Surviving Reality: Compassionate Competition

To a lot of people, the word competition is ugly and holds a negative connotation. When we think of the word competition, we often think of professional sports, athletes, Survivor the reality show, "others" on the dating scene, or the younger generation entering the workforce who may just beat us out for the next big promotion. But in reality competition can be what empowers us to be more than just a survivor and the reason we flourish and succeed. We can amp up the level we achieve by embracing compassion within our actions during times of competition.

Compassion isn't just for the strong, educated or well read; it's for everyone, and our success can be easier when it's not built on the shoulders of those we pass over but rather on our supportive interactions with our competitors. By encouraging them to do more, be better and go for the gold, we in turn become stronger. When you look toward wanting a more successful professional life, you normally envision yourself climbing the Corporate Ladder—which means you need to put up with certain elements in the work environment to get to the next rung. And as I've mentioned in past articles such as "What's Your Edge?" that there are many things you can do to ensure you have an edge. But we encounter competition in many different areas of our lives, and it's important to understand that how you embrace your competitor in one sector will reinforce how you interact in another.

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A Stone Foundation Supports Your Success

As we look around at others in our lives, we often wonder what it took for certain individuals to succeed: how they made it so far, so quickly or what motivated them to keep going even when times were difficult. There are many qualities that make a great leader or support you in becoming one; there are unlimited opportunities for you to experience and gain the skills you need to become successful in life, but one of the elements people often overlook is their foundation. Examining the foundation on which your life is built is not about going back and pointing the finger at our childhood. It's about looking forward to your ultimate goal and asking yourself what it takes to get there to achieve and manifest your goal.

We all know the building parable "Is your house built on sand or stone?" When it comes to achieving success, understanding that your experience and academic portfolios are the building materials you use to build your life house means it's important to ask which pieces of your experience are stone and which pieces are sand. While moving through life, our foundation needs to actually be comprised of both elements, for science reminds us that sand is actually very small stones.

In life flexibility is critical to our learning and adopting new information, allowing us to mold and bend when necessary and stand firm in our beliefs and values. Using me as an example, people often wonder why I would choose to make certain decision in life; and for the most part, my decisions were based on following my heart and my desire while staying true to my dreams and values. When first embarking on the new role of coach, I did the exercise most of us have done when deciding to take a turn in our careers and wrote down how my life experiences (both professional and academic) supported this turn. When looking back to even my teenage years working at a boat marina, my work experience has always ultimately supported either directly or indirectly my recent life decisions.

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Employee Motivation: A Secret Society?

Motivation is a key ingredient to success. This is not a news flash by any means, and all managers and good leaders embrace some degree of motivational program for their employees; whether they do this consciously or subconsciously, they all do it. Motivation is not some secret society either, but the secret to motivation is the "what" behind it. So what is the "what" anyway?

It's a great question and one that every great leader seeks to answer—although the answer is never the same twice! So that is what makes motivation part of a secret society, remembering and understanding the same employee will have different motivators at different times of her life? And yes, different times can be as often as yearly, monthly or even daily. This is the "what" behind keeping your employees motivated and feeling empowered.

Now that you're a part of this secret motivational society and you’ve been let into the inner sanctum, you're reading this and still thinking, "What? That isn't a news flash, either!" And yes, you would be right—but the news flash is the remembering that translates into engaging in some form of communication with your employees regularly to ensure you're in the know of what their current motivator is or might be. Regular communication is the real secret ingredient to realizing your success as a great motivational leader.

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Business Leadership: Leading with Social Responsibility

Over the last several years that I've been working with business owners, entrepreneurs and those seeking to begin their own businesses, there seems to have been an underlying theme revolving around leadership. I recently wrote an article ("The Meaning and Essence of Business Leadership") and thought it would be beneficial to continue this topic with the focus on Social Responsibility. We know leaders are not made; nor are they "born," even though there are individuals who seem to exude all the necessary qualities that make a great leader and are therefore are referred to "born leaders." But what is this sought-after set of skills and abilities that makes you a great leader, and do you possess the desire to become a great leader? If you are asking yourself these questions (as well as can you do if you want to acquire these leadership skills not just from a business perspective but possibly from a personal one), read on.

