9 STEPS TO BUILDING AND COACHING A KILLER TEAM

Being self-employed doesn’t mean that I don’t work with other people. In fact, I’ve had to create numerous teams throughout my career to help me achieve my goals.

These days, my team gets together every morning on Skype because we all live in different places. I couldn’t do what I do without them.

Building a killer team is crucial to your success as an entrepreneur. Here’s how to do it.

1. Look for real talent. Hire people who are smarter and have more experience than you. This may seem like a given, but I’ve found that it’s not. You may want to feel like the smartest and most experienced member of your team, but your team will be much better off if that's not the case.

2. Seek out different skill sets. When you’re building a small team, it’s incredibly important that each member bring something different to the table. Make sure your team members know that you aren’t simply looking for a “yes” person. You value their opinions -- especially when they differ from yours. What are your weaknesses? Find people who can fill them.

3. Avoid the temptation to micromanage. Everyone needs direction and management, but no one likes to be micromanaged. Give your team a goal and let them achieve it. They might do things differently than you would, but that’s perfectly fine -- maybe even better.

5 SECRETS OF GREAT BOSSES

When you think of your best boss ever, what did he or she do that created an inspiring work environment for you? How did he or she act to enable your high performance and high engagement each day?

I’ve asked thousands of people in my leadership programs and keynote audiences these questions. The answers I hear are consistent. Great bosses do five vital things daily to create workplace inspiration and serve their employees well.

Before I share these five secrets, let me pose a different question: Would your employees, today, say you are their best boss ever? The answer may not be a resounding "yes" from every employee.

Today’s entrepreneurs invest a great deal of time and energy in their businesses. If you’re like many small-business owners, you put greater thought into your products and services than you do into your company’s culture. Thing is, culture -- the quality of your work environment and the relationships you have with your employees -- drives everything that happens in your organization, good or bad.

Great bosses ensure that their company’s work environment is founded upon trust and respect. Those bosses model trust and respect daily, and they require that team members demonstrate trust and respect in every interaction, with each other and with customers.

So what does it take to be a GREAT boss? It has to do with Growth,Relationships, Excellence, Accountability and Teamwork.

1. Inspire growth: Great leaders help employees build needed skills and toss antiquated ones. They help employees try new approaches that can increase quality and efficiency. Great bosses hold employees to high standards of performance and delivery. They ensure employees see the business from their customers’ point of view so that great service is the norm.

SMART LEADERS KEEP THEIR EGO IN CHECK AND LISTEN IN

Confidence is what helped you take your idea from a mere thought on paper to a full-fledged business. But the more successful your business becomes, the more likely you are to let your confidence become overwhelmed by your ego.  

Although flexing that muscle may put extra cash in your pocket, it could also damage relationships with those around you, especially employees. Instead try putting the “I’m the smartest person in the room” aside when it comes to dealing with your workforce. Take these three tips into consideration to secure quality feedback from your employees and better collaboration -- and more favorable results:

1. Ask for input regularly. The collective intelligence of your team will generate more and better ideas than you can alone. And in today’s dog-eat-dog business world, innovation is not just an annual objective. It’s an everyday goal.

Whether your business is a five-person show or a Fortune 500 company, instill a culture that makes it desirable for ideas to be shared. 

THE LEADERSHIP STYLE THAT WILL BRING A STARTUP LONG-TERM SUCCESS

Consider the old adage that “founders can’t scale”.  Why is it that as a company grows the founder often finds him or herself replaced by someone from a traditional management background?  More often than not, the reason for the replacement has less to do with the founder’s technical ability and more to do with their overall leadership style.  The problem is that as the company grows the founder-centric (and often ego-driven) approach that helped get the company off the ground becomes something that can hold the company back.

Successful long-term leaders exhibit a markedly different skill set than founders, one that plays down their ego and puts the needs of their company and team before their own wants.

It’s a deceptively simple concept, but one that is incredibly difficult to put into practice with any consistency, especially when you’re dealing with the business you founded. The truth, however, is that if you are going to have even a remote chance of creating a successful, long-lasting company you will need trust, loyalty and support.  The only way to gain those things is to give them away. That’s the very core of being a servant leader, and it’s the secret to beating the “founders can’t scale” curse. 

