A Leadership Perspective
By · CommentsI had a new experience as a juror this week and as we were deliberating one of my fellow jurors made a poignant statement. He quoted the Blackstone ratio and said ‘it is better than 10 guilty persons escape, than one innocent suffer’. Bringing those experiences back to the office made me think about how we lead our staff; some use leadership as a punitive advantage and others use it as a method to force the hands of our employees. By doing that we are being our most ineffectual selves, our staff is our most valuable resource. The Blackstone ratio could give us the framework to be more effective leaders and here’s how.
Your staff is right until they are wrong
Now this is not an invitation to let your staff run amuck, but it is an invitation to give your staff the benefit of the doubt until you have the necessary details to make an educated decision about challenging situations. We all know that staff can and will lie, but that should not be a deterrent to treating them fairly and getting the facts of the situation.
Your analysis should involve only the relevant factors
A common mistake that start-up entrepreneurs make with their online presence is trying to save money by doing it all themselves and not hiring a website designer. While this may save money in the short term, in the end you usually end up with a design that you don’t really love, and a site that doesn’t really make money for you and your business.
One of the best investments you can make in your business it to hire a professional website designer to help you get your online presence off on the right foot. The benefits to working with an expert designer are numerous. Here are just a few:
1. Save Oodles of Time
Setting up a brand new website and social media presence takes time. And if you aren’t familiar with the process, or aren’t quite sure what you’re doing, it takes even MORE time. This can quickly suck up hours, days or even weeks of your precious time.
Wouldn’t it be better to spend that time running your business, making sales, connecting with customers? Hire a designer and leave all that time-consuming work to them. Not only will it mean that YOU don’t have to do it, but since this is what they do all the time, they’ll be able to finish it MUCH faster than you would doing it on your own.
Did you know that 99% of the employers in the United States are small businesses? Did you know that the number of women-owned businesses in the United States increased by 20% from 2002 to 2011?
In other words, women small business owners are playing an incredibly important part in job creation in the United States as more and more women take control of their own careers, start their own businesses, and create jobs for more people.
A new infographic from BOLT Insurance Agency offers a visual representation of how women small business owners are impacting job creation in the United States. Using information from the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy and the Center for Women’s Business Research, Infographic World designed the infographic shown below.
Take a look and learn more about how women-owned small businesses are affecting job creation (23 million new jobs), economic impact ($3 trillion), and more.
Via: Bolt Insurance
When Being GUTSY Starts Young
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I recently spoke at a women’s networking group and asked the bright and creative professionals to think about the earliest time they could remember when they spoke out for themselves.
To jog their memories, I told a story about unfairness when a boy in my elementary school class was yelled at when I was the one “sneaking” in front of him in line. (You can read the whole story on the “About Sylvia” page of www.sylvialafair.com.)
Another great example. This gal was an assistant in an after school gymnastics class. The teacher was absent for three weeks due to illness and she led the class alone. At some point, she felt she should be paid, assistant or not, she was the one doing all the work.
She was encouraged to go to the head of the program and state her case. She did. And they agreed to pay her.
She was twelve years old!
This is a perfect example of GUTSY at a young age.
Think about the messages of success or failure you were given when you stood up to say what you wanted and needed. Were you, like this extremely vibrant woman, heard and acknowledged? Or, like some of the other stories, were you told to lower your head and be quiet?
You Never Know What Impacts
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I was having an amazing conversation with my grown daughter who is a free spirit. She is a film maker and raw food chef who has a ton of friends and opinions about, well, just about everything.
Here’s what was fascinating.
When she was little, way before You Tube, she loved to listen to songs and stories by Marlo Thomas from the album “Free to Be You and Me”. She went on to talk about other parts of her life, looking at what it means to be a woman, a leader, a creative human who yearned for adventure and depth.
Back to Marlo and songs from a revolution to give children the freedom to choose what their lives would include. My daughter, Mikayla, told me how she would listen to the story of Princess Atalanta and how hearing this well over one hundred times, informed her to be free to be.
The story in a nutshell: a king thought it was time for his daughter to marry. He decided to have a race where all the males in town could compete and the winner would have the princess for his wife. EXCEPT…Atalanta was no ordinary princess of her times, she was from the new breed, a GUTSY GAL who would make her own choices.
