How to get more PR for your business

 Culture  No Responses »
Jan 192012
 

Answer: Treat writers and journalists with the respect they deserve.

This week I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some brilliant journos & reporters from BRW, SmartCompany & Dynamic Business.  

These guys have the power to write great things about you and your business if you work with them and help them.  Here are a few things I’ve learnt that might just result in more PR for your business:

  • Be available
  • Return calls and emails quickly
  • Understand they may have tight deadlines
  • Understand the angle they’re writing
  • Be polite, helpful and interested in their day
  • Be prepared for the conversation and have something interesting to say
  • Don’t ask to see the article before it goes to print (it’s their work, not yours!)
  • Be humble. If you have a great story to tell, let them write it.
  • Don’t take up too much of their time.  If they’re busy, respect that.

In short: be nice, be helpful!

**This post is the first of the new series ‘What I’ve learnt this week’ that I’ll publish every Thursday. If you’d like to receive these and other Culture is Everything posts in your email, subscribe here.

The best people management tool ever

 Culture  No Responses »
Dec 122011
 

Getting the right people into the right seats is one of the highest priorities for all leaders.  Jim Collins has been telling us this for years.  I agree with Collins, but I like to take it one step further…

The right people, in the right seats doing the things they LOVE is my approach.  

To make this happen, I use the ‘Love versus Loathe List’ and I reckon it is one of the most valuable tools ever.

What is the Love versus Loathe List?  

It’s a 10-minute task that lets your team members tell you what they love and what they loathe doing in their current job. 

How to start using it?

  1. Ask a team member to stop what they are doing and grab a blank sheet of paper
  2. On the sheet, divide it into two columns.
  3. One column has the title ‘Love’ and the other ‘Loathe’.
  4. Now the team member has 10-minutes to add all of the tasks of their current job on to the list.  There can be no middle ground, every task is either a love or a loathe.
  5. When the 10-minutes is up, review the list together and talk trough why they love or loathe each task.

How to get the best results?

  1. If possible, remove at least one of the loathes from the team member’s list immediately.
  2. Make a plan to gradually allow that team member to spend more and more time on the tasks they love and less time on the tasks they loathe.
  3. If, for any reason, you can’t add more loves or remove more loathes, explain clearly and honestly why this is the case.
  4. Use the tool with as many team members as possible at least twice per year.

Regularly using this simple tool will make you a better leader.  Start using it today!

PS – if you’d like to receive these posts into your inbox, sign up here.

Take a break! Bad things rarely happen

 Culture  No Responses »
Nov 272011
 

When was the last time something disastrous happened in your business?   I don’t mean like losing a big client or a crappy email being sent to the wrong list, I mean really freaking bad.  Like someone dying. My guess is probably never.

I used to think that I needed to be in the office every single day.  I thought I needed to be there earlier than everyone else and I thought I needed to stay later.  I was the leader.  I needed to be there. My team needed me to be there, just in case something went wrong. 

There are three fundamental flaws with my old approach:
1.    Disastrous problems almost never happen
2.    Small, bad things will happen whether I’m there or not
3.    If I need to be at work all the time, I have the wrong people

Ever since I figured this out in 2009, I’ve been taking regular breaks.  There is so much more to our lives than being at the office.  Time to think, time to relax, time to learn new things and time to dream are some of the things that happen when I’m not at work.

Right now I’m drinking jasmine tea in the courtyard of a little guesthouse in Chengdu, China.  KW and I have just finished a lesson on our very basic Mandarin (she’s better than me!). We‘re in the middle of a short Chinese adventure while, back in South Melbourne, it’s business as usual.

If you want to be an effective leader, start leading the way with regular breaks. 

How to encourage employees to save your business money

 Culture  No Responses »
Nov 242011
 

My last monthly post in 2011 for Small Business Victoria’s business blog…

______________

Spending smartly on things that add value and saving money in less important areas is a very familiar challenge for business owners.  Imagine if all of your team members had the same approach? It can be done.

Running a business today can be more competitive than ever and I reckon the most brains wins.  In my experience, the key to encouraging your team members to help your business be sustainable is to trust them. By sharing your biggest challenges and asking for their help you will get great suggestions. Get more brains working on your challenges by asking for help.

Here are a couple of things that we’ve used at The Physio Co to encourage our team to help our business be more sustainable.

Always ask for a discount

When asking for a quote from suppliers, we always ask for a better price. Always.

Business owners should be doing this every single time they make a purchase.  We’ve trained our team to do the same.  It’s not hard.  With a smile on your face, politely ask ‘Is that the best price you can give me?’.  There’s no harm in asking and you’ll be surprised how often you can get a discount.

Teach your staff about the business

For the first time, this year we have shared the people, financial and logistical challenges that exist in our fast growing business with our physio team.  Instead of protecting our physios from the issues that our leaders deal with every day, we asked for their help.  We asked for the 40+ intelligent people in the room at our annual conference to help figure out what we should do next.

