1.  Ask my staff for ideas more often.

At various times, I have sat alone as the owner of a company trying to visualize how I can do something differently.  In other words, I am working within my own box.  An excellent idea that I sometimes forget about is asking my team for ideas on the subject under consideration.  I recently had a refreshing experience with this when I opened the floor to the team for marketing ideas.  They really got into it and excitedly fed off each other’s ideas, and I wrote these down as fast as I could.  Don’t laugh at me … I suspect most leaders already know this to be a good action, but it was an epiphany for me in a new unit of time and I was inspired by it.  Actually, I was kind of humbled by it when I realized that some of my staff are smarter than me [at certain things].

2.  Getting mad at the staff never works.

It usually backfires on me when I get irritated or cross with my staff.  I then have to deal with “attitude” for the rest of the day or week.  When I take a deep breath and consciously try to understand their thought process on why something was done [wrong], I can then figure out how to get the situation fixed without a lot of negative emotion and then can train the individual in a more ideal way of doing whatever it was for next time.

3.  Don’t panic in a crisis situation.

I am learning to take a deep breath and calm myself down when confronted with a crisis.  I am gaining confidence in the fact that I always pull things off and make them go right.  I just have to remember to do that each time I am confronted with a new flap or seemingly unsolvable emergency.

4.  Be positive about things.

My staff WANT to know what is going on in the company, but mostly they want to know about good, forward motion and to be acknowledged for their productivity.  They don’t really want or need to know about things I am working on fixing or backslides unless it is their specific job to fix.  “Compliment in public and criticize in private” applies here as well.

5.  Make work a game.

Making work more like play brings everyone UP and is great for production and therefore morale.  Games for meeting targets and deadlines gets everyone inspired and I have fun handing out the rewards or prizes.

6.  There’s always tomorrow to do better …

🙂

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