Identifying the Best Candidate
Choosing one candidate for a position out of five can be overwhelming, let alone fifty. Where does an employer begin to differentiate?
Your Business Success is in the Hands of Your Employees
Getting the right people on the job is mission critical for all companies. Employees, whether staff or management, can make or break an organization.
Goal Setting: Find the ROI – Measure Your Goals
By Valerie G. Cardenas “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” – Paul J. Meyer Have you heard this business quotation before? It’s one of my favorites because it’s absolutely true. Unless you have a strategy for measuring your goals, you have no way of keeping your business on track and no way of knowing when you’ve achieved success. Good management of goals begins with setting measurable goals. (You may recall my reference to SMART goals in previous blogs – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible goals.) If you’ve set measurable goals, then you’ve asked some basic questions, such as: How much? How many? By when? Now you’re ready to measure. Choose Measurements that Can be Managed for ROI Every business is different, so measurement strategies and types vary. But here are a few standards to get you thinking about measuring your business goals and determining your Return on Investment (ROI): General Business Measurements Dollars per contracts signed Number of call-backs per 100 jobs Increased your profit by [insert your goal percentage here] Sales Measurements New accounts as a percentage of total accounts Number of new accounts per day Percentage of referral business to your total business Ask yourself: How can you track your success? Or, what does success look like to you? Remember the quote we started with: You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it. Set up Dynamic, Motivational Measurements of Achievement Once you establish measurements, then share them and your checkpoints reached – even if the sharing is just with yourself. We humans need to celebrate our achievements! Create the visual that works for you. It might be a chart that shows your upward progress, a graph that compares, counts, or illustrates checkpoints reached. It might be pins on a map, numbers on a spreadsheet,…
Even SMART Goals Need Smart Action Steps to Succeed
Goals are fundamental to turning a business dream into business success, and SMART goals are the standard in business planning. Most of my clients have heard of SMART goals, and I suspect you have too. But just as a refresher, let me remind you that SMART goals are: Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Tangible Even SMART goals can fail you unless they’re accompanied by smart action strategies, and that’s what I want to talk about today: Smart Action Steps to Achieving Goals. Put Your Business Goals on Your Calendar The easiest and one of the most effective action steps you can take is to put your goal on your calendar. In other words: Give yourself a deadline. When should this goal be attained? Until you move action steps and your goals onto your calendar, you have great ideas but no real means of achieving them. Make Time to Succeed Set aside the time to reach your goal. Too often, we ‘add’ goals to our business days, somehow hoping our days will expand to meet them. (Wishful thinking!) As long as goals have no time allotted to them, we have no plan to achieve them. How to Plan Your Steps and Checkpoints For most business goals – whether it’s sales, productivity, or other business-related goals – you’ll increase your chance of success exponentially if you have prioritized action steps and checkpoints to keep you on track. So, block out the time for the action steps you need to take to reach your goal. Creating successful action steps: Think through the steps you need to take to reach your goals; make them specific. Prioritize your action steps and set target dates. Identify checkpoints along the way to your ultimate goal. Move your action steps and checkpoints onto your calendar, allowing sufficient time for…
Goal-Setting – Still the Overlooked Secret to Success
Often it’s the basics that determine the difference between thriving in your life and business or merely surviving in business. Goal-setting is one of those bottom-line, essential basics. Mark McCormick in his book What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School tells of a Harvard study conducted between 1979 and 1989. Researchers found that the 3 percent of 1979 MBA graduates who had created clear, written goals were earning, in 1989, on average, 10 times more than 97 percent of their graduating class. They also found that the 13 percent of the Class of ’79 MBA graduates who had set goals, even though they were not in writing, were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent of students who had expressed no goals at all. Goals and the clarity of goals made a lifetime of difference for these Harvard MBA graduates. Goal-Setting Process In my consulting practice and workshops, I often include a 9-step goal-setting process. I’ve found that one of the most overlooked steps in the process – the one so many of us dearly want to skip over – is one of the most intuitive. That skipped step: identifying obstacles and challenges that are likely to appear along the way and thinking through solutions. These obstacles are usually quite easy to identify. Begin with the top two: you and everyone else. Consider the obstacles you put in your own path: procrastination? Chaotic time management? Inability to delegate? Then consider the obstacles others contribute: Interruptions? Lack of support? Lack of training? Once you’ve identified your obstacles, then set about finding workable solutions. I encourage you to hold to your goals. Resist the urge to reduce your goals; instead, improve your solutions. And remember, well-planned and supported goals – the ones most likely to succeed –…
