Category Archives: Teams

Team Building for Small Businesses – Can Your Really Serve 100 Clients In 100 Days? (Yes, You Can!)

The most important asset in your business is the solution you provide to your customers. The second most important is the team you have created to deliver that solution reliably and repeatedly. The fastest way to serve 100 customers in 100 days is by expanding your thinking beyond “I do it myself.” Let me give you just ...

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Entrepreneur Tips – Discover How To Build Your Business Right, Or Else

Entrepreneurial business building can bring you endless waves of profit, freedom and fun, when you do it right. That is where the title of this article comes from – “build your business right… or else.” Or else what? One of the challenges of entrepreneurial business is that there are lots of ways to do it wrong. If ...

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Business Management Tips – Top 7 Ways To Screw Up Your Business & What To Do Instead

In entrepreneurial and small business, the greatest challenge is to grow the business while at the same time stop doing everything yourself. This is an enormously important part of building any business successfully. Over the years of consulting and coaching business owners and entrepreneurs, I’ve uncovered quite a few ways to mess up your efforts. Below ...

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Team Building for Small Businesses – Endless Waves of High Payoff Productivity

High Payoff Teams are one of the best ways to bring endless waves of productivity to your business. Whether your team consists of a handful of folks, or you have 50 people in different functional areas, when you use these techniques, you won’t be able to stop the productivity if you wanted to. 1. Hire for expertise ...

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Business Productivity – How To Get The Most Leverage And Reach Out Of Every Hour

Would you like to get the most leverage and greatest result out of every hour of your day? How about the time, intelligence and energy of everyone on your team? Here are 7 ways to get leverage working for you: 1. Leverage your time – Most of us have been trained to think in 60-minute hours. Well, ...

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3 Ways To Break Deadlocks on Your TeamThere are times when business leaders I’m working with settle in face to face with their peers, arms crossed and accusations flying. I’ve found it helps to view myself as a referee on the grammar school playground during lunch break. Holding the image in my mind certainly helps me calm the disputes and get everyone refocused on the elements that have broken down and led to the finger pointing. I put on my ref’s cap this week with one of a CEO client and her heads of HR and Finance. For over six months the Finance department has had two critical positions open. In that time, fewer than ten candidates have walked through the door to interview for the positions. The source of the deadlock and finger pointing? Well, the Finance Department head is aggravated at HR taking months to find appropriate candidates. They’re frustrated that each of the candidates they interviewed, liked and had staff interview didn’t pass the background checks. And they know their staff is wondering why the candidates they speak with keep disappearing rather than being hired. HR is offended that the department heads don’t appreciate that the positions are hard to fill. The organization has a unique mission and wants people who share the same values in the management ranks. That mission pre-screens out many candidates who have the skill and experience to do the work. Everyone knows all of this. So why the pent up frustration? The breakdowns are actually a result of very different factors. 1 – There’s no shared sense of urgency 2 – The scope of the issue isn’t understood 3 – There’s no formal process 4 – There’s no systematic communication With the seats still unfilled after 7 months, I expect you could understand that the Finance folks feel insulted. They sure don’t feel like they’re valued clients of the HR staff. HR has hired hundreds (well probably thousands) of staff members. Every year the organization’s technical staff has turn over that need to be replaced. And they post the positions and sort the resumes and in short order the position is filled. The person in charge of searches knows exactly what to do for those typical seats. However, this time the Finance department positions are more complex. The HR staff tried the traditional sites for posting the positions. And found no takers. Weeks stretched into months. Two, then three, then five. The Finance managers kept looking at their calendars, and their empty IN baskets. No resumes arrived. No interviews were set. No word at all from the HR department. So the Finance managers started calling HR once every couple of weeks to ask what was going on. The HR staff then reported that the Finance staff were harassing them. Were the Finance managers actually being rude? Probably not. The underlying element in all of this is that the HR staff were unfamiliar and inexperienced with filling these high level roles. The Finance managers had never had to recruit and fill such high level positions before. Everyone’s embarrassment over ‘not knowing quite what to do’ lead to lots of doing nothing. You can see how it all deteriorated. And for all of those months, the Finance managers have been working double over time because key positions are sitting empty. So clearly a solution needed to be found. One that got everyone working at the same pace, with clear communication, and shared expectations being met. The first step – Put a shared system in place Regular discussions on the open positions between the HR staff and Finance managers now take place weekly; recruitment strategy and actions, interview appointment deadlines. Now HR’s client knows that actual recruiting activity is being observed and tracked. Within two weeks there were resumes available to be sorted. Clearly the urgency was at last being matched by both sides. The second step – Formalize the process so that it can be used again With the second open position, face to face weekly meetings are now being held to report on the recruitment activity. The Finance staff no longer has to debate whether to call and ask – every Tuesday they are told specifically exactly what activity is taking place. The third step – Institute customer satisfaction surveys of the internal customers The information being obtained from the survey is reinforcing the processes, and reminding the HR staff that the entire organization is their customer, even if positions come up infrequently in many departments. Knowing they are being tracked has accelerated the HR staff’s follow through in the recruiting process. It’s a new start and a new relationship between the departments that will get the job done to everyone’s satisfaction.

© 2008 Linda Feinholz. There are times when business leaders I’m working with settle in face to face with their peers, arms crossed and accusations flying. I’ve found it helps to view myself as a referee on the grammar school playground during lunch break. Holding the image in my mind certainly ...

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Business Lessons From The Lazy River

© 2008 Linda Feinholz If you’re like most of my clients, you’ve been working to smooth out the kinks in your business. You’ve put your time into systems for streamlining activities and installed processes that make the work flow efficient. While I was on ...

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SUCCESS QUOTES

"Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." Vince Lombardi

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Change 1 Belief And You Can Change It All!

Are you ready to dump some of your own programming and let yourself step up to your own next level? Let’s take a look at what might be keeping you from leveraging what teams could help you create. Turn off your email, put your phone line on hold, and grab a piece of paper and something ...

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ARE YOU MISSING OUT ON THE TRUE POWER OF TEAMS?

© 2008 Linda Feinholz. Here's an interesting fact... According to one of today’s leading authorities on Attention Deficit Disorders, Tellman Knudsen, if you have ADD, you have been programmed since birth to actually NOT be able to do something you really need to do to succeed in life... The thing you have been programmed not ...

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