June 2018 « Confidence Coach

Getting on the Same Page with Employee/Employer Relationships

Here’s a simple exercise you can use if you are having difficulties getting on the same page with your employees, managers or supervisors. Perhaps you can’t get on the same page due to a past conflict or a personality issue. I’m going to give you a solution today that is a question you can ask that will transform and improve difficult working relationships. It helps owners and leaders get on the same page with their employees, creates strong bonds, builds collaboration and helps people work together better.

Is there someone in your organization that immediately comes to mind? Someone that’s hard to work with them or you’re having a struggle, problem or an issue with? Then this question should help turn the situation around.

This is the step you need to take and the question to ask them. Get them in your office or in a place where you can talk to them one-on-one for a few minutes without any interruptions. Ask them first if it’s okay to ask a personal question, and if they are agreeable, ask them “What matters most to you in your work here at this company and personally in your life?”

Now, you may just want to ask “What matters most to you about the work that you’re doing here in the company?” And that’s far enough. But, if you feel like you can go deeper, you should also ask them the question “What matters most to you personally?”

And then be quiet and listen.

What this does is it changes their whole feeling about you because what we are finding by using this question is that nobody in their life or very few people in their life are really sitting down and going – Okay, what’s going on with you? What matters to you and what is happening in your life that might be affecting this work thing or what are you really struggling with at work? And by asking this question, you open the door to have a conversation.

Now, the second part of this is after asking this question, you have to be willing to listen. You have to be willing to turn yourself off and really listen to what they’re saying. And then after they have answered that you might want to follow up with the question of “why?” Why does that matter to you and why is that important to you?

In doing this, you will open a door of understanding to be able to manage, to work with and understand what makes this person tick. We have found that it has undone a lot of problems in relationships – managers vs. employees, owners vs. employees, and has turned those dynamics that are “versus” into, “Oh, you’re a human being too!”. Your people have things that matter to them, and you need to know what those are in order to lead them well.

My challenge to you today is if you know somebody who immediately came to mind (or a bunch of people!), take five minutes and ask a couple of people this question, and then let us know how that works out.

If you’d like to know more about how to interact and build strong, healthy relationships in your business, reach out to us at Confidence Coach. We’d love to help you with this. Also, if this has been valuable to you or you know somebody that this would be helpful to, please pass this information on to them.

by Scott Ballard , June 24, 2018

Do You Know How Your Employees REALLY Feel About Your Business?

You know how you really feel about your business, but have you ever thought about what your employees really feel about your business? It may be that you haven’t thought about this or don’t think it’s important, but then again, it may be something that you are afraid to ask!

Do you really know how your employees feel about your business? About working there? What does working there feel like to them?

I know some of you are thinking — I don’t really want to know; and that’s very real and understandable. However, everyone needs to think about this because how your employees feel about your business is what they’re going to reflect to your paying customers and to one another. This also creates a culture which is either really positive, collaborative and progressive, or it’s a culture where there is negativity, backbiting and all kinds of other problems that slow down the progress in your business.

You may ask what can be done to help people like you with this challenge? At Confidence Coach, we come in as a third party and do what we call an anonymous survey to find out how your employees feel about your business. We ask them their opinion on how it’s running, how they feel about their managers, and maybe what the systems are. We do this anonymously so that they feel protected and they can be totally honest because they know we won’t reveal their names. We create the survey and use questions in such a way to really find out what and how they’re thinking, and then we’re able to provide that information to you as the owner or CEO of the business. This begins to help you to get a feeling of how your culture is at this point. It will help you know how employees are interacting and how that’s being projected to your customers. This is incredibly valuable information.

We have a lot of success stories of people who have used this tool to help figure out what is going on in their company with their employees. It’s kind of a secret weapon we provide for people. We normally do this on a quarterly basis. This enables you to have ongoing information so you can make good decisions and can understand what’s going on in your culture. We spend a lot of money as business owners and CEOs to figure out who our paying customer is, what they’re about and what’s going on with them, but we miss the opportunity if we are forgetting about our own employees, our “first customers” and what’s happening with them. This is a tool to do that.

If you’re interested, please reach out and contact us. We’d love to demonstrate how this can work for you. Also, if you know somebody else that this would be help, please pass this on. Maybe they have some questions about what’s going on with their employees or want to know how their employees are feeling. If so, forward this article to them and then subscribe to our YouTube channel where I’ve also talked about this.

Make it a great day!

by Scott Ballard , June 17, 2018

Start Your Meetings With Wins!!!

Do you know how to start your meetings with wins so that everyone will want to attend your next meeting and be excited about it??

As we work with clients, one of the things we are seeing is that they’re having a lot of meetings and/or doing a lot of strategizing. They’re meeting with their team all the time. Those meetings tend to be a real drain, not only for you as the owner or manager, but also for the team. So our tip for you today is an idea that can help stimulate and make meetings much more productive so that you can get a greater result out of them.

Here’s the simple tip that you can add to each meeting at the very beginning once everybody is there. This has nothing to do with your agenda or the project that you’re working on, nor does it have to do with what you want to talk about.

Start your meetings with everybody in the group taking 30 seconds and sharing what they’re most excited about in their life right now.

For example, it could be at work, it could be personal, it could be family related, it could be a recreation or whatever they’re doing — but give everybody a chance to do this and share. What you’ll find is that mentally by doing this, their engagement will increase 10 times just because now they’re talking and thinking about something that they’re truly engaged in. There’s energy around this and it will then transfer on into what you’re talking about in your meeting. They’ll have this positive mindset and be ready for the meeting.

So this is how we change meetings from being basically the “death of a business” to something that people look forward to! Recognize and let people acknowledge the “wins” in their life. Because if you do this at every meeting, as you go on, people will come with the anticipation of sharing what they just did. Maybe someone will say, “Oh, I want to share with everyone that I just finished my first half marathon” or, “I just did this…” and they will say what they are excited about. This is how to change meetings from being this thing that people dread and they think are wasted time killers to making them productive, exciting and a great experience.

If you found this idea helpful, please share it with somebody that’s a fellow business owner. We’d love to hear back from you if you have any comments about this as well. To learn more about this or other ways to have a great meeting, schedule a free catalytic conversation or you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Make it a great day!

by Scott Ballard , June 10, 2018

What Is Your Strategy?

As the owner, manager, CEO or entrepreneur, what is your strategy to improve your employee engagement? What are you doing? Do you even have a strategy? If so, how are you following through on it and how do you know if it’s improving? How are you tracking that or are you even doing this at all? Maybe you are at a point where you’ve tried a bunch of different things and nothing’s really gotten results or helped with the engagement level.

This is an area that we specialize in.

We not only work in this area but we are passionate about it! We have employee engagement tools to help you do this too.

If you’re looking for a process or program that you can install, we have one that can be maintained, tracked and you will see transformational results happening in your employees’ engagement.

We do this through a process we call The Dream Employee which is based on every individual getting the engagement that they need as they work for your company. As we take them through the process within your company, within your culture, you can see the progress of the engagement and how the whole program works. So if you’ve been out there and you’ve had some failures or tried some things that haven’t worked, and you’re like, okay, what do I do now? Or you’re just kind of treading water, so to speak, reach out to us. We’d love to give you a free demonstration of how The Dream Employee works. We can help you to get into a process that is ongoing, building and supportive so you’re not holding everything. You do everything yourself, but we can partner with you to provide that support. So, reach out to us.

Also, it’d be great if this has been helpful or you know somebody that needs this kind of help, share this with them. We’ve also got a YouTube channel you can subscribe to if you would like to follow us there. Make it a great day.

by Scott Ballard , June 3, 2018