Realizing the Personal Aspect of All Productivity
Recently in one of my business coaching workshops, a client hit the nail right on the head when it comes to company productivity. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said, “What you’re saying is that company productivity is really all about personal productivity. It’s all about us.” You can imagine my response: “Excellent,” I said. “Gold Stars.” All productivity, whether your company is a small firm or a global corporation, derives from the personal. And what does that mean to you, the leader or owner of a company? It means that your company’s productivity begins (or ends) with your personal leadership and productivity. You get your team to be more productive by setting an example of personal productivity. Leadership Matters in Productivity Productivity starts at the top, in your office. Think of who has the most invested in your company or department. I’d wager that that person is you. If you own the business, it’s your money on the line. If you’re the managing executive of a department, it’s your career and reputation on the line. Your investment in productivity is huge. Now, consider the essential nature of productivity. If I’m on your sales force, I can bring in all the work in the world, but if it can’t be done within budget and without cost overruns or rework or, at worst, orders cannot even be filled, then we do not get the net result we’re looking for. In fact, we do our business more harm than good when we over-sell and under-deliver; i.e., when productivity cannot meet needs. This is no small order, either, and is especially challenging now that many workforces have been reduced and everyone has to be more productive without having a nervous breakdown. Productivity can mean the difference between survival or not…
Getting Excited About Productivity
— the best-kept secret to business success in any economy Many businesspeople I consult with hear the word productivity and immediately fall into a deep sleep. There’s just nothing exciting about the word. But I have to tell you that the difference productivity can make in your life and business is very, very exciting. Improve your productivity and you improve your chances of spending quality time away from business, leaving you more time with the ones you love. How to Improve Productivity Productivity is fundamental to meeting any business goal. And in challenging economic times, being strong on the fundamentals can be a make or break for a business. But how do you improve and increase your productivity? This is one of the essential business concepts I tackle during some of my first meetings with clients. We go through many steps and use several different tools to reveal the truth underlying the hours spent at the office. When we do, we almost always discover that too many of the hours we spend at work are virtually “lost hours”, which in turn contribute to long days – and weekends – at work instead of play. I want to share with you one of the first steps toward discovering these lost hours and the holes in your own productivity: Know – and understand – what your time is worth. Your productivity will always be tied to how you spend your time, so seriously evaluate how you spend each minute and hour at work. What are your high-payoff activities, and how much time do you spend on them? How much time are you spending on low-payoff activities? How much time is lost to no-payoff activities? Once you’ve taken this step, you should see some opportunities for increasing your productivity. And when you increase…
Improve Productivity with Communication
Written By Paul J. Meyer. (Reprinted with permission) Business leaders often state that one of the greatest needs in the workplace is people who can communicate. Once goal setting and planning are accomplished, goals and plans must be communicated to others whose cooperation is needed. Effective communication unifies employees and their work to the overall purpose and direction of the organization. Through communication, you raise your organization’s levels of energy, enthusiasm, and productivity! Mastering the art of communication is a complex process demanding time and ongoing effort. But choosing to continually improve your communication skills increases your productivity dramatically and the productivity of those around you.
“Business Communication” Improves Productivity
Here is an excerpt from the latest business article we have added to our library. Improve Productivity with Communication Business leaders often state that one of the greatest needs in the workplace is people who can communicate. Once goal setting and planning are accomplished, goals and plans must be communicated to others whose cooperation is needed. Effective communication unifies employees and their work to the overall purpose and direction of the organization. Through communication, you raise your organization’s levels of energy, enthusiasm, and productivity! Mastering the art of communication is a complex process demanding time and ongoing effort. But choosing to continually improve your communication skills increases your productivity dramatically and the productivity of those around you. Read full article >