The first quality is respect; individuals can easily look up to and respect you as a leader if you respect them. Their respect will be based on your ability to communicate easily and compassionately your expectations of them. This is the second quality of a great leader: being a compassionate communicator. Within your mutual respect, your communication style will be inspiring. Those whom you lead will feel empowered by you to step out and up into their reaching for their goals—one of which will be to "please" you and to live up to your expectations. So the third quality is being able to inspire those who follow you. Now that we’ve covered three qualities that support being a great leader, let’s look at what might be another quality on which we often focus and talk about less but is nevertheless equally (if not more) important; that is, business leadership is based on social responsiveness.

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The Secret Weapons of a Good Business Leader

"The very core of leadership is that you need to have vision. You can’t blow a hesitant trumpet." This is what well-known scholar Theodore M. Hesburgh said about leadership. Leadership is a very desirable attribute among successful people no matter what type of business they are in. And if you talk about business, then leadership is a must for carrying out your tasks effectively. Thus, every successful entrepreneur embraces some leadership quality within herself.

But the reality is that being a leader is not that easy. Everyone is not a leader; in fact, we cannot be leaders if there are no followers. Many people believe leadership as such is a human trait that is possibly related to genetics—that people inherit their leadership skills by birth. Leaders possess some unique qualities that allow them to easily motivate others. Let’s take a few minutes to review the different qualities or skills good leaders possess.

First, as a leader you need to have a unique ideology. If you look at the great business leaders such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Sam Walton, you will find each of them has their own ideology that allows them to step out and up, easily reaching such a top position. Thus, the very first component of leadership is having a unique ideology. Begin thinking about what makes you unique as an individual and how this translates into your being or becoming the great leader you want to be.

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The Meaning and Essence of Leadership in Business

Change is the only unchanging features in this changing world. Everything surrounding us changes with the passage of time to be in line with modernization. The ongoing business environment is no exception when it comes to this trend. Modern business is on a triumphant march through tracking changes via hard work from the most efficient business leaders.

Effective leaders adopt strategies and techniques to try to win or take the lead in the competitive market, which is ultimately a game of "survival of the fittest." In both good and bad times, there is always a need for quality leadership. The success of a business or an industry is mostly dependent on the leaders it gets or inherits. The successful implementation of desired leadership techniques is crucial for meeting the changing demands in business. The mystique of leadership in and of itself makes it one of the most widely debated, studied and sought-after commodities in business.

The Meaning of Leadership

Leadership is the social process of influencing the behaviors of others without posing any threats of violence. It is a process of influencing the thoughts, attitudes and behaviors of others by setting a direction that helps visualize what they can hope to achieve or what lies ahead for them. It's the capability of getting other people to do something significant through harnessing their efforts jointly.

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Skills of a Successful Entrepreneur

So you want to go into business for yourself, do you? Well, there are a few skills every successful entrepreneur needs to either have himself or the resources (both monetary and human) available to him. We are not all born to entrepreneurship; and even if we grow up in an entrepreneurial family setting, we still need to have a certain amount of drive and basic skills to achieve success.

It is a given that successful entrepreneurs need to begin their journey of being in business for themselves with a certain degree of courage combined with the ability to plan before entering into the business world—let alone meet or exceed the challenges they will face. The following are eight basic skills you need to achieve success as an entrepreneur.

#1: Value

The first and the foremost skill before embarking into business for yourself is to ensure you will be providing value: value to customers, the industry, vendors as well as to yourself. Once you enter the business world, you will face tremendous challenges and a new competitor at every turn. It is important to try to discover new ideas of promotions and do what others are not providing to your target market. It will be important to work hard to maintain your value on a scale that is equal to or greater than your competitors.

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Stand Tall or Stay Flat?

As an entrepreneur, what was the first organizational decision you made? Most likely it was accounting or something to do with internal procedures, or maybe it was something to do with the product or service you were going to be selling. If you are like most small businesses, one of the distant decisions you rarely think about when you go into business is how you’re going to structure your business as it grows—organizationally, that is.

Choosing your organizational structure is a strategic decision that involves a careful evaluation of your options, but long before this decision you need to believe that what you are creating will grow and ultimately become its own entity; therefore, it needs to have its own family tree. This article will help you with the visualization of two of these main organizational hierarchical structures.

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Bulletin Board Ideas

Remember back to your childhood and the first day back to school. Your new teacher for the year spent the month of August putting together her welcoming bulletin boards for you to see and hopefully build excitement about the upcoming school year. Bulletin boards are excellent tools for making learning fun! Not only do bulletin boards make the classroom look brighter, they can also serve as excellent platforms for students and teachers to work together and express their creativity.

As business professionals, can we tap into this same creative approach to get our employees excited about upcoming change and transition? I think so. Let’s take a few minutes to see how ideas that teachers embrace can easily be translated into a professional work environment.

