Your Beliefs and Your Business: A Year End Review

I am a big fan of the year-end review. Yes, we are already into 2014, but it’s not too late. We all need to take an hour or two to evaluate – did you do what you said you wanted to do in 2013?? Did you get the results expected? This year, I suggest you add another review. Do a review of your belief systems. Are they serving you? Or are they holding you back? What do I mean by belief systems? Well, we have belief systems about everything. About what it means to be a good mom or dad; what it means to work hard; about how we should treat people; even what the expected response time is to an email or a text message. These beliefs govern everything we do from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we go to sleep at night, and sometimes they inhabit our dreams. So if they are so pervasive, and influence every action we take over the course of a day, shouldn’t we give some thought to whether they are serving us or not?

Don, a former client, believed that in order to be successful, he had to own his own business. His dad and his grandfather had been successful business owners, running a printing company that specialized in large volume printing. They repeatedly pressed Don to come into the family business. Don had spent his life listening to his father and grandfather discuss the business and it had no appeal to him. He wanted to fly planes. He had planned to join the Air Force out of high school and take a job with an international airline afterwards. Then his beliefs got in the way. He believed that the only acceptable path to success was business ownership and if he wanted to feel good about himself and his career, he needed to own a business.

As it often is in families, Don chose not to discuss his career goals with his dad. He knew he’d be shot down, maybe even ridiculed for choosing a ‘loser’ career path. His dad assumed Don wanted to join the family business, though there had been little indication of that. Dad’s beliefs about Don were so strong, they didn’t need ‘evidence’. After high school, Don enrolled in a local Community College, bridging an aviation program with business classes, transferring to a four year school to finish out his degree in Business. Upon graduation, he started in the family business.

Fifteen years later, Don was the Chief Operating Officer for his dad’s company, poised to take over as CEO and owner one day, and he was miserable. Don never wanted to be in the business and now his dad was pushing him to buy him out and run the company. Don felt trapped and was contemplating all kinds of exit strategies. Don’s beliefs about success had gotten in the way, and he realized that he was still living his life in alignment with a set of beliefs that did not serve him. He was not a failure if he took a job flying planes. He was not a failure if he chose to pursue a career that interested him! He was not a failure for believing he had a right to a career that energized and engaged him.

Don’s situation might be very different than yours, but the foundational question about whether your beliefs need a year-end review is still critical. What beliefs are serving you and what beliefs need to be changed because they are holding you back? It’s time to live the life you were meant to live?

Let us know what you discover!

The Conversations We Avoid — or Blow

Building truly effective relationships with employees may mean stepping out of your communication comfort zone Joe hardly made eye contact as Mary, his manager, fired questions at him about why he had failed to hit the delivery dates for a customer order. Clearly angry and frustrated, Mary blasted everything from Joe’s casual business attire to his age (29) and his habit of leaving the office at 5:30 pm sharp to spend time with his kids. But she never asked what actually happened to cause the delivery date failure. By focusing on attributes unrelated to the problem, her reprimands were unlikely to teach or motivate Joe to change or improve his work.

Harold, 35, expected to take over the business from his 70-year-old father last year. The two had discussed and agreed to the plan. But when the time came for a transition, nothing happened.  Harold waited it out for a few weeks, guessing the delay was just an oversight. Weeks turned to months with still no word from his dad. Finally, ready to explode, Harold stormed into his father’s office and demanded to know why he was not in charge. Dad, having decided Harold needed more experience, counterattacked. Harold clearly was not ready for the responsibility of running a business, dad yelled. He was too volatile and immature and would not be taking over any time soon.

 Straight talk as a learned skill

We hear much talk these days about how the younger generation — those who grew up with email, texting and phones attached to their hips — hasn’t developed the level of communications skills needed to be successful in business. But I’ve observed plenty of business professionals who came of age before these technological advances who also struggle to communicate effectively. Maybe technology isn’t the issue. Maybe our professional development opportunities, our educational systems and our family experiences fall short in offering the training, experience and reinforcement we need to learn how to communicate effectively.

In the scenarios above, Mary, Joe, Harold and Harold’s father each missed opportunities to proactively communicate in ways that would improve the business, create learning opportunities and strengthen working relationships. They let anger, frustration, and fear of feedback get in their way of an honest exchange.

Whether it’s a simple update on the status of a project or a more challenging task such as giving difficult feedback, we tend to fall back on communication patterns that feel safe.  Such ineffective communication leaves a gap in truly hearing and understanding each other. Worse yet, we fire up emotions that may damage the relationship and our trust. Productivity suffers. In all cases, the business loses.

Through my Leadership & Legacy Group coaching, I work with leaders who have built highly successful, profitable businesses yet still stumble when it comes to difficult conversations. Too often they soften or under-play the message. They leave their employees confused and not sure what action to take. Or a leader may go on the attack out of frustration, creating high levels of stress and tension that prompt employees to either lash out or withdraw. Either way — plus many variations between — is terribly ineffective.

Crafting effective messages

In Fierce Conversations, author Susan Scott tackles some of the most challenging and important types of dialogues