Radical Clarity Tip #2

The Quest for Clear Communication

Over the next while we will explore the topic of communication in the workplace.

I am a firm believer in the quest for Radial Clarity which to me means that the intended message that you are sending is received in the way you had planned. Additionally, Radical Clarity means that communication is not avoided. Even if the message is tough, communicate openly and honestly. Your reputation rides on your ability to communicate. There are no perfect communication styles or ones that are better than the other. You need to find your own “voice”. There are, however, helpful tips which can help. I will be sharing some of the easy ones that have worked for me.

Tip #2:
Make Time for Employees.
Regular, one-on-one meetings with your team members are important; if employees work remotely, meet by phone. If you can't meet weekly, do it at least twice a month. And don't take phone calls during meetings, unless it is an emergency. Show your employees they have your full attention. Talk about their career paths and how you envision them growing in their jobs. On the flip side, employees need to be aware of bosses' time pressures.

Radical Clarity Tip # 1

The Quest for Clear Communication

Over the next while we will explore the topic of communication in the workplace.

I am a firm believer in the quest for Radial Clarity which to me means that the intended message that you are sending is received in the way you had planned. Additionally, Radical Clarity means that communication is not avoided. Even if the message is tough, communicate openly and honestly. Your reputation rides on your ability to communicate. There are no perfect communication styles or ones that are better than the other. You need to find your own “voice”. There are, however, helpful tips which can help. I will be sharing some of the easy ones that have worked for me.

Tip #1
Active Listening

Listening is divided into two main categories: passive and active. Passive listening is little more that hearing. It occurs when the receiver of the message has little motivation to listen carefully, such as when listening to music, television, or when being polite. Active listening means fully engaging in what the other person is saying and truly hearing what they have to say.

The following are a few traits of active listeners:
o Spend more time listening than talking.
o Do not finish the sentences of others.
o Do not answer questions with questions.
o Are aware of biases. We all have them. We need to control them.
o Let the other speakers talk. Do not dominate the conversations.
o Plan responses after the others have finished speaking, NOT while they are speaking.
o Provide feedback, but do not interrupt incessantly.
o Analyze by looking at all the relevant factors and asking open-ended questions. Walk others through by summarizing.
o Keep conversations on what others say, NOT on what interests them.
o Take brief notes. This forces them to concentrate on what is being said.

Turning Around a Problem Employee

by Toni Bowers
Takeaway: If you have an employee with a productivity or attitude problem, the temptation is often just to write that employee off and get back to business. But before you take such a drastic step, you need to identify the problem and try to solve it.

An employee with performance problems is not just a manager’s problem. It’s a problem for the whole staff. Staff members can resent taking up the slack for a poor performer, and rightly so. Hostility and anger from a problem employee can permeate and infect the whole environment. Ungrounded cynicism can also spread to the rest of your staff, even your good performers.

For these reasons, it’s important that you take action with an employee who is exhibiting problems with productivity and behavior as soon as you detect there is a problem. Here are some of the best ways to approach this tricky issue.

Dealing with the problem
Try this six-step process when helping employees improve their performance. The steps are:

1. Describe the employee's specific performance issues
• Talk about the issues, not about the employee's poor effort
• Describe the results of the employee's performance.

2. Describe the expected standards of employee performance
• Be specific. Don't say you have a “poor” attitude; instead list specific occurrences that illustrate problematic behavior.

3. Determine the cause of the performance issues
• Does the employee lack training, skills, knowledge?
• Is there a lack of motivation, incentive?
• Are there external factors involved (family, financial, etc.)?
• Are there factors beyond the employee's control affecting the performance?

4. Ask the employee for solution(s)
• What could the employee do to improve this situation?

5. Discuss each solution with the employee
• How will this solution help with the employee's problem?
• Discuss your solution(s).
• Try to jointly improve upon the solutions.

6. Agree on specific actions to be done and a time frame to implement them
• Arrange for another meeting in the future to track the progress/results of the solution.

The best way to tackle performance issues early is to use a regular performance appraisal process. At the very least, conduct performance appraisals once a year. But it’s even better to conduct smaller evaluations every few months so that any information about performance problems doesn’t come as a surprise to the employee. Also, you can set performance goals at more frequent intervals and check more readily if they’re being met.

Effectively dealing with performance issues in an employee can be a long, intensive process. But it’s best to do it right.

Team Building and Delegation

Employee involvement is creating an environment in which people have an impact on decisions and actions that affect their jobs. Employee involvement is not the goal nor is it a tool, as practiced in many organizations. Rather, it is a management and leadership philosophy about how people are most enabled to contribute to continuous improvement and the ongoing success of their work organization.

Involve people as much as possible in all aspects of work decisions and planning. This involvement increases ownership and commitment, retains your best employees, and fosters an environment in which people choose to be motivated and contributing. It is also important for team building.