Transitioning into this mature management style can be an incredibly difficult task for founders who risked everything to build their company, but it is by no means impossible.

As the co-founder of BodeTree, a financial-management platform, I have had to set my own ego aside as our company has continued to grow. I don’t claim to have all of the answers, but here are three steps that helped me transition into servant leadership.

1. Stop worrying about yourself. It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in the petty details of running a company.  Worries about compensation, titles and who gets credit can (and often does) eat up the bulk of your day.  These worries are not only pointless but harmful and counterproductive. 

7 THINGS YOU SHOULD NEVER SAY TO YOUR EMPLOYEES

When managing employees, sometimes your patience is tested by a lack of motivation, a resistance to what you’re asking or one or more ‘problem’ workers. And just because you’re the boss does not mean you're perfect. Sometimes we all say things we regret later.

But, unlike the average worker, it’s incumbent upon the boss to keep his nose clean when it comes to verbal communication. You don’t have the luxury of saying something off the cuff when you’re frustrated. The last thing you want is for your verbal missteps to demotivate your staff, causing even bigger problems for your organization.

Here are seven phrases to especially avoid, especially in the heat of the moment. An instant reactive comment can cause reputational damage and destroy any trust your employees have in you, which can take a lifetime to repair.

"I’m the boss. Do as I say." We’re all adults here. You can’t expect that your employees will take to your hypocrisy. If you are setting different standards for your employees than you have for yourself, you can’t expect that they will respect what you ask them to do.

"You’re lucky to have a job." If that’s how you really feel about any of your employees, then perhaps you’re the one who’s lucky to have a job. No one works well in an environment where they are made to feel like somehow they’re indebted to their employer. If it’s not working out with a particular employee then be a professional and deal with the issues at hand. Find a way to correct them or part ways with him immediately. The mentality that your employee should “kiss your ring” is immature and evidence that you lack leadership skills.

"If you don’t like it, I’ll find someone who does." As the manager, you call most of the shots, but that doesn’t give you a license to be a jerk. Anyone can call herself a manager or the boss, but a good one will use leadership skills to motivate employees and deliver results. Threatening employees with losing their jobs, as a way to get them to do what you want, is not sustainable. Sure, they may do what you demand at first, but eventually they will become demotivated and unwilling to do more than the bare minimum to get by. And that’s if they don’t quit first.

4 CRITICAL TRAITS OF GREAT LEADERS

Most of us strive to become leaders. We want to do something great, be respected by our peers, make more money and acquire more responsibility. Overall, we want to make a difference at our job. However, most of us simply don’t know the proper way to gain heightened respect, confidence and admiration from those whom we work with.

In reality, there is no simple answer to leadership. It takes devotion, time and patience. Most importantly, it takes knowledge.

A firm understanding of leadership

Without a firm understanding of what makes someone more influential, you cannot begin to alter your beliefs, and practices accordingly.

Though, once aware of the traits that make someone more authoritative, you can formulate a plan to improve upon lacking areas and alter the behaviors preventing you from achieving management and executive status.

Below, you’ll find a list of traits that our sales and marketing headhunters look for in leaders, along with some exercises to enhance your influence and responsibility at work.

Defining the traits of leadership

1. Strength - Begin to carry yourself with poise and confidence. People are drawn to confidence and shy away from nervousness, lack of authenticity and insecurity.

SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATIONS NEED LEADERS AT ALL LEVELS

Anybody who has ever watched interviews with managers or coaches of professional sports teams will have heard plenty of discussion of the need for leaders throughout the team. The same thinking is also increasingly a preoccupation of business people. Indeed, the need for “leaders at all levels” is one of the 12 critical issues identified in the Global Human Capital Trends 2014 survey published earlier this month by Deloitte University Press, the publishing arm of the professional services firm’s leadership center.

