chief executive officer, in an attempt to change the culture, hired a new, buttoned-down sales manager who began instituting very different policies and rules. The hiring drew such fire from the other managers that Hanson was tapped to address the company's ailments.

She began with exercises in "process mapping." At a meeting of the managers that included the CEO and president, she asked everyone to look at work flow and operations, focusing on inbound orders, external sales, delivery and so on. She asked each manager to stick up a Post-it note whenever he saw a glitch or something wrong, without finger-pointing, of course. "That caused great excitement," Hanson says. "They began to see the duplications and the weaknesses." More importantly, the CEO and president, who were usually removed from such details, had their eyes opened to what was going on.

Later, she confidentially asked each manager to evaluate himself and all the other managers. Then she went back to each to report: "Here's how you see yourself and here's how the other managers see you." That stopped a lot of the backbiting.

Hanson also required the managers to meet one-on-one for lunch, for a golf game or the like, every month. Each executive was given specific and corny assignments for such meetings, such as being told to talk about a hobby or an interest — anything but work. The idea, of course, was to build relationships. Within four months, she says, managers set up meetings to discuss business scenarios rather than to fulfill assignments, which was the result she intended.

Still, the real problem stayed at the top. The CEO and his friend of 10 years, the president, "were both volatile people and they weren't changing," Hanson says. Even though they were asking senior managers to evaluate their work habits and improve peer relationships, the chief executives themselves were unwilling to do the assignments or to work at transformation.

"Within four to six months, the company was functioning much better," Hanson says. But it needed another nine months to a year to really come together. And that didn't happen. "You need to set a picture at the top of what the company should look like. It's very hard to say to the CEO, 'You're the problem.' "

Lesson: The discrepancy between what leaders say they want and what they really want often causes company dysfunction. You can't ask employees to do anything you're not willing to do yourself.

2. You've got bosses who like to point fingers.

No company can flourish in an environment that penalizes experimentation or trust. While that sounds obvious, on a day-to-day basis the nature of risk-taking inevitably means a great number of dead ends before any breakthrough. Very few managers remain calm after hitting the wall.

But how you handle those crashes — and how you encourage employees to pick up the pieces and start anew — makes all the difference between a company that encourages innovation and one that stagnates.

"When you see a pattern of blaming and people trying to protect themselves and their particular turf, something is wrong," says Russ Moserowitz of Franchise Insights, a Bedminster, N.J., consulting company.

Lesson: The remedy is to put your trust in the people you hire and give every employee sincere responsibility. Hands-on, my-way-or-the-highway entrepreneurs won't find this easy. But that's how the business gets better.

3. You've got a CEO who doesn't set priorities.

Fast-growing companies are often so intensely focused on moving to the next level that no one is actually in charge. That's how dysfunction creeps in and takes hold.

Paul Glen, an IT management consultant in Marina del Rey, Calif., tells about a 20-year-old software company that hired him to create a new product management department. The business had released several successful products and grown to 100 employees with 13 departments, each headed by a different executive. Every one of the managers reported directly to the CEO, so no one had to talk to anyone else about his department's work.

When Glen asked each executive what the new department would do, he got 13 different answers. It turned out that the company didn't need a new division at all. What it needed was someone to coordinate the company agenda and get the managers to share information.

The idea for a product management department was how the executives expressed their need for better coordination. "The product development department didn't take direction," Glen says. That meant the group simply created products and released them without checking with any other department. So sales didn't know about the features of the new products, or when to sell them. Support and consulting were also in the dark. They couldn't help customers implement products or fix any problems. And so it went.

"Each department flew off on its own, trying to do what was right." Priorities were constantly shifting. Decisions were continually made and unmade. "The CEO assumed the executives had the authority to make product decisions and it wasn't her job to tell them what to do," Glen says. While everyone had the very best of intentions, chaos reigned.

Lesson: Company leaders must set the mission and the agenda. A hands-off policy can only go so far.

Epilogue: Time for a checkup

Smaller businesses are both more susceptible and harder hit by the ripple effects of dysfunction. With a close-knit staff, it's easy to make allowances for people's tempers or bad moods or refusal to take responsibility. But, sooner or later, that kind of thinking catches up with you and the business.

Lesson: Take the time now to check the health of your workplace. And make the course corrections you need. Starting now.

From Microsoft's Small Business Website

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