March 2018 « Confidence Coach

Does Everyone Have a Dream or Goal for Their Life?

Let me explain why the question “Does everyone have a dream or goal for their life?” is so important — because the answer is definitely “Yes!”

The Dream Employee

We work with companies who hire us to come in and implement a process with their team members called “The Dream Employee.” The Dream Employee is basically the concept of finding out for each one of your team members what their dream, goal or aspiration is for their life. If you can find out what really motivates them and have a conversation with them about how you can support, encourage and help them to achieve their goal, this in turn helps them see the connection between their work or job and the contribution they are making in your business with what they are after. By figuring out what really motivates them internally in their personal life and showing them the connection between their work and their goals, we find that we’re able to transform whole cultures, have greater employee engagement, and improve the feelings and emotions of people. They bring their best self to work.

Goodwill

When you start talking about the one, two or three things that they are most motivated about personally, you’re depositing goodwill into them. In doing so, when they come to work on Monday morning, they come with batteries! Meaning – they come to work ready to go because they understand the connection, they feel your support, and they know that you know what is really important to them in their life. This could be a myriad of different things — maybe it’s putting braces on their daughter’s teeth, it could be getting a second car, a dream vacation to Italy, learning a new language, finishing a college degree, getting their GED, learning woodworking or painting, or maybe running their first half marathon. It could be any number of things — the list of people’s dreams and goals are endless!!

But what we’re saying is, if you invest time systematically into what’s most important to them, then ultimately they’ll start to see the connection between their life and their work. They know you care! So then when you speak about what’s most important to you or what the vision or mission of the company is, they will respond to that in a much more positive and open way.

The other benefit of this is when you do have to have those difficult conversations about their performance or attitude or about something that went wrong or needs correcting, you have made positive deposits into their life by supporting their goal. This helps those difficult conversations go much better and there’s a lot less negative pushback because they know that you really care about what they really care about.

Celebrate the Wins

This also creates a whole culture of amazing momentum. It’s a culture where as people are achieving things personally, we all celebrate (just like when the company wins)! We celebrate them as individuals as they accomplish whatever goals they have; doing so builds unity, collaboration and a winning attitude in your business.

We get great pleasure doing this with companies. If you are interested in learning more about The Dream Employee, reach out to us today. We’d love to talk to you about it. We can also introduce you to other companies that are doing this and having great success. Make it a great day!

by Scott Ballard , March 25, 2018

Respect Multiplier

I want to talk to you about a subject today that is not talked about a lot in business anymore, but back in the day, say 30, 40, 50 years ago, it was a big part of leadership management. The topic is what we call the respect multiplier.

One of the things that we do to help leaders with their employees is to talk about the three levels of management. We all know the first level of management which is managing people – their tasks, their productivity, helping them become more efficient, reporting, and doing all that kind of thing. So that’s all book learning and school learning, and that’s pretty fundamentally out there for anybody to get to and look at.

Then the next level of leadership which has become so popular in the last 10 years is this whole idea of the next level of “being” leadership – this idea of leading your people. You know if you want them to go somewhere, you have to lead. You have to set the example. You have to be what you want them to be. You have to cast the vision. All of this is vitally important. Every successful company has a foundation of management and they have a foundation of leadership – somebody out front with courage, confidence and commitment to go to the next level.

But the next level is here and now and, in our culture in the Western world, this is critically important — and that’s the idea of respect.

How do you develop and create a respect culture between all of your teammates whether you have a thousand or a hundred thousand employees? How do you create a culture of respect? And why is respect so critical in this day and age in the time that we’re living in?

Here ere are a couple of things about respect that I want you to think about and take away.

1. You can’t give away something you don’t have.

If you don’t have your own self-respect, then you can’t really give respect to somebody else. And, if you’re operating in a culture that does not show respect for each person, who they are and their innate value of who they are, and their abilities and talents and contribution, and that can’t be mutually respected, then you’ve got all kinds of problems. You have retention and turnover problems. You have low productivity. You have incredible time wasting. You have people just going through the motions. What you have is a cycle that eight out of ten businesses suffer from right now, and that is you’re just barely holding level.

