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Ashley Ross's picture
Ashley Ross
Sun, 2011-02-27 10:41

I felt it was really important to share what I’ve learned from the multitude of jobs I’ve had. I sometimes think about being a business consultant, to go through their hiring and training process, and develop a report and action plan to close the gap of disconnect between management and “regular employee,” and to increase efficiency and overall happiness. Anyways, this is the rant I’ve wanted to tell some past employers.

It is just my experience, nothing hard and fast or set-in-stone. I have not run my own business with employees yet, so this is just from the perspective of employee, not management or boss. Hope it helps.

Some of my experiences from past jobs:

-Running your own business with the sole purpose of making money doesn’t work. People I’ve seen do this end up basing everything on whether it will make the business money, they focus on loss of profit, on “sales are down this week,” they make A.D.D. decisions on marketing tools, techniques, staff, etc. You need to have a bigger purpose other than making money - everyone says it: If you put your will and energy towards your purpose and goal the money will naturally follow. It doesn’t work very well to try to force the money out of the woodwork, people get tired, depressed and burnt out very quickly that way (from my experience at least). Customers usually buy “why,” way more than they buy “what” or “how;” they want to purchase a part of your vision, not just your product…. If your vision is strong enough, it doesn’t matter how saturated the market is, people will come to you over others. *Google Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action on TED Talks!!!!!!

-Having a negative, poor-me attitude won’t help your business thrive at all. Your attitude will transfer throughout the whole business: employees won’t be happy, customers will feel uncomfortable and you will continue to be miserable. Focusing on the loss of sales, the loss of profits, the bad things that happened here and there won’t do a thing to help reverse any of it. Recognize and acknowledge these things but focus on the good things that are happening, whatever they may be. The overall uplifting mood will transfer through to the employees, partners, customers, etc. Everyone will be looking for more good things which will make them appear faster and faster (law of attraction). When employees are happy to be working for a happy boss they will tend to work more efficiently and effectively, putting in more energy and effort. Customers will be happy about purchasing your product (they are buying a feeling: if you feel great selling your product, then they will feel great if they buy it = basic advertising tricks) and people will WANT to work for you and with you.

-On websites and most other things it is hugely worth your time and effort and extra funds to do things the right way the first time, to the best of your abilities of course. Don’t try to cut corners to get something done quickly because you’ll be paying for it later. For example, if you have many products on a website, getting all the right info and categorization for each is worth doing completely the first time: you don’t want to pay someone a weeks or months worth of wages to go back through thousands of products to insert image alt-tags or to make sure each product has the correct picture or accurate description, etc (and trust me, not very many people want to do that even if they are being paid for it). A quality website with quality content is, in my opinion, worth waiting a little longer to make, rather than to “throw something up” that is sub par. My reasoning: First impressions last a very long time, if your potential customers are coming to a poor quality site (I don’t mean fancy vs. simple, simple can be beautiful and intriguing; I’m talking about the heart and effort put into something that will read across many dimensions.) that impression will stay with them and will possibly turn them away from your business before they even know what it’s about. Why not wait a little bit longer to ensure your first impressions with everyone are the best they can be at this point? Everything you do, everything that has your name or logo on it, everyone that works for you is a reflection of the business and its products or services. Do you really want anything other than high quality web-presence, high quality products, high quality staff, etc. representing your company? I wouldn’t!

-Nobody can read your mind. If you work with anyone else whatsoever, it is so much easier if you assume nobody knows what you’re thinking. Be very clear about what you want, without sounding condescending or rude. If someone asks again what you want or what you said, don’t get mad, just calmly and nicely repeat what you want/need, more often than not you didn’t actually tell anyone what you thought, or it wasn’t as clear as you thought it was. If you change your mind about something you need to tell anyone who still has old information: it’s very frustrating to be acting on behalf of the boss/manager all day just to find out they changed their mind 8 hours ago and all your work is for nothing, not to mention a waste of money and energy for the company. Bottom line: it doesn’t matter what you mean, it only matters what message actually gets through, and both parties are responsible for transmitting and receiving the correct message, but if you’re the boss it falls mostly on you.

-Make sure your vision is clearly understood, if you can do this people will start acting on behalf of the companies best interests. This requires a little faith in staff and release of control, but it is possible to build a team of people who act as if they own the business too, they will treat their decisions and actions with high regard and do whatever they feel is best for the company. This means a load off your back, if you’ll allow it, and a strong network of naturally flexible and adaptable decision makers. However!, if your companies purpose or vision are not clear or is based only on superficial means (like money) management will suffer and so will the company. All of my bosses and managers who were only interested in profit didn’t know how to portray themselves or the company to the world, they didn’t know what they stood for and they were very indecisive. One boss in particular was only focused on the profit margin. He would make, what seemed to me in the short time I was in the office, very rash decisions, he changed his mind almost weekly on what he wanted: “yes social media - no social media, yes blogs - no blogs, yes customer service - no customer service it costs too much – ok yes customer service, I don’t like that get rid of it - oh wait maybe it’s ok, I’ll ask someone else to bring it back without telling everyone, so the first person still thinks I don’t want it!, change this on the website - oh wait I read the article wrong and we have to change it all back to how it was to begin with, etc. – etc., etc. – etc.” I know he has lost a lot of money trying to save or make money! It seems like there will always be debates about different marketing techniques, all you can do is research well and follow your intuition, or gut instinct. Changing your mind is fine, just make sure you research well and do what you think is best for your vision, not just your profit margin. Also, new things might take a little while to catch on or settle in, give things a chance before you move on with the next.

