Engage employees to keep them creative

Q: How can I get my employees to be more creative in improving our business?

A: To ensure success, a small business needs to have its employees fully engaged and committed to the owner's vision from the beginning. The whole really is greater than the sum of its parts, and one employee's creativity is sure to stimulate new ideas among others. It's a self-sustaining cycle that only gets better and adds value with time.

Creative environments are particularly important to millennials, the 80 million people born between 1980 and 1995 who soon will dominate the workforce. Millennials already have an edge over their elders in terms of their savviness with technology, cultural trends and connecting with their peers (who are your current and future customers). There are ways you can foster a creative environment to get the most from your employees, regardless of age.

Be flexible. Not all people do their best work between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Whenever possible, allow employees some leeway in their work hours. This also includes allowing them to work from home or elsewhere during the week. They also must be willing to show flexibility, however, such as being available for meetings when necessary.

Communicate early and often. Employees are more willing to give 100 percent when they know and believe in the reason for doing it. Regularly share what's going on in the business and the market. You can't always tell employees everything, but honesty from the boss goes a long way toward building trust. Encourage employees to contribute ideas and insights. If an idea sounds promising, let the employee who offered it take the lead if possible - or at least explain why not gently, and ask the worker to keep those ideas coming.

Be a coach, not a supervisor. This is particularly important for younger workers, who are experiencing many aspects of the working world for the first time. Give them the training they need to feel comfortable about doing their jobs and confident in taking the initiative. Sure, they'll make mistakes. By fostering a regular dialogue with your employees, you'll know better what happened and why, and what they can do to improve.

Keep resources up to date. Without investing in every technology, stay as current as possible so that employees will have the best tools available to do their jobs. Your millennial employees may be ideally suited to investigate new technologies and help determine whether it's better to upgrade or wait for something better.

F.E.A.R.

Making the transition toward doing more of what you love will involve change. Small or large, insignificant or dramatic – it doesn’t really matter – you will underestimate the difficulty involved in changing. This almost always due to the simple fact that change is unsettling and being unsettled instills fear – anything from discomfort to outright terror.

As part of our biological make up, we all have an amygdula – also known as the ‘lizard brain’. This is the evolutionary carry over from when many living organisms needed the ‘fight or flight’ warning system to survive. We still have one and every time we feel threatened, the amygdula triggers a survival response.

Once a survival response is triggered, we instinctively develop a ‘survival strategy’. Unfortunately our survival strategy is often informed by our past experiences and related beliefs – and not all beliefs are positive. As Henry Ford once said “If you believe you can or you believe you can’t – either way you are right”. When we create a strategy around the reasons we can’t accomplish something, the beliefs that support that strategy are called self limiting beliefs.

We all have them. The key is whether we will act on them. I like to refer to the acronym F.E.A.R – False Evidence Appearing Real. Your ability to confront your inner critic – your self limiting beliefs – will directly impact your power to change. And, if you are not able to manage change, it is unlikely you will be successful in executing your plan to do more of what you love.

The Trapeze Of Life

However we define our existing life – how we separate the meaningful aspects from the stressful, the wasteful from the productive – results in how we feel about our daily existence. Within the complexity of an individual’s existence – often cleverly hidden and obscure – are activities that we truly love. Sometimes we don’t know they are present until they are gone; often we forge ahead randomly looking, hope we will come across something to do that we love.Typically, we don’t have a strategy to identify and maximize doing the things we love in our lives.

This inner world of ambiguity becomes our comfort zone – something we become so accustomed to that it becomes ‘normal’. The more ‘normal’ it becomes, the more elusive doing more of what we love becomes.

Doing more of what you love in your life is great theory and no one I have met ever argues that it is not possible. The struggle comes with the attempt to change from a life where doing what you love is buried deep within a more complex life to a life where doing what you love becomes a priority, around which all other necessary activities take a back seat. It’s kind of like swinging on a trapeze…

Think of your existing life, with all it’s challenges and wonder, all it’s demands and stresses, all it’s joy and learning as a trapeze bar that you are gripping, swinging back and forth over a safety net. Over time, you get pretty good at it and with increased skill comes comfort. It becomes ‘normal’.

In the distance, is a second trapeze bar – swinging but empty. It represents a life with focuses on doing what you love first and most. Unfortunately to get there, you have to let go of the first one and travel through the air to grab the second one. And…there is no safety net.

Personal transformation of any kind is this scary! Once committed, at some point in a transformational journey, you will encounter the feeling of being between bars with no net!

How to deal with this? Follow this blog over the next month or call your coach!

Fear 101- Get Curious

Last post, I described the feeling we can experience as we introduce change into our lives as being similar to feeling like we are in mid air, between two trapeze bars with no apparent safety net. The most common reaction to this analogy is how afraid we would be. Fear is a common, naturally occurring emotion that can have a wide range of impacts on us – everything from paralysis to boundless energy!

Over the next few weeks, I want to investigate fear and suggest techniques you might try to overcome the fear you experience when looking at change.