Are You a Change-maker?
By · CommentsPost by Jane K. Stimmler, contributing Women on Business writer.
It’s a new year with new opportunities. Maybe there are things you want to change about yourself, or perhaps you have a desire for change on a more global scale. Do you want to get ahead in your workplace? Change the culture of your organization? See more women rise to the top?
Whatever modification you want to make will require your effort, focus and passion. And, in order to effect change, you will need to eliminate any self-imposed barriers that are holding you back from realizing your potential as a leader.
Making change is not easy.
Margie Warrell, author of Find Your Courage: 12 Acts of Becoming Fearless in Work and Life, says that for women to make progress in the business world, they will need to “challenge both the perspectives they bring into the workplace and the actions they are willing to take to grow their leadership ability.” She goes on to discuss three important issues:
- Mindset: a fundamental shift into a leader mindset
- Capacity: intentionally cultivating habits that build resilience and grow leadership capacity
- Courage: a willingness to step into difficult conversations with greater candor and boldness
3 New Year’s Resolutions for Your Business
By · CommentsGuest Blog Post by Lourdes Balepogi of Chispa Marketing.
For many, a New Year represents a chance at a fresh start. And business owners are constantly in search of ways to reinvent themselves; to capture that next edge that will help them grow their business and better serve their clients. Thankfully, there are a number of ways to do it. To get you started, we’ve picked three resolutions you should make for your business in 2012.
1. I’ll only solve problems
It’s a common pitfall among small business owners. You love what you do and you want
to do it all. Well guess what? You can’t – at least not if you plan on being financially
successful. As a business owner, your job is to focus on delivering exactly what your customer wants – not what you think they might want. In 2012, keep that at the forefront of your mind when approaching your work.
2. I’ll meet with clients and prospects in person
Guest post by Georgina Dunkley (learn more about Georgina at the end of this post).
Implementing an effective PR strategy, particularly for any start-up business or company which has little or no experience handling communications, may seem a daunting task, but as we all shake off the apathy of returning to work and prepare for a successful 2012 in the spotlight, I have developed a series of PR top tips.
Make time to plan – having the best of intentions and an enthusiasm to get started is all well and good, but without effective planning and thought, your PR outreach will be inconsistent, not on message and lacking clarity. Developing a strategy doesn’t need to be a long drawn out process, it just needs to include a clear breakdown of what the main aims and objectives of the activity are and how the proposed PR activity will help meet those objectives. Who you want to reach out to and what you want to say to them in addition to the mechanics to do this are also vital, so incorporate target audiences and media, key messages and tactics.
Sears: A Post Mortem
By · CommentsSears has been on a steady decline for quite some time and they have just released news that they have a new merchandising officer. They have lured Brookstone CEO, Ron Boire, to fill this invented position under the guise that a focus on merchandise will help the struggling brand. We can learn from some of Sears’s mistakes and here’s how.
Find your voice and stay true to it
The thing that strikes me the most about Sears is how it has managed to lose its reputation and confuse the people that shop there. When I was a girl (I know I’m dating myself here) we went to Sears when we were going to buy a new stove, dishwasher or washer machine. When my son was a baby, I noticed that they had begun the foray into selling clothes and let’s be honest-it was never their thing. If I wanted appliances I went to Sears, if I wanted clothing I went somewhere else. They have always been the appliance store and that’s what they should stick with because that’s what they used to be good at. Find your voice and stick to it.
Know your customers
A lot of us have seen this article on Forbes making its round on the various social media platforms: No You Can’t Pick My Brain. It Costs Too Much.
But – what happens if the person picking your brain is already a paying client?
Most small business owners or consultants would agree – we give entirely too much information away for free. For me, a lot of times this occurs with current clients who I’ve either done a website for or whom I provide virtual assistant services to, and it’s a regular occurrence – ‘how do I do this’ or ‘where do I go to do that’ or ‘what do you think about this…’.
An emailed response can take anywhere from a couple of seconds, to a couple of minutes or more… When it’s a current client, where do you draw the line between good customer service and having your knowledge taken advantage of? This can be a particularly sensitive situation because the client may feel you ‘owe’ it to them since they do business with you. For some industries (especially the web design and development field), this is lovingly referred to as “scope creep”.