-LISTEN! I can’t tell you how important this simple thing is especially if you have employees. Most all of my bosses or managers would not ever fully listen to me. I don’t care how much you have on your plate, if you are paying people to work for you, you need to listen to their input full heartedly. Unless you are just paying people to be robots, it is a waste of money to ignore them, no matter what they are doing. Usually if someone is working is close quarters with a particular part of the company they will develop a more intimate knowledge of their task, more so than a manager or boss overseeing the whole operation. So it stands to reason these people will begin to develop suggestions (if you nurture it) which may help boost service or production or efficiency, etc. Or they will let you know of concerns they have that you could fix before the situation becomes big and costly. Most of all, it’s just rude to pretend to care about someone and only give them 50% of your attention when you speak with them. Either don’t care about them at all and make that clear or give them 100% of your focus and energy. After I figured out my managers or bosses really weren’t listening and really didn’t care about anything I said, even though they said they did, I stopped giving 100% of my attention to the job: why try to pay attention, catch small details or problems or try to figure out how to do things faster or better if my boss doesn’t care or won’t listen to suggestions? I stopped trying to do anything beyond the bare minimum of the job; poor management has basically reduced my past work to a button pushing robot.

-Time management: Do one thing at a time! If you are trying to do 3 things and pretend to have a conversation with an employee all at the same time, you won’t do any of it well. Just like people, tasks and challenges need your full attention. The Pomodoro Technique is a great example of an efficient time management system. The basic concept is make a list of your to-do for the day, focus on one thing at a time for a 25 minute period, using a timer is good, stop when the timer goes off, take a short 3-5 min. break and move on to the next task. Even if you work on the same project for 2 hours, taking frequent short breaks and not multitasking can greatly enhance overall quality and speed. If something else needs to be done, move onto that for the next 25 min., etc. *Google Pomodoro technique, they have free downloads and lots of good information. This is just one example, but research shows focusing on the least amount of things at one time makes everything go faster and better and is much healthier for you = less stress!

Recap - Very Important for anything you do:

1. Know why you do what you do and make sure everyone else knows too! Want to get to the core of what is important to you and why? Google “7 Levels Deep,” there is a good video explaining it by Dean Graziosi; it’s really cool! After you figure out your core reason why search for “Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action” on TED Talks. It is VERY Inspirational!!

2. Take the time it takes and it will take less time!!! Don’t pretend doing something half-way over and over and over again is saving any time, energy or money. Respect yourself, your business and your task enough to do it the very best you can from the beginning.

3. First impressions last forever and everything is a reflection of you and your company. Spend the extra time, energy and focus to produce the best quality you can at any given time.

4. Speak clearly and make sure what people hear is what you mean. Also be patient and kind with people (and animals), they are only doing the best they can and nobody can read your mind (actually animals can: if you are yelling “NO, get out of the garbage” while at the same time picturing the animal tearing the garbage up all over the house, they will follow the pictures in your head, not what you are screaming. Picture what you want them to do, not what you are afraid of them doing.)

5. Be as consistent as possible with your actions, words, thoughts and emotions. Everyone and everything will sense any discord and will not take you seriously if you are hypocritical or not really feeling how you pretend you are feeling or thinking. Honesty is usually the best policy, be aware of your body, of your feelings, thoughts and of how you project yourself to others. Be honest with yourself!

6. Respect the people you work with or around enough to give them your full attention. If you can’t do that, tell them and excuse yourself from the conversation, come back to it when you can. Tell the truth – if you say you care about someone, act like it and show it, otherwise don’t say anything (refrain from saying things like ‘we are a family here’ etc. if you don’t REALLY mean it).

7. Devote your full attention to a single task if possible. The more things you try to do at the same time, the more time it will take to get all of them done. Accuracy and quality severely suffer from multi-tasking. Try to focus on one thing at a time in 25 minute blocks, take a short break and move on, either with the same project or something new. This will get things done faster, better and more peacefully. Search “Pomodoro Technique.”

Again this is just my opinion and some things will vary for different people and businesses. :-)

Some people say this is too idealistic to be successful in the workplace, but I think it’s not only very possible, it is very necessary; maybe the same possibility of being successful as your entrepreneurial dreams... :-)

Ashley Ross's picture
Ashley Ross
Tue, 2011-03-01 08:54

One other thing I think is really important in a business is keeping information organized and up-to-date. The last employer I worked for had 3 computers full of information as old as 10 years! And each temp. office person who worked for him had files full of irrelevant stuff. That much clutter makes it really hard to find what you actually need and slows down productivity.

Make it a point to go through your files regularly, delete the things that are no longer useful and file away stuff you might need later, but not now. Do the same thing with any paperwork. And make sure there are clear labels on everything so you know where it's all at from a glance.