Competition and success in the 21st century will be won by those companies that best engage and motivate their employees. Now, most employers will sort of give a head bob for this, but there are a lot of myths and learned behaviors that stand in the way of empowered employees.
This is incredibly important. Employees are likely your largest expense. Productivity in the modern office is hard to measure. But by the best objective measurements, engaged employees are many times more productive than average.
Employees in low spirit can seem to move in slow motion. Top people who are not appreciated, not listened to, or not given the space to excel can and will jump ship and go elsewhere.
It is not like the good old days. Few people make widgets any more. It was always easy just to measure the pile of widgets to measure results.
Today, how might a dispirited and disengaged team member respond to a customer who needs help? What might a fully engaged and happy team member to differently in the same situation. And today a bad experience for a customer can take on a digital life in a bad review. Maybe we need to review the value of a life-time customer?
And there are so many things beyond just getting the work done that an engaged team member can do. They can easily make a contribution to the sales effort and to the content creation engine you need to build. LINK
Empowered employees make you more money.
Empowered employees are easier to manage.
Empowered employees think like business owners.
Empowered employees watch out for your interests.
People desire to feel significant. They long to be appreciated. They yearn to feel they play a significant role in the success of the company. In fact, everyone should play a significant role, or you are not getting a proper return on investment. Make sure you see the conversation on motivating people.
Enlightened Leaders engage and inspire everyone in their strategic role. Uninspired leadership is too busy reacting to events- too busy wondering what is happening.
Enlightened leadership can find a role fitting the strengths of everyone in the company in business development. They are not all sales people- we don’t want to scare everybody- but even the introvert nerds have expertise that inspires confidence. All we have to do is find a role that they enjoy. And everyone one on the team enjoys being significant to success. Here is a great quote for you.
Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control, but freedom is about what you can unleash -Harriet Rubin
We have all kinds of strengths within our organizations. Technical nerds are good. Steady people to watch the details. People who like learning new things. People who are nurturers and relieve stress. People who are communicators and rainmakers. There is all kinds of strengths available through freelance talent. We can create mentoring systems within our team structures. Leadership is relaxed, understands that reducing stress and empowering people- is productive.
People need to be informed and involved in decisions that touch them, that touch how they work.
It is essential that enlightened leadership engage all employees in the success of the business- in a basic understanding of the financials- profit and loss, cash flow etc. People need to know what is required to create a profit. When they have an appreciation of the difficulty to build a successful business, and when they are able to grasp they have a significant role in business development, people will jump in with enthusiasm.
Too many employers, love to see employees busy, busy, busy. Unfortunately busy just might translate poorly to results achieved. We need to understand and honor the concept of slack time.
You must know what you want done and what is in your strategic interests. LINK
We must have critical measures to account results. Counting money does not really cut it. Counting money cannot help determine what is not working as well as it might. Counting money mostly enables making stuff up i.e. empowering HIPPOs LINK
It is also critical that you, yes you, do less and spend more time indulging in strategic thought. What could employees be doing that is more productive than what they are doing now?
How much time do you allow yourself for strategic thinking?
Do you ever say to yourself that you will do that in a couple months when things slow down and you will have more time?
Do you ever stop to consider how many items on your plate should be removed so you can have more slack time to think strategically?
What would it take to do this?
It costs serious money to not be thoughtful and strategic. It is big money that never shows up in the bookkeeping, but is covered under the concept of opportunity costs.
Oh, and you need to be thinking about the power of great content creation to increase the size of the community who trusts you and to make individual sales easier. Both of these are items that do not fit into the accounting system but are worth big bucks.
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