Raising The bar: Taking Business To The Next Level

In fact, it’s been said people die in their 20’s, they just wait until their 80’s to be buried. Ever work with someone who’s been “dead” for years? Most of us have.

So the question is how do we keep people alive, alert, and motivated? How do we improve morale and productivity in order to take our businesses to the next level in today’s ever-changing, always-challenging environment?

The following seven steps are designed to shift how we look at issues and jump start our creativity.

• Step 1: Let Others Live Up to Your Expectations, and Speak in Possibilities. Language is a symbol of how we think, and if we talk in negatives or expect negativity from others, then that’s exactly what we’ll get. People tend to react from emotion, focusing on what they don’t want. As we stay focused on the desired outcome, we influence the outcome of those around us as well.
   
• Step 2: Model Excellence, Especially Outside Your Industry. One of the traps we fall into is aspiring to be exactly like the best in our industry, not modeling their strengths but mimicking their every nuance. Accelerated learning gurus tell us we shorten our learning curve appreciably when we look to see what others in vastly different professions are doing.
   
• Step 3: Ask Yourself How You’re Limiting Your Own Success (and your company’s success). We all set limits on our greatness; we put limits on how successful we think we can be. We all get stuck setting boundaries that limit our success, and we can always decide to expand those boundaries. Misery and frustration are optional!
   
• Step 4: Get a Coach. Sometimes we get stuck creating from our past limitations, not our potential outcomes, and someone else’s perspective can give us a different insight. Often, when we get our own egos out of the way, we can get incredible information from a consultant or coach who can see areas of improvement we’ve become blind to.
   
• Step 5: Use Empathy: Empathy means acknowledging someone’s emotion, and with empathy we start to see his or her model of the world. All of us are wired differently; we approach goal setting and delegating and prioritizing from different perspectives. When we start to understand someone else’s perspective-- through empathy--it creates the rapport that moves us forward.
   
• Step 6: Ask for Advice, and Listen. The more open we are to hear someone’s valued opinion, the more effective and flexible we’ll become. Flexibility, a willingness to stretch, is imperative in adapting to change and new methodologies. Naturally, listening to others is one of the most powerful things we can do to both increase our knowledge base and create trust and rapport simultaneously.
   
• Step 7: Commit. The main difference between greatness and mediocrity is that the great ones just keep on until they get what they want. It’s not education or experience or people skills or IQ (although all those factor into the mix), it’s the tenacity to keep on until we reach the desired outcome. Will Rogers said even if we’re on the right track, we’ll get run over if we just sit there. On the other hand, by standing up on that track and doing something little every day toward our outcome, our goal, we start to create unbelievable results.