Cycle 4

Here is a thought provoker for you: I often get asked, how can I motivate my employees?

The answer is: by creating an environment where they motivate themselves. I have a complete system, Success With People, and we train/coach teams of people for a year in our Customer Champions program. However, some people prefer simple steps to ponder.

Here are four cornerstones for success. You can build the house of your career or business many ways with different cornerstones, but here are four. If you work these systematically in a cycle you can achieve great results. (I admit more detail is needed, but that would take a really long newsletter.)

#1 Desire: You have to have a strong desire to succeed which leads you to commit yourself to focus on what's truly important rather than what seems urgent. Leaders or employees without strong desire do not commit, and therefore are average or poor performers even if they work long hours.

#2 Information: Desire initiates your journey and sustains you through challenges, yet wise use of information enables you to hire-manage-develop-retain great people, discern competitive threats, identify opportunities and build upon your success.

#3 Repetition: Otherwise known as Systematic Power, your ability to develop, repeat and evolve best practices enables you to deliver a more consistently positive employee, customer and vendor experience. The outcome is superior results, however you define your pursuits.

#4 Accountability: Success is elusive and/or unsustainable if you do not hold your people and processes accountable to delivering a "perfect" client experience and to achieve clear, measurable results. Your processes for accountability are repeated often to catch minor mistakes before they become major issues.

Check out the discussion questions below and add your own. You may identify some ways for your individual performers or organization as a whole to improve certain processes, behaviors or objectives.

Meeting Ideas

CYCLE 4 is one way to simplify your approach to improving your leadership skills and/or company culture. Although there is a lot of detail missing in this brief email, there is value in having a discussion with your people about these four cornerstones of your business because they exist whether you like it or not.

Here are some questions to consider this topic with your team: For the best conversation be honest and candid.

1. Desire: What burning passion do we have as an organization and how does it apply to our core business strategy? How about as individuals?
2. Information: What information are we gathering to support our business, or hold ourselves accountable, that is great? How can we leverage it even more? What information should we be gathering, but are not, and how should we present it serves us best?
3. Repetition: Start simple, but what best practices have you defined as a system? How can you more consistently follow those systems? How do they need to be updated? Make a list of additional best practice processes you need to define or update; organize the list in order of priority; and set dates for when each one will be released and people trained to follow it.
4. Accountability: As a starting point, what needs to happen for us to be held accountable to follow through on what we defined in #1-3 above and who will do it? (More than one person can share responsibility for accountability.)