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Every good plan, whether business or personal, starts with setting goals; specific, quantifiable, written goals.  If you know the outcome you expect, you will know when you have reached what you have set out to achieve.  Having confidence is essential when you are managing a business. You need to have that point in time when you feel a sense of accomplishment to give you the confidence to push forward to achieve additional goals.  That feeling of confidence gives you energy.  That energy, mental energy, gives you the strength to overcome obstacles getting in your way every day of your life.  When you have confidence, those obstacles are just small impediments that are no larger than a pebble in your path.

That “mental energy” or “confidence” also enhances your decision-making ability.  Achieving your goals requires that you be mentally sharp and confident that the decisions you make are sound decisions.  When your confidence is low, you can almost become paralyzed in decision-making.  Making no decision is generally much worse than making one, even if the one you make is not exactly the best decision.

Having confidence has an added benefit in addition to you feeling good about yourself.  You actually make more money when you are confident.  Confidence is like a magnet.  I believe that other business people like to do business with people that are confident.  They don’t necessarily understand the reason they are drawn to do business with someone.  But often it is because the person just exudes confidence.  Think back to a time that you decided to do business with someone.  Did you sense they were confident?  Did you end up doing business with them for that reason?  Protect your confidence and use it to your advantage.  Never put yourself in a situation where your confidence can be compromised.

We at Shaw & Sullivan, PC provide a structure, through The Advisory Board Program, to help you quantify your goals, monitor those goals and make mid-course corrections to keep your business on track.  To succeed, you actually need to drive your business toward success.  When your business starts to go off course you have to immediately get back on track.  It takes a surprisingly short period of time for a business to get into financial difficulty but once in trouble a long time to get stability back.  But with focus, you can make those mid-course corrections to keep your business on track.

Coachability has such an enormous impact on a business’s efforts to achieve its goals.  An entrepreneur needs to “coach” his/her staff to create the most value.  His/her ability to inspire and motivate each person on the team to perform at their highest level will dramatically impact the value generated by having a team.  Synergy is the value that is created when people work together effectively. Synergy occurs when one plus one is greater than two.

“Empty your glass, so it can be filled again.” This philosophy was first espoused in the 17th century by the samurai (military) class of Japan, and was the  backbone of their moral code of principles known as Bushido.  We use this analogy today to represent the attitude toward being receptive to new ideas.  If your glass is full, you cannot pour any more water into the glass, it just spills over.  If you take that glass and pour the water out, you are now ready to receive more water.  Imagine that an empty glass represents your openness toward receiving new ideas, information or knowledge and a full glass as you being closed to new ideas because you feel you already know as much as you need to know.

Shaw & Sullivan, PC created The Advisory Board Program almost ten years ago to expose entrepreneurs to new ideas and remind entrepreneurs that participate in the Program about lessons long forgotten.

We believe, that if you adopt a philosophy of constantly striving to improve yourself, you will be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things.  You will push yourself to be a better businessman/woman, a better employer, a more positive and confident person and an all around better human being.  And you’ll probably make more money as well.

Managers constantly struggle to create incentive systems to drive productive activity in the workplace.  And while incentive systems are important there is compelling evidence that increasing the energy of employees and harnessing that energy is more important.  Creating that energy comes from employees feeling they are making progress in the work that they do.

The challenge of the manager then is to do everything they can to create the perception as well as the reality of keeping progress moving forward.  What happens when forward progress is being made?  Many things happen, but they are really hard to quantify.

(1)The worker is more confident.

(2)The worker has the ability to make clearer and better decisions.

(3)The worker has more energy and focus and is more “engaged”  in the work that he/she does.

(4)And with such focus the work actually gets done in a more efficient manner.

Progress is quantifiable only when someone knows what the goal is.  You have to know where you are starting from and where you will be when the goal is achieved.  It is only then that workers can feel they are making progress.  This quantifiable information then needs to be presented to demonstrate the forward progress.  Often it is financial information presented in the form of financial statements or graphs, but it can come in other forms as well.

Every day the manager should make sure he/she is doing everything they can to demonstrate the progress of their workers.

-First,  have clear goals.

-Second, constantly monitor the progress toward those goals.

-Third, communicate that progress.

(Note, if you would like a complete Discussion Point on which this blog is based on please contact our office and we will be happy to furnish you with a copy.)

I received my latest issue of Harvard Business Review to find an article titled Finding Entrepreneurial Opportunity in Adversity. There was a comment in the article about something apparently Machiavelli had said. “Never waste the opportunities offered by a good crisis”. The article went on to pull a quote from Michael E. Porter’s book entitled The Competitive Advantage of Nations “Competitive advantage emerges from pressure, challenge, and adversity, rarely from an easy life.”

I have participated in The Strategic Coach Program for over ten years and they also focused on what they called The Greatest Teacher I Ever Had which discussed the fact that “We rarely learn when things go well.  Only when we fail at something do we open our minds and make the decision to change.”

I look for these types of lessons as I write discussion points for The Advisory Board Program®, our own proprietary business coaching  program  I created eight years ago. We adhere to the concept that we must all learn to embrace the failures in our life. There is a very short period of time, after something doesn’t turn out as planned, when our mind is open to change. We need to embrace those times. We need to learn as much as we can from those experiences, for it is only then that we get better.  Be careful not to always point the finger at everyone else.  Accept responsibility for your role in whatever has occurred, learn from the experience and let the wisdom accumulate.