To go past management and leadership, and to really get into the new world of collaborating in unity, joint venture, and really getting people in the sense that they’re on a winning team and everybody’s valued as a player, you have to implement, be a role model, live out and institute this whole idea of respecting people. It can be as simple as listening well. As simple as saying please and thank you. It can be as simple as saying,”You know that is something that you do really well! I respect your talent and ability in that area.”

2. Respect is also the way you operate at work.

Do you clean up after yourself after you use an office or a meeting room? Do you show up on time for meetings? Do you ask other people in the company about themselves? Are you somebody that is presenting themselves in a respectful way? Do you end your meetings on time respecting other people’s time in the business and in the company? Are you somebody that is taking care of yourself, meaning respecting yourself from that standpoint?

We have created a whole list of respect indicators that we’d love to send out to you (all you have to do is ask for it). It’s a list of things or a checklist to see where you’re at on the whole idea of respect and whether that’s a big part of your culture or not.

Think about this as a closing thought. Who are the people that have had the greatest influence in your life? Maybe it was a coach, a teacher, a manager, a CEO, or somebody that was a mentor in your life. Then think about the correlation of their influence and impact on your life and then how much respect you had for them. Then think about the influence you can have in a positive way on all of your team members if you started to institute and live out by example, respecting every person — whether that’s the janitor or the vice president of sales or whoever that is.

This is a huge thing that you can implement, talk about and everybody benefits. Everybody gets it and everybody wins in a company full of people respecting one another. Reach out if you want a copy of the respect indicators.

by Scott Ballard , March 18, 2018

Finding the “Why” of Your Employees

Finding the “why” of your employees is critically important in order for you to get the most leverage out of their talent and ability as they help you build your company — whether you have 10 or 10,000 employees. Finding the why and connecting their why with their job or the work that they do in your company, and then helping them to identify that, get clear about that, and live that out in their life — both within their work in your company or also within their life, and how one should support the other. This is an ecosystem that can provide you with long-term internally motivated employees by finding their why.

Why are they working at your company? Why are they doing the work that they’re doing? What is the purpose of their job? Are they clear about it being a vehicle for them to achieve the things that they want to achieve in their life? Have you helped them draw the connection between their job and and their big “why”?

This is an area where you have to start asking these questions — even in the interviewing process when you’re onboarding somebody. Why are you here? How do you see this as a fit? How does this fit into your life? How does this fit into the big “why” of your life? And then, support them in that.

So “why” is a great question. It’s a simple question that can dramatically improve your employee engagement with all your employees. It’s a conversation that you’ll always find fruitful in managing, supporting and leading your team. If they understand there “why” then you can communicate better what the company’s “why” is and then you can correlate or connect the two of those together. When people get clear about their “why”, they gain confidence. They get committed to the task. They have a sense of courage that takes them to a new level and performance.

Everybody’s looking for an edge in business. And one of them is finding the “why” of your employees, of your team, of your managers, of your leadership. When you can do that and connect the “why” for them personally with the “why” for the company, then you’ve got something! That is what we call an unfair advantage in the marketplace because your people are internally motivated with the big “why” being the secret sauce of your advantage. Overall your competition.

We look forward to hearing what you’re finding when you’re asking “why” questions. Let us know because we’d love to talk to you about it.

by Scott Ballard , March 11, 2018

The Truth About Your Business

What’s the truth about your business?

What is it’s value?

What’s the purpose, product or service you bring to your customers?

What is in the way of solving your customer’s pain or problem?

Is this something that is going to change or evolve over the next 2-3 years?

The answer to all those questions about whether things are going to change or evolve is yes! It certainly will change, because as business in the world is speeding up, change is happening at a faster and faster pace.

So the purpose of the question “what is the truth about your business” is to see if you are prepared to take on these challenges of rapid and faster change as you go forward.

Have you ever looked at your product or service through the eyes of your customer and to the changes that are happening in their life? Have you anticipated what their changing needs are going to be six months from now, a year from now, or 18 months to 3 years from now? If not, then how are you going to get ahead of the curve? What are you doing to provide the solution that is going to be relevant and exciting to your customer around their pain or problem? What’s the solution you can bring to the table that’s going to be dramatically different than what it is today.

We want you to think about that. We want you to realize that this is where opportunity lies.

The companies that have the best future ahead of them are answering these questions and figuring it out. We’re excited to talk to you more about that. Thanks for reading today!

by Scott Ballard , March 4, 2018