PROBLEM. SOLVED. - Don't kill your company with kindness

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PROBLEM. SOLVED.
* Don't kill your company with kindness

Many budding entrepreneurs start their own companies because they like interacting with people and providing products or services that others need. But the friendly relationships that grow out of this impulse can have a negative impact on a business if they extend to its employees.

As the boss, there’s not always a lot of space between showing empathy for the people who work for you and being seen as a pushover. Becoming “friends” with your staff members in the belief that they’ll work harder as a result sounds good, but it comes with a variety of pitfalls.

Identifying the Problem

How many of the following traits describe your particular style of leadership?

• You often don’t hold people accountable for substandard work.
• You often choose to avoid conflict, hoping that people will sort issues out on their own.
• You tend to take on work that others fail to do, in addition to all of your regular responsibilities.
• When the time comes to make big changes in the business, you frequently capitulate to employees’ objections — and don’t make the necessary adjustments.
• You really like to be liked.

If you identify with any of these traits, you should notice how your leadership style may be affecting behavior in the workplace: Employees miss deadlines and fail to let you know. Your input is either ignored or employees argue against your decisions. You feel obliged to explain yourself and your rationale in order to “justify” a task they’re given to complete. Workers feel free to drop by your office at any time and share inappropriate details about their personal lives.

You don’t need an MBA to recognize that these are warning signs, all of which represent the unfortunate results of being “too nice” as a boss and as a business owner.

Finding a Solution

How do you fix the situation? Become “professionally friendly.” Create healthy relationships with your employees without compromising your business goals and your vision for the future.

Try adopting a few basic principles:

• Treat everyone fairly. Make sure every employee is held to the same standards. Avoid favoritism (or even the perception of favoritism), so that no one feels as if underperformers are being unjustly protected.
• Avoid gossip. As tempting as it may be to chitchat about juicy incidents in employees’ lives, stay away. This not only undermines people’s respect for you, but also inevitably leads to resentment among those who feel “out of the loop.”
• Deal with conflicts head-on. Not everyone is up to the unpleasant task of handling conflicts between employees, but it comes with the job of running a business. Consider hiring a professional coach to assist you in developing effective conflict-resolution skills. A strong leader knows how to step in and resolve issues and offer guidance for coping with troublesome matters in the future.
• Fulfill your “like to be liked” needs outside the workplace. Building a network of trusted friends and acquaintances in your personal life will address your urge to be “one of the guys” with your employees.

When you run your own business, you create the culture you want, for yourself and the people you hire. It’s not the place to go looking for a new BFF.

Read more: http://blog.intuit.com/employees/are-you-too-nice-to-lead-your-small-business/#ixzz2Hwjd8Fac

MARKETING
* How to draw more visitors to your website

1. Focus on content creation. Good content markets itself. When you put the effort into building and promoting great pieces of content, the natural result is more traffic to your website via shares and referrals.
2. Add social sharing buttons to your website. Don’t assume that your readers will take the initiative to share your content on their own. Instead, make it easy for your site to accrue more visitors from social networking sites by adding social sharing buttons to your company’s blog posts.
3. Answer questions on social networking sites. When you see people asking questions online, provide whatever helpful information you can. Doing so will earn you both website traffic and customers for life.
4. Distribute press releases for actual achievements. While you shouldn’t abuse press release distribution websites to promote insignificant accomplishments, take advantage of this traffic stream whenever you have something noteworthy to share.
5. Use SEO responsibly. Don’t over-optimize your website, but do make use of current SEO best practices (which put the emphasis on looking “natural”) to let the search engines know where they should list your site in the natural search results. High rankings will result in plenty of new visitors to your website.
6. Invest in your website’s blog. By publishing high-value posts consistently, you’ll build your relationship with your readers, resulting in visitors who check back frequently to view your latest posts.
7. Share slide decks and other presentations. Posting informative materials to sites like Slideshare andScribd will help you to increase both brand awareness and website traffic through exposure to new markets and new potential customers.
8. Build a killer email newsletter. When readers find valuable email newsletters, they tend to share them with others. If your current email followup sequence is lackluster, making improvements here could result in significantly more referral traffic.
9. Publish a helpful podcast. Similarly, producing a regular, high-quality podcast will increase referred website visitors, while reaching new visitors through podcast directories.
10. Deploy infographics. Infographics get shared more often than most other types of content. This makes them ideal candidates for traffic generation campaigns that make use of content marketing.
11. Run a YouTube channel. YouTube is one of the web’s largest search engines, making it a great way to expose new audiences to your brand. As an added bonus, your videos may be listed in Google’s blended search results, leading to even more traffic!
12. Ask visitors to share your site with others. Simply asking your visitors to forward your articles to others or share them on their social networking profiles is a great way to quickly boost page views.
13. Write guest posts for top industry sites. Ask other websites in your industry if you can pen guest posts for their blogs. Having your content featured there isn’t just great for traffic – it’s a good way to build your perceived authority as well.
14. Connect with influencers in your niche. Having an authority figure in your industry share just one of your blog articles can result in a tremendous amount of new traffic, subscribers and buyers, so make relationship building a key part of your company’s marketing strategy.
15. Pay attention to up-and-coming social networks. Newer social networks like Tumblr and Pinterest are sprouting up all the time. Because there can be a significant “first adopter” advantage to the people that establish a presence on these sites early on, keep an eye out for these future opportunities.
16. Eliminate website errors. If the search engines aren’t able to index your website properly (which can occur due to a number of different errors), you may not be receiving all the search traffic you should be. Check your Google Webmaster Tools account for information on common problems.
17. Add pillar content to your website. Every website should have at least a few pieces of “pillar” content — in-depth, well-written content that will always be of interest to readers — to help drive traffic via person-to-person sharing.
18. Over-deliver on your company’s products or services. From a word-of-mouth traffic standpoint, over-delivering can’t be beat. When you go above and beyond in your industry, customers will recommend you to others – leading to more traffic and a higher marketing ROI.
19. Interview experts within your industry. People love hearing from experts, so if you can snag an interview and publish it on your site, you’re in for a big surge of traffic from the authority’s existing audience.
20. Comment on other websites. Leaving valuable comments on other websites’ blogs can be a great way to build traffic back to your own site. Just be sure to say more in your comment than, “Great post!” or “Thanks for sharing!”