The result: a rich group discussion that was eye opening for some and empowering for others. We now have about 8 times the number of brains working on challenges that, when solved, will grow and improve The Physio Co faster than ever. What a fantastic result!

Share your challenges and ask your team for their help – it works!

_______

Succession Planning – the key to great leadership

 Culture  No Responses »
Oct 242011
 

How often do you consider who will do your job when you’re not around to do it? How about who will do everyone else’s job when they’re not around either? Succession planning is one of the keys to great leadership. 

A friend of mine and former EO Global Director, Carlo Santoro, once described great leadership as ‘leaving a legacy’. In my opinion, Carlo is spot on and I use his approach as often as I can. 

Similarly, in Good to Great, Jim Collins discovered and described the humble but professionally driven Level 5 Leaders that were laser-focussed on creating an organisation that became even better after they left it.  Level 5 Leaders select and train successors to do a better job then they ever did.  That’s great leadership.

Succession planning is needed for every position in every organisation.  At The Physio Co, we continually reassess who will be completing every role a) this month, b) next month and c) in 12 months time.  We appoint an ‘apprentice’ often and provide as much training as possible. In my opinion, it’s not possible to be ‘too prepared’.

The future is inevitable.  How often are you preparing your succession plan?

PS – apologies for fewer posts last week. I won’t make excuses, I’ll just get on with it.

PPS – this week I’m in Phoenix for a ‘mini-think week’ at the Fortune Growth Summit. I’ll also be visiting Zappos while here in the US.  Exciting few days ahead!

Want to grow fast? You have to pulse fast.

 Culture  No Responses »
Oct 192011
 

If you want to grow your business faster, you’ll need more meetings.  That’s right more meetings, not less. Here’s why..

Businesses generally have annual planning days, monthly management meetings and a semi-regular weekly meeting.  This approach can work for businesses growing at 10-15% per year.  If you want to grow at 30%, 40% or even 50% per year, you’ll need to compress time and have many more meetings.

In a fast growth business there is so much happening that a year can feel more like a decade and a quarter more like a year.  With this in mind, you’ll need to talk strategy at least every quarter, measure performance every week and pulse with a short huddle every day.

The best way to start a faster meeting rhythm is with a daily huddle.  This is where we started at The Physio Co, we call our huddle To The Point and it’s become the most important meeting we have.

Pulsing faster by committing to a regular meeting rhythm and almost religious discipline are some of the keys to fast growth.

PS – Want to know more? Check out this post: a 12-minute meeting that works.

PPS – If you’d like to see our daily huddle in action, come and join us!

Creating policies v’s firing the bad eggs

 Culture  No Responses »
Oct 132011
 

Growing businesses create policy after policy to stop bad situations recurring. Imagine that instead of creating more rules, you just removed the people that were causing the problems? 

For example, if one team member continually claimed excess fuel allowance by driving the long way to client sites every single day.  When their manager found out, some sort of policy like: “fuel allowance only applies when the most direct practicable route to a client site exceeds XXkm and must be verified by a manager every week”  might be created.

What if, instead of creating another policy for everyone, you respectfully (& legally) parted company with that one problematic person? The result: you’d have less petty problems to deal with and all of your best people would be left alone to keep doing what they do best.  

Instead of policy-making for the minority and upsetting the majority, why not just eliminate the problem?

Great companies focus on doing less, not more

 Culture  No Responses »
Oct 052011
 

Are you continually looking for ‘the next big opportunity’?  A new product or service to add to your range?  Maybe a new initiative to start or even a new business to launch? If so, perhaps you’re wasting your time…

To increase your focus, the happiness of your team and even your profit, it’s probably time to STOP doing some things.

Do you have products or services that aren’t core to your business?  Do you have people or even whole departments not contributing to your success?  What about proposals that take weeks to prepare and rarely win new business?  Policies that create work for work sake?  Meetings that achieve nothing?  

I’ll bet you answered yes to at least one of these questions.  If so, stop it.  Now.

Instead of asking what can we start?  Start asking what should we stop? 

Want a happier team? Here’s how…

 Culture  No Responses »
Sep 022011
 

How much authority do the people that serve your clients and customers have?  In my experience, delegating the greatest amount of responsibility to the customer-facing members of a team is one of the most effective things I can do.  

Empowering team members with the information, authority and confidence to deal with as many situations as possible creates the following:

  1. Better service for your customers through faster decision making                 (Team members should never have to tell a customer that “I’ll have to check”).
  2. Happier, more independent team members who can get on with doing their job: serving customers
  3. More time and head space for the leaders to focus on growing the business

Consider the questions that people in your team ask you everyday. Could you empower them to deal with more of these situations on their own?  I think so.

If you really trust your team, start showing it by letting them make decisions for themselves.  They’ll love it and so will your customers.

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