In a paper examining the findings, Adam Canwell, Vishalli Dongrie, Neil Neveras and Heather Stockton – who work for Deloitte in a range of locations  – point out that leadership “remains the No. 1 talent issue facing organizations around the world,” with 86% of respondents to the survey rating it “urgent” or “important.” However, the fact that only 13% say they do an excellent job of developing leaders at all levels means that this area has the largest “readiness gap” in the survey.

Finding good leaders has, of course, always been a crucial issue for all sorts of organizations. This is why the armed forces, for instance, put so much effort into training their officers and why business schools and other providers of executive development have thrived. But the Deloitte team argues that “21st-century leadership is different”. Canwell and his colleagues write: “Companies face new leadership challenges, including developing Millenials and multiple generations of leaders, meeting the demand for leaders with global fluency and flexibility, building the ability to innovate and inspire others to perform, and acquiring new levels of understanding of rapidly changing technologies and new disciplines and fields.” No wonder organizations are coming up short.

Almost inevitably, the problem is felt to be especially acute today. This is a result of the strengthening of the global recovery, the desire on the part of the companies to expand in new markets and the growing numbers of older leaders choosing to retire.

HOW TO TRICK YOURSELF INTO BECOMING A MORNING PERSON

The early bird apparently does get the worm. Christoph Randler, a biology professor at theUniversity of Education in Heidelberg, Germany, found that morning people are often more successful than evening people because, as a group, they tend to be proactive. A recent survey conducted by The Guardian confirms this idea, reporting that many CEOs of successful companies are up by 5 a.m.

But what if you’re more of a night owl than a morning lark – is it possible to change your ways?

Yes, but it will take work, says Dr. W. Christopher Winter, Medical Director for the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Va. and spokesperson for theAmerican Academy of Sleep Medicine.

"Your genes determine what we call your 'chronotype,' which is if you are a morning or evening person," says Winter. "It's often similar within families, but it can be influenced to a certain degree."

Changing your chronotype takes about two weeks, but you have to stick with it. If you slack off, you’ll drift back to your natural tendencies, Winter cautions. He offers six simple tips for adjusting your internal clock:

1. Put yourself on a morning schedule, but don't sweat bed time. 
Wake up, exercise and eat at the same time every day, says Winter. The body likes to anticipate what’s happening, and will settle into a routine. But don’t worry about your bedtime: "People get hung up on setting a bedtime, but that’s a mistake because it can cause stress," he says. "The bedtime will sort itself out because you'll be tired. The most important piece is to not slack off on the wakeup time."

HOW TO START A CONSULTING BUSINESS

The dictionary defines a consultant as "an expert in a particular field who works as an advisor either to a company or to another individual." Sounds pretty vague, doesn't it? But unless you've been in a coma for the past decade, you probably have a good idea what a consultant is.

Businesses certainly understand what consultants are. In 1997 U.S. businesses spent just over $12 billion on consulting. According to Anna Flowers, spokesperson for the Association of Professional Consultants in Irvine, California, the association has recently noticed an increase in calls for information from people who want to get into the business. "The market is opening up for [the consulting-for-businesses] arena," Flowers says.

Melinda P., an independent consultant in Arlington, Virginia, thinks more people are getting into the consulting field because technology has made it easier to do so. "The same technology that has helped me to be successful as a consultant has made it easier for others to do the same," she says.

A consultant's job is to consult. Nothing more, nothing less. It's that simple. There's no magic formula or secret that makes one consultant more successful than another one.

But what separates a good consultant from a bad consultant is a passion and drive for excellence. And--oh yes--a good consultant should be knowledgeable about the subject he or she is consulting in. That does make a difference.

You see, in this day and age, anyone can be a consultant. All you need to discover is what your particular gift is. For example, are you very comfortable working around computers? Do you keep up with the latest software and hardware information, which seems to be changing almost daily? And are you able to take that knowledge you have gained and turn it into a resource that someone would be willing to pay money for? Then you would have no trouble working as a computer consultant.

