This Tip Sheet Reveals:
- Three Essential Strategies that will assure a profitable Winning Business!
- The surprising result that happens when the strategies are used.
First, right on in caring enough about how to make your business more successful to get this Tip Sheet. It shows us you already have the quality most required for success in business. That quality is, you naturally look for ways to keep your success happening. So, leverage this strength and look for ways YOU can use these strategies. Here is how you will do that. I’m going to give you an “Action Step” with each strategy and you’ll no doubt have your own great ideas.
You’re about to see how things you may not have thought about dramatically affect your business success. Ready? Let’s get going.
First, let me ask you a question, “What’s the issue at work that you lose the most sleep over?”
You may have answered that question with “getting more customers” or “cash flow” or “surviving in a fast-changing economy” or gone right to “my staff.” And remarkably, all of these are strongly affected by all of the strategies we’re going to share with you.
In all my 25+ years of coaching business owners, managers and their teams, the most common issue we talk about is, “How do I get my employees/team to work better together, and do what they are supposed to do in the right way?”
This is no minor issue; it’s so common that it is often thought to be unavoidable in business. Well I’ve made it the mission in my coaching to help my clients have this be a non-issue, because if it exits realizing the full potential of your business is impossible.
All of the strategies I’m about to share with you are integral elements of the “Business Winners S.M.A.R.T. System™”
Strategy #1 – Focus on What’s Right/what’s working to solve problems:
It’s a common practice to think that finding and fixing problems is the way to improve your business. Yet it has been revealed by neuroscience in just the past few years, that identifying problems FIRST inhibits the creative thinking necessary to have a high performing business. And don’t worry your problems will get fixed. We often hear the advice “find your problems and fix them;” this is logical advice, except it rarely leads to creative solutions to those problems. I bet you’ve noticed that. There are two factors at play. The first being the Reticular Activating System (RAS) which affects what we pay attention to. It’s like buying a new car and immediately you start seeing all these other cars, just like yours on the road that you hardly noticed before.
Simply put, whatever you focus your attention on is what you will see more and more of. So, when you focus on the problems you are having, that is what you will continue to see more and more of – problems.
The second factor is more recent knowledge from neuroscience identifying which areas of the brain are activated by the conversations we have. A conversation that focuses on what’s wrong immediately activates our lizard brain (fight or flight) where creative thinking is NOT possible. On the other hand, if you focus on finding what is working and identifying what generates success you will keep finding more and more ways to be successful. It’s a subtle difference yet amazingly effective.
Star athletes and great coaches use this method for training and achieving the highest results. They visualize themselves performing at the best possible level. A good example is the world-renowned West German freestyle ski team that won the European Cup SIX TIMES between 1976 and 1982. After training on the slopes, they routinely had sessions where they visualized themselves perfectly covering every bump and movement of their routine. They focused on doing it well and they did this by training just as hard mentally as they did physically. The result was unparalleled success. And mine and my client’s experience is that this kind of focus on doing things well, also leads to exponential success in business too.
Rarely do these star athletes and great coaches ever reinforce mistakes or problems by putting attention on the problem. They only reinforce the positive actions and outcomes that they want to see happen. When any problem is blamed on the actions or behaviors of people, any person will likely feel criticized and become defensive and resentful. People who feel criticized, defensive, and resentful are rarely solution focused nor creative in their thinking. And this leads us to strategy #2.
Starter Action Step: Ask yourself, have you and your team been more focused on finding problems or leveraging what is going right? You’ll hear more about this in the bonus we will send you “What’s Right Questions”.
Strategy #2 – Consistently acknowledge and appreciate others (employees and customers)
Strategy #2 goes hand in hand with strategy #1. Actually, it is generated by strategy #1. When much of the time you or your team are pointing out what people are doing wrong, the feedback you are giving to that person is that they are incapable, stupid, or less than others in some way. If that’s mostly what they hear from you or others, what will they begin and continue to think about themselves? And how will they likely be acting as a result? And how will that affect the job they do for you?
The simple act of acknowledging what people do well and appreciating them for the positive good that they have made for the customer or the business (even the smallest thing) is the most effective way of having that behavior/outcome happen again and again.
And here is an extra perk. A powerful second benefit of acknowledging and appreciating what you see in others is that it is the best way to improve a quality in yourself that you want to have more of. When you see it in others and actively acknowledge it to them, you are ingraining that behavior more deeply in yourself as a habit. Neuro-scientists tell us that you literally build physical connections in your brain called neuronal pathways. You hardwire the habit of success you want.
Funny thing about the human brain – when you tell someone to not do something – like ‘don’t do XYZ, the subconscious mind does not recognize negative words. So, what your subconscious hears is ‘Do XYZ’. What happened when you told your 5-year-old “don’t drop the glass”? Invariably they drop the glass. Instead, state the positive action of what you want to happen like “hold on to the glass.”
Again, the more you look for the good and great in what others are doing and genuinely acknowledge and appreciate it to them, the more those things will happen.
🡺 Starter Action Step: Think about each of your staff and find at least one thing you appreciate about them. Bonus points for telling them!
Strategy #3 – Get rid of negative attitude people quickly:
Keeping negative people too long will kill your business success. Negativity is all around us in the messages we hear and read in the media and negativity dominates in conversations with people all the time. Some people have been exposed to negativity so much that they never or rarely see things in a positive light. It you allow people like this to be a part of your team, they will undermine any positive energy and innovation from occurring.
It is possible to turn negative people around, but only if they are willing to put in the effort to essentially overcome a long-ingrained habit. If they aren’t willing and committed to doing that, you must let them go – and the sooner the better.
Starter Action Step: Rank each of your staff from zero (not at all positive) to ten (always positive). Awareness is the first step to change.
The surprising outcome these strategies produce that explode your business success:
The effect of implementing these strategies in your business is a workplace that lives from a place of Vitality, Collaboration, and Innovation. What that means is that each person in your business enjoys coming to work each day, they are engaged and happy in their work because they feel like they are contributing to a bigger purpose than simply getting a paycheck. They genuinely co-operate with one another on the job and come up with innovative solutions to problems on their own. The effect of this is that it becomes easy and routine to over-deliver to your customers.
And this results in the best marketing program possible. You may already know it as Referral Marketing. It’s a rare business that achieves a successful Referral Marketing program where customers are coming to you seemingly from out of nowhere. People only refer things because it makes them look good, and people look good by telling others about a great experience they have had themselves. The positive atmosphere and good feeling generated by the happiness and over-delivering service that naturally occurs in your business, just plain attracts customers/clients to you. Nothing is better than that, and it’s easy to achieve this kind of atmosphere in your workplace when you employ the three strategies.
The ultimate strategy this tip sheet is all about is embedded in the statement: “The most effective thing you can do is simply over-deliver”.
- Over-deliver in leveraging what is working rather than focusing on problems.
- Over-deliver in acknowledgment of your staff, vendors, and customers.
- Over-deliver in keeping your business positive.
The result is that you and your people will naturally and consistently over-deliver service to your customers and they in turn will refer like crazy for you. Extensive research on workplace business culture reveals that high performing cultures (less than 25% of all businesses) produce three to five times what the best of the low performing cultures produces.
And this can be your business too!
Thanks for stepping up and requesting this tip sheet, we appreciate your commitment to the greater success of your business and to making a positive difference for everyone involved.