The first things to try is getting curious. Fear is painful when you try to push it away. Don’t resist. Allow the fear to fill your whole body and be completely aware and curious of how it affects you. A funny thing happens when you do this, the fear usually disappears because you’re not afraid of it.

Remember those dreams where you’re being chased by something horrible? Fear is the same way. It’s chasing you, but once you stop running and turn around, it goes up in smoke, because it was an illusion.
Often fear is triggered by an event, a comment from someone, a thought. When the fear arrives, make a quick note about how it arose – what triggered it. Over time, you’ll begin to anticipate when a specific fear might arise and, in that anticipation, be more prepared to face it down. For some, journaling about the experience is a great way to embed the experience in a positive and useful way…and you always have notes to go back to to refresh your memory.

If getting started on a ‘fear reduction’ program is to much of a challenge, you can always get your coach to support you!

Too Many Choices! I’m Stuck!

At this point, if you have been sorting through the various alternatives that will lead you to doing more of what you love, you will likely have several solid candidates. Using your personal values as the filter has lent accuracy and credibility to each…but you’re stuck!

Randomly moving between the choices will only serve to confuse the process and, depending on your energy and mood, you will see the same choice in different light on a different day. Yikes!

Try the ‘reverse’ approach.

Recently, a friend moved from a larger to a smaller home. She had been a lifelong collector of art and was struggling where to put the individual pieces – largely because there was no way there was enough wall space for everything in the new home. Something had to go…but what?

The reality is that, when confronted with more choices, the brain struggles to make decisions. An effective process of elimination will make the difference. The difficulty for my friend was that she started with her favourite pieces and worked down. Since she was fond of most of the work, eliminating anything became very problematic.

I suggested she start by eliminating the pieces that, under no circumstances, would work in the new house. Size shape and color scheme were actually quite easy ways to rule out pieces that could not practically  and appropriately fit in the new home. She actually ruled out 2/3 of the art work.

What she had left were not only beautiful pieces, it was easy to find a place in the new home. Unstuck!
The same process works when looking at alternatives for new directions in your life. You may want to do all of them – and maybe you can some day – but right now, which are the ones that just won’t work? Once those have been  set aside, the choices left behind will make it simpler and easier to decide where to begin the transition to doing more of what you love.

If this doesn’t, call your coach!

To Do More Of What You Love, Start With A Map

Once a person is seriously engaged in changing their lives to do more of what they love, it becomes quite apparent that there are many moving parts to the process. The various elements are diverse, often unclear, and sometimes actually compete with one another. Organizing this wide array of information is an imposing task and this is the step where many people give up in confusion or frustration.

Fear not, my friends, there is definitely a way!

When I decided to start a coaching practice, there was a variety of critical elements to address for me to launch my business: coach training and certification, financial aspects – both personal and business, marketing plan, tools and assessments, physical location, professional affiliations to name a few.

That’s when I discovered mind mapping. Starting with the central point naming the goal (become a coach), each of the critical elements has its own stream, with its own elements related to it. Once complete, the map gives you a visual image of your entire project and allows you to create the individual action steps to complete each piece. Mind mapping is the creation of Tony Buzan and his website provides a great explanation of the process. If you want to test another version, a free version of mind mapping can be found here.

Of course, if you are still stuck, you can call your coach!

Business plan can boost odds of success

Q: Why prepare a business plan? I'm very experienced in my field and don't need financing. My uncle says I have a good idea and should just get started before somebody else beats me to it.

A: The need for business planning is all about managing risk. The greater the risk, the greater the need to investigate, research and think through all relevant aspects of starting or operating a business.

Some business ventures or situations carry little risk. Maybe your business gives you a nice, stable income, you don't particularly want or need to grow, or you and your employees could survive if your business suddenly shut down. In those cases, you may not need a formal business plan, and need only keep your eye on your market and on others who could affect your business.

But the more you are risking, in terms of dollar investment, time spent deferring something else you need or want to do, or maybe forgoing income for your family, the more you need to formalize your plan.

Veteran SCORE counselor and small-business owner Matt Fitzgerald says: "The value lies in the process of researching and thinking about your business in a systematic and critical way … not in producing a finished document."

Avoiding mistakes

You'll need a document, though, to share your ideas and plan with others. The plan is not only important for starting up, but for running the business as well. It takes time now, but can avoid costly, perhaps disastrous, mistakes later.

For startups, it gives you an indication of how successful you might be. For existing businesses, it tells you the condition of your operation. Can you take advantage of opportunities that may arise or deal effectively with challenges that may occur?

You can start or run a successful business without a business plan, and you can fail with a good one. An appropriate plan just increases your chances of success.

SCORE counselor

Fitzgerald suggests a thorough review of a business plan from someone like a SCORE counselor. "Getting a third party to serve as a sounding board will provide valuable, unbiased feedback on how to improve things, look at the plan from a lender's or investor's perspective, and raise questions you may have overlooked," he says.

Fitzgerald will teach a SCORE workshop on business planning on June 16. Learn more and register at www.scorehouston.org.