* Google+ features overcome numbers for B2B brand building

MANAGEMENT
* Why smart bosses start book clubs

Ask your entire company to read a strategic book together.

What I learned most after 16 years as a rugby player is that the team who communicates, mobilizes and executes in the same directions as a cohesive unit for 80 minutes will win. This feat is both physically demanding and rare.

After 21 years of consulting experience, recommending that an entire company –– usually from three to 300 employees –– read the same book from cover to cover in 30 days has been one of the most effective methods for initially turning a company around, increasing baseline revenue and mobilizing everyone in the same direction.

Classics I’ve assigned include “Blue Ocean Strategy,” “Financial Intelligence,” “The Phoenix Effect,” “Good to Great,” “Lead, Sell, or Get Out of The Way,” and “Analytics at Work,” among many others. Choose own your top four to six titles, and then read one as a company every two to three months. The cohesion, result trajectories and company alignments can be stunning — if marshaled well.

The secret is for leadership to select the precise book and then listen carefully to employees during and after they’ve completed each read. Don’t lecture. Just listen.

Employees who love their company, appreciate their job and care about their career will dive right in. Almost immediately you can see their minds, their work, their passion, and their ideas improving exponentially. Everyone in the company is guaranteed to have something in common to talk about going forward.

We’ve especially applied this “old school book assignment” to creative companies in need of relief from their chaotic, lifestyle-driven, outdated, or rural business model. Uniform communication helps reduce chaos and steer toward operational alignments.

However, those employees (or partners) who make excuses, complain or refuse to read the book typically exude similar attitudes and behaviors on the job. While companies and employees often claim they are on the same page, this old school book assignment strategy proves it — literally.

The takeaways here are:

• Group book reading journeys initiate company alignment.
• A fresh perspective as to who should (and should not) remain “on the bus” going forward will emerge quickly after two to three book assignments.

Capture stunning photography and video footage.

Marketing, PR, and social media success today is driven by distinctive, high-quality photography and video production. For-profit and nonprofit organizations large and small each have paying customers, sponsors, members, or donors to reach.

Expert photography and video is the undisputed kernel of today’s marketing content value and reach, simply because people are not taking the time to read beyond headlines unless visually enticed upfront. Increase one line item in your PR budget — photography and video — then hire the best of the best to record and disperse your brand narrative.

The most successful media, blogs, and magazines have always had absolutely gorgeous photography and compelling video content online, inviting potential customers to read in greater detail after being impressed visually or interactively.

Are your core visual elements stunning and fresh? The good news is that modern innovations in photo and printing quality also allow for more colorful graphics on billboards, commercial vehicles, mass transit and even boats. Innovations in video camera techniques enable company offerings, messages or news to be viewable anytime via handheld, desktop or on social media.

The shocker is that organizations still spend upwards of millions of dollars hiring expert event planners, adventure travel companies, motivational and leadership speakers, or tired advertising agencies — yet they still fail to capture the footage of their true, inspirational and explanatory narrative.

The takeaway here is that compelling footage of your people, your events, your workplace or culture, and how your organization gives back must be captured more frequently and aired more thoughtfully than ever before.

Consider mobility.

Qualified, nice and professional customers who will pay you well are out there. However, they may be more dispersed or more challenging to connect with in today’s economy. Modern mobility enables entrepreneurs to visit new customers, as opposed to waiting for old customers to reappear less often.

To be clear, mobility or executive travel varies in relevance for every business model and budget. In my experience, confident economic exploration into relevant new markets breeds growth. Online file uploads, design proofing and modern shipping technologies allow rural craftspeople and large materials suppliers to transact business from anywhere without a single airline ticket. Other fields require face-to-face interactions.

Quick case study: A modern art gallery was enduring both the economic dip and an abrupt end to their posh storefront lease (sale of building). Once relocated in a larger, more chic space, we re-engineered the company “cash register” and increased inventory quality and valuation.

Our next recommendation was for the gallery owner to embrace a more mobile schedule, including international art dealer events and elite shows. Elevated PR and marketing strategies spurred new client purchases to exceed collector transactions in terms of overall percentage of sales.

Sure there were growing pains, lessons learned, car trouble in Mississippi and all kinds of parking fines. Yet the gallery owner now transacts in New Orleans, D.C., Berlin, Miami, Chicago and other top art markets. Gallery revenues have tripled within seven months and are projected to reach a 580% all-in sales increase within 13 months.

The takeaway here is to determine which cities or regions you might best acquire new customers, expert employees or fresh resources. Akin to attending industry summits, obtaining a more profitable concentration of customers and partners — at new altitudes — is perhaps the freshest perspective to embrace this coming year.

MONEY
* 5 ways to get office space without spending a fortune

TIPS & TOOLS
* Top tools for savvy social media marketing
* The truth about technology
* 4 innovative products that can help your business
JUST FOR FUN
* If corporations are people, can they carpool?

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