Or are you an expert in the fund-raising field? Maybe you have worked for nonprofit agencies in the field of fund-raising, marketing, public relations or sales, and over the years you have discovered how to raise money. As someone who has turned a decade of fund-raising successes into a lucrative consulting business, I can tell you that fund-raising consulting is indeed a growing industry.

Things to Consider Before You Become a Consultant

HOW TO START A BUSINESS IN 10 DAYS

With an executive staffing venture about to open, a business loan from the in-laws gnawing at her conscience and a new baby to care for, Michelle Fish was already feeling the pressure. But what really pushed her over the edge was an unexpected communiqué from the IRS demanding immediate payment of a "huge sum" owed from a prior business in which she was a partner.Poof! Her seed money was gone. "All the spreadsheets, all the forecasting, all the pre-planning took a back seat once that bill came," recalls Fish, hearkening back to the 2003 launch of her Charlotte, N.C.-based firm, Integra Staffing.

Jeremy Ostermiller didn't need a letter to know that he had to get his Denver-based media-tech startup, Altitude Digital, into the black fast or watch his future take a dispiriting U-turn. "I knew it had to be profitable," he says. "I had put my last $500 into it, and I definitely didn't want to move back in with my parents."

A lightning-fast rise to profitability by their respective startups spared Fish and Ostermiller from going belly up. Neither has looked back since. Now a decade old, enjoying seven-figure annual revenues and flush with Fortune 500 corporate clients, Integra Staffing is the third-largest female-owned business in Charlotte, according to Fish. Meanwhile, 4-year-old Altitude Digital, which matches online content publishers with advertisers using an eBay-like bidding platform, is on target to generate $20 million in revenue this year.

Chances are, neither venture would be where it is today if not for the strategically sound groundwork laid by its founder prior to and right after launch. Trying to start a business and make it profitable in a matter of weeks isn't for the squeamish. Nor is it always advisable. But it can be done. In fact, we've condensed the process into 10 intense, highly focused days. Call it our DIY accelerator to launching a business.

Read on to learn how Fish, Ostermiller and a handful of others did it fast--and, more important, did it right.

Read more >>

8 WAYS TO SPOT GREAT LEADERS

If you ever wonder why we’re in a crisis of leadership all you have to do is to watch and listen to those in positions of leadership. While there are clearly many aspects of leadership that must work together in harmony in order for leaders to be effective, everything breaks down when leaders don’t understand how to engage effectively.


Let’s start with what leadership is not: Leadership is not a monologue, a speech, a lecture or a filibuster. Leadership is not talking at or over people. Leadership is not sequestered, does not live in a bubble or operate in a vacuum. Leadership is not exclusive or arrogant. Leadership is not about the leader.

What we see all too often in today’s leaders are little more than egocentric talking heads. They are so enamored with seeing themselves on camera or listening to themselves talk they have forgotten it’s their job to solve problems not create or exacerbate them.

History’s best examples of leaders are of those leaders who were/are highly engaged, very inclusive, deeply caring, and highly empathetic. They don’t fear being proven wrong, but are deathly afraid about the thought of being wrong and not knowing it.

The best leaders are not interested in who is right, but what is right. They not only embrace dissenting opinions, but they seek them out at every opportunity. Real leaders are just as at ease when unlearning as they are when learning.  And perhaps most importantly, they never pass up an opportunity discuss, converse, dialog, or debate. They know that their leadership is only as good as their ability to engage, listen, discern, and to act.

Here’s the thing – what politics and business would like us to picture as the perfect image of a leader bears little resemblance to the genuine article.  Following are eight ways to spot real leadership:

WHAT GREAT LEADERS DO DIFFERENTLY

Great leaders stand apart because of the results they get, and they get results because of what they do. Some of what they do comes under broad headings like communicate effectively and develop a compelling vision. But there are six specific behaviors that seem, to me, to set great leaders apart from other leaders. In each case, we'll name an over-arching behavior and then talk about some of the specific tactics that leaders use to get that to happen.


Here are the six behaviors.

Maintain a realistic picture.
People before strategy.
Rehearse mentally.
Work hard to assure understanding.
Manage consequences of performance.
Take every opportunity to communicate your key message.