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Personal Accountability

Mar 10 2014
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Motivate Yourself and You’ll Motivate Your Team

By Comments & Opinion, Entrepreneurial, Foundations of Success, Leadership, Personal Accountability No Comments

motivation-for-entrepreneursThere was a recent meeting I attended with my leadership team that got me thinking about motivation. We were discussing sales numbers, and I encountered a typical problem – the numbers were good, but they could have been much better. This can be difficult to communicate to staff, because some think that “good” is enough, and simply don’t have the motivation to improve their methods.

There are countless articles online that discuss how to motivate your employees. In fact, I encountered one great article from Inc.com that details three questions that you should ask your employees every few months to gauge their motivation. After reading this fantastic article, something occurred to me. At the end of the day, you need to make sure that you, yourself, are motivated to become a better worker, a better entrepreneur, and essentially a better person. Once you can keep yourself motivated to do better, you’ll understand how to motivate your team to do better. Here are three pieces of advice I can offer fellow entrepreneurs to help you motivate yourself:

Prioritize your Tasks: It’s easy to get bogged down by little tasks that may seem incredibly important to you at the time, but aren’t truly essential for day-to-day operations. If you keep getting distracted by little tasks, it will eventually drain you and leave you with little “juice” left to focus on the important items on your list. Take a step back and prioritize what tasks are truly essential to business operations, which will keep you focused and inspired to perform to the best of your abilities.

Realize That People Are Depending On You: They may not blatantly tell you to your face, but your team is depending on you in many different ways. They depend on you for guidance, mentorship and general leadership. Of course, it’s not just your team that is depending on you either – your family is depending on you too. When you realize that you have so many people counting on you, you’ll recognize that you have to become better in more ways than one.

Think about the Flip Side: As an entrepreneur, you ultimately decided to take the risk of running your own business for one central reason: you despise the idea of working for someone else. This one point alone is usually enough to motivate most entrepreneurs, but hectic days can make you lose sight of this. Remind yourself that you opened the doors of your business because you not only wanted to be your own boss – but you knew that you could do it better than anyone else.

What methods do you use to keep yourself motivated? Do you find that motivating yourself helps your team stay focused? I’d love to chat with you about this in the comments below.

Feb 05 2014
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Making goals is easy – Sticking to them is the challenge.

By Entrepreneurial, Foundations of Success, Planning for the future, Personal Accountability One Comment

The beginning of the year can be hectic for entrepreneurs. Once the year has settled in, it becomes far too easy to lose the focus and determination you had at the beginning of January. As I mentioned in one of my recent blog posts, I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, yet I still find myself being more focused at the beginning of the year. It takes dedication to keep that focus going, and it becomes more difficult as the months pass by. Anyone can stay determined for a month, but it takes a lot of strength and willpower to stay determined for an entire year.

There are many things you can do to stay focused on the goals you’ve set for yourself, and these are just a few things I do on a regular basis to stay focused.

Making sure that you have clear goals for yourself is very important, but it’s also important to be realistic about them. Instead of telling yourself “I’m going to reach a certain goal by the end of the year”, break them down to weekly or daily tasks. Doing this is an easier way to keep yourself accountable to your long-term goals, and it’s also easier to check things off when they come up instead of auditing yourself at the end of the year.

An important part of staying focused is also making sure that you’re taking the necessary time for yourself to unwind. I’ve been talking at length in the past few weeks about how I have been unwinding with some close friends on my beer league team of the Screaming Eagles. It’s important to find a past-time that you not only find entertaining, but that also lets you completely escape and forget about the stress that was brought about from your work.

Another way to de-stress is to simply unplug yourself from your smart phone and e-mail for about an hour or so before you go to bed. While that may seem challenging to those of us who are constantly checking our e-mails, and may also seem counter intuitive to staying focused, but no one can operate on a 24/7 basis and over-working yourself is one of the traps that entrepreneurs fall victim to that makes them lose sight of their goals.

These are just a few ways that you can stay focused this month and, in reality, for the rest of the year. Now that the first month of the year has passed by, this is the time where you can prove to yourself that those goals you made for yourself weren’t just for show – now it’s time to attain them.

Jan 13 2014
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Where there is no leadership, the people will perish!

By Comments & Opinion, Leadership, Personal Accountability No Comments

My last posting I introduced my life long hobby of hockey and my beer league team of the Screaming Eagles.  Since that posting I’ve become a lot more in tune of some potential on ice lessons and been on a pretty awesome point streak.  In the last post I spoke about how our team doesn’t have a formal coach and how we essentially have to hold each other accountable as peers and I spoke about the brilliance and effectiveness of that.  However, two games after that one our team organizer as I’ll call him, John Grobanopoulos (Grobo), not to be mistaken with George Strombolopolous (Strombo) who is another lifelong school mate, missed a game.  We joked prior to the game as we were getting dressed that his presence on the ice probably won’t be missed as we had several of our more talented players in attendance but what took place even before the puck dropped was noticeable and as a result reminded me of some valuable lessons in leadership and organizational behavior.

Right after warm up it was time for the puck drop and one of my team mates yelled out “what are the lines?” and all I heard was silence,  I knew immediately we may be in for a long night.  John although not the formal coach, looks after all the administration and setting of the lines, we were lost right off the bat, nobody seamlessly took over what might be a menial task yet an important one that can set the tone for the game and ultimately be the difference between winning and losing.  After some comical back and forth and mass confusion of who was starting even after we organized the lines we finally dropped the puck.  After we observed the pace and assessed our opponent, it was clear that our speed and talent far exceeded theirs and we should be able to easily defeat them.  However, without Grobo on the bench to make game observations to see who was on and which pairs were clicking, we suffered from a lack of discipline, taking too many penalties and ultimately not moving our feet enough.  Since we had more talent we kept it close and went late into the game holding a one goal advantage yet we let that slip away with only mere seconds left in the game.  This meant overtime which was also Grobo’s responsibility to decide who the best players of the night were and who deserved to play the extra session and ultimately give us the best chance to win.  Well needless to say especially since we were shaken by giving the late game tying goal, confusion and ego prevailed and we entered the overtime period as discombobulated as we had started the game and it took only 30 second for our weaker opponent to finish us off and emerge victorious.

As the screaming eagles retired to the dressing room and did what we do best (yell and drink beer), I sat and reflected and couldn’t help but notice how the lack of at least some organization, guidance and gentle accountability can be fatal to any team or organization.  It’s not always about being a charismatic game changing vocal leader who can quote all of Jack Welch’s books, sometimes all that is needed is someone who can keep order and eliminate confusion within an organization.  Upon John’s return when he asked how we lost to such a weaker opponent everybody chimed in with some excuses but I paid John a compliment and said we really missed him, and not necessarily his fierce back checking (he will resent that sarcastic comment) but his leadership.  Like the humble effective business and team leader that he is, he shrugged it off and taught me another lesson when he comically said “The key to leading or motivating a bunch of type A personalities is simply to out yell them”.  Can’t say I ever thought about that but at The Wish Group I lead several Presidents and a management team of over 20 type A’s and come to think of it I do yell a lot.  It’s an old biblical saying yet it’s true, without leadership regardless of its form a group or organization striving to achieve a task will perish or at least not be merely as effective as it can be.  I encourage each of you to reflect on times where nobody takes leadership of a situation and observe what occurs, it may be enlightening, and maybe that will motivate you to step up and take the leadership, because often leadership isn’t given, it’s taken.

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