How to involve employees in decisionmaking and continuous improvement activities is the strategic aspect of involvement and can include such methods as suggestion systems, manufacturing cells, work teams, continuous improvement meetings, Kaizen (continuous improvement) events, corrective action processes and periodic discussions with the supervisor.

Intrinsic to most employee involvement processes is training in team effectiveness, communication, and problem solving; the development of reward and recognition systems; and frequently, the sharing of gains made through employee involvement efforts.

Employee Involvement Model

For people and organizations that desire a model to apply, the best I have discovered was developed from work by Tannenbaum and Schmidt (1958) and Sadler (1970). They provide a continuum for leadership and involvement that includes an increasing role for employees and a decreasing role for supervisors in the decision process. The continuum includes this progression.

Tell: the supervisor makes the decision and announces it to staff. The supervisor provides complete direction. Tell is useful when communicating about safety issues, government regulations and for decisions that neither require nor ask for employee input.
Sell: the supervisor makes the decision and then attempts to gain commitment from staff by "selling" the positive aspects of the decision. Sell is useful when employee commitment is needed, but the decision is not open to employee influence.

Consult: the supervisor invites input into a decision while retaining authority to make the final decision herself. The key to a successful consultation is to inform employees, on the front end of the discussion, that their input is needed, but that the supervisor is retaining the authority to make the final decision. This is the level of involvement that can create employee dissatisfaction most readily when this is not clear to the people providing input.

Join: the supervisor invites employees to make the decision with the supervisor. The supervisor considers his voice equal in the decision process. The key to a successful join is when the supervisor truly builds consensus around a decision and is willing to keep her influence equal to that of the others providing input.

Delegate: the supervisor turns the decision over to another party. The key to successful delegation is to always build a feedback loop and a timeline into the process. The supervisor must also share any "preconceived picture" he has of the anticipated outcome of the process.

Keeping Your Staff

Entrepreneurial companies are tough places to work. What's stopping staff from leaving your firm?

Finding the right answers could make the difference between achieving greatness and being profiled in More Lessons From the Edge, because the cost of staff turnover is disproportionately higher in smaller firms. If someone leaves a big company, management can transfer in an underused employee from another division or arrange for job sharing until a replacement is found. You don't have that luxury. The result is a loss of productivity and, potentially, of business opportunities — not to mention the expense of hiring and training the replacement. Once you have good people on board, it's much cheaper to keep them.

Once you've landed an employee, your job becomes retention. The most significant employment advantage of an entrepreneurial company is just that — its entrepreneurial culture. Play to your strengths. Create and maintain an environment that has the following characteristics:

Open communication: Start with communicating your vision and values, which, if you are doing a good job, everyone in the organization should be saying in their sleep. When your vision and values become a mantra, your company can use that mantra as a touchstone for all the decisions that are made. An open environment also means providing reinforcement and other forms of feedback to your employees. The flipside: adopt an open-door policy in which no idea is considered stupid. You can also offer rewards for ideas that are implemented in order to encourage a constant flow of creative juices.

While it sounds counterintuitive to private firms, I believe all companies should practise open-book management. When employees understand the finances of a firm and can see the impact of their work on the bottom line, they are far more likely to buy into your vision.

Respect and trust: Show that you respect and trust your employees by standing back and letting them do their thing. If you sense they need assistance, then be a coach rather than a micromanager. As long as they deliver results, let them come and go as they please. After all, growing companies demand flexibility from their workforce; you should be willing to pay it back. Allowing employees to achieve more balance in their lives through flexible schedules, job sharing, telecommuting and reduced summer hours can make that shiny office tower across the street look like the Death Star.

Continuous learning: Employees who can develop new skills through formal education and on-the-job training tend to be more loyal and, of course, more effective.

Lots of fun: A casual, enjoyable environment goes a long way to building employee loyalty. Create bonding experiences for your team through regular group activities, whether they're educational or just for fun.

Results-based compensation: Build compensation packages that are transparent, consistent and fair across the organization. They should include a modest base salary with plenty of opportunity for upside through commissions, profit-sharing and equity. This will align your employees' interests with the goals of the company. By offering equity, they will truly feel like your partners. Just be sure to impose mid- to long-term vesting periods so that the employee must stay with the company for a fixed period of time before they can cash in.

Celebrations: Recognition is very important to people. Although something as simple as an Employee of the Month trophy can be motivating, I suggest you try to be more creative. I have seen one company provide the best parking spot and the use of a top-of-the-line Mercedes to its best-performing salesperson each month. It is also important to celebrate as a company. Since you've opened your books, everyone will know when you exceed your targets. Make a big deal about it. Have a party. Do something big that will be a constant reminder to your team of their success and the part that they all played in it. Heck — why not ride in on an elephant?

Your most important assets walk out the door every night. To make sure they come back the next morning, give your people your time and full attention. Need a mantra to help you achieve this? How about this one: "The most important customer is my employee."

Virtual Assistance for Small Business

With over 70% of the economic experts expecting a last quarter uptick in the economy, now is the perfect time to start preparing for the extra business. I am a big fan of using virtual assistants to help build out my team during peak seasons. This is an especially useful business strategy in today’s market place. One of the best lessons a recession can teach us is that in many circumstances variable costs beat fixed costs any day. To survive the feast or famine rollercoaster of entrepreneurship, you need to make sure your expenses mimic those same ups and downs.

Benefits of Virtual Assistants

Adding virtual assistants to your workforce is a terrific way to turn a traditionally “fixed” expense, like payroll, into a more cash flow friendly variable expense. Let me explain how it would work. For example, most business advisers suggest that payroll expenses should average 20-30% of your sales. This would mean that when sales are flush at $250,000/month that translates into payroll expenses of $50-75,000. When sales hit a downturn at only $50,000/month, your payroll would then move back to a more manageable, $10-15,000. As a business owner, how closely you adhere to this ratio means the difference between bleeding red and staying in the black.

Additional Benefits Include:

1. No payroll taxes or employee benefit expenses
2. No “on site” office space requirements
3. No costly training programs when hiring experienced VA’s
4. No long term commitment
5. No morale draining lay offs during slow seasons

Understanding the Relationship

When considering virtual assistants to help manage business tasks, there are a couple considerations to keep in mind. For starters, they are not your employee but independent contactors. This means they will most likely have other tasks and deadlines on their schedule while they are working for you. READ: They are on their clock- not yours. Make sure you are respectful of time constraints and provide as much advanced notice of tasks, deadlines, and special circumstances as possible. As with many business relationships, communication is critical. You can’t blame a virtual assistant for not living up to your expectations if you never made those expectations clear. In other words, don’t just say you need something “right away”, make sure you define “right away” as within two hours.

Getting Started

I also think it is wise to start slowly when building a new relationship with a virtual assistant. For example, instead of requesting that they create a new website for you, start by having them update your blog template first. As each task is completed satisfactorily, and communication strengthens, you can then proceed to larger and more complex tasks. Also, be sure to discuss with potential VA’s their strengths and weaknesses to ensure the best experience possible. If you are in the real estate field, consider searching for VA’s with backgrounds in real estate. If you an entrepreneur looking for marketing help, be sure to search for VA’s with a background in marketing or who are currently active in social media.


If you have never considered hiring a virtual assistant to build out your team, I strongly suggest taking a second look. As technology continues to advance and better networking platforms are built, virtual work relationships will only become even easier. A couple great places to start your search for virtual help include Guru.com, Freelance.com, RentACoder.com, or a simple “virtual assistant” search on Google.
Written by: Heather Nolte

Starting Your New Business

It is important to make the right decisions when starting a small business in order for it to become a success.

When you start your own business, you will get advice from just about every person you encounter. Some of that advice will be valid and some of it will be a complete waste.

Often the advice you get will have no merit to the business you are starting. There are a number of business startup tips for small businesses that are valid regardless of the business you are starting.

Let's take a look at the five best starting a business tips for becoming successful.

Business Startup Tip #1
Making sure you have a financial plan is key to succeeding in small business.

When you develop a financial plan along with a budget that you stick to you are giving yourself more control over your success. This gives you the ability to better track your success and dictate your short-term and long-term financial goals realistically.

Without a financial plan you are really trusting fate to make your small business a success. That’s not very smart.

Business Startup Tip #2
Networking is another important aspect when it comes to small business success.

Regardless of whether you operate your business from a home office or you have an actual office you need a support structure. Having industry related contacts can help motivate and inspire you.

In addition, networking helps keep you updated and current within your industry. Networking for small business success can be done online and through local associations and groups.

Business Startup Tip #3
Many people who start a small business successfully do so with the help of a mentor. When you are just starting out it is good to have someone within the industry that is already successful.

When you have a mentor to help you start a small business you can bounce ideas off of them and get their input on critical business decisions you do not have experience with.

Business Startup Tip #4
It is also important to take care of yourself when you are starting a small business.

Starting a small business can be very time consuming - and if you are not careful, you can overwork yourself and burn out.

Balancing the responsibilities of your small business with your personal life will not only enable you to recharge your batteries from time to time, but it will also help you to maintain an objective and fresh perspective.

Business Startup Tip #5
By far the most important tip for starting a small business successfully would be to do something that you love.

If your small business is just a means to an end and you get no enjoyment from what you do, your chances for success are slim. Figure out what you are good at or what you have a talent for and take advantage of that skill or talent.

If you do this and succeed, your success will only be sweeter - but if you don't and you fail, your failure will only sting more.