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Undercharging? Death of a Business

In the competitive world of business, selling your services cheap may seem tempting. After all, a lower price tag on your services may help you attract more clients than your competitors, right? But when you are in a field like consultancy or coaching, you need to ask yourself, “Is undercharging for my services worth it in the long run?”

What sets apart a consultant from the others is your intellect—or, more specifically your wisdom. Cheapening or devaluing your wisdom to a level that in line with or less than that of a competitor may not be a good idea. Also, it is simple business psychology that people expect providers to reduce their prices even more if they are already offering their services at a fee lower than the average market rate. By reducing your fees you are buying into this psychology. If that is the case, then you may want to ask yourself, “What is my true value, and how this is being reflected in the fees I charge?”

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Difficult People at Work?

Whether we like it or not, all those working in an office setting have to deal with office politics and difficult people at work. After all, we can’t always choose with whom we work, so we just need to find a way to co-exist with people we don’t like or with whom we can’t get along. The vital question is, “How can one do that?” So, here are some tips that can help you find the right answer.

Introspect
I know it doesn’t sound like the best piece of advice. After all, we’re supposed to discuss how to handle people whom you have already acknowledged as difficult, right? But the fact is that often it is our own reaction to people who are different from us that makes us see them as “difficult.” It is therefore important we examine our own reactions and behavior objectively to figure out if at all we are the ones who are overeating.

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Client Management: When to Fire Clients

As a consultant you want both money and work satisfaction, right? You’ll get these two vital things only if you have the right clients. So, what do I mean by the “right clients,” you may ask? The answer: your clients should respect you, value your services and pay you well. As a small business owner you do not go into business for yourself with the risk and investment to lose money or just break even. You go into business to make money. Part of the responsibility of working for yourself is about knowing your limits and your area of expertise. When you don’t honor these elements, you run the risk of losing more than you could be gaining.

Several consultants have a huge client base, but their earnings really come from 20-25% of them because a lot of people try to squeeze as much as they can out of consultants without paying them what they deserve. Then again, there are also clients who treat consultants like commodities or mere trainers. While such clients may pay you well, at the end of the day people who don’t value your services are not good for your overall brand image. This is one of the many reasons you need to be able to truly identify your key target demographic and/or perfect client type.

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Getting and Managing a Business’s Online Reputation

“Need information? Google it!” That seems to be the mantra for almost everyone who has access to the Internet. The World Wide Web has so much information about everything under the sun that hitting the search button every time we need to find out something has become second nature to most of us. Having an online presence is therefore essential for the success and growth of any business. In fact, it isn’t just enough to have a presence; you must also be able to maintain your online reputation.

The best and worst thing about the Internet is that there is hardly any censorship in the virtual world, so people can say what they like about you through blogs and opinion polls. And unless what they are saying is pure slander, you will not be able to do anything about it. However, this doesn’t mean you have no control over your image and reputation; that is, you can take the following steps to build and maintain your brand value in the online world.

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Human Resources: Stress Management Policies

If you are an HR professional, it’s a part of your job to make sure the employees of the organization for which you work remain productive and efficient. Devising policies and taking initiative to keep their stress levels to a minimum is an essential component of ensuring the efficiency level of the employees stays up to the mark. However, it is also a well-acknowledged fact in business circles that a little stress is essential in order to get peak performance out of employees. The vital question for HR professionals, therefore, is how to ensure stress levels in the organization do not rise too far above the required minimum. As we know, more does not equal better when referring to stress.

Office politics, harassment, intense work pressure and negative relationships with colleagues or managers are some of the most common causes of excessive stress in the workplace. While discord, politics and work pressure are inevitable by-components of working on a team, as an HR professional your job is to ensure these problems do not become unmanageable.

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Management Tips for Small Businesses

As an entrepreneur, do you get a little confused when people start interviewing you on “business management”? Not surprising, since it’s probably based on the belief that the word “management” is more suited to big business and multinational conglomerates. From one perspective that might be true, but from the perspective that you want your business to grow, thrive and be successful, then it is the wrong approach.

Efficient business management is the foundation of a successful business. In simpler terms, small business management is a mix of many things: that is, the juggling of many hats like advertising, marketing, administration, HR and sales. If any one of these elements if managed incorrectly or with a lazy approach, then it can, in fact, make or break a small business. It is therefore extremely important to draft and execute governing policies—yes, even if you are the only individual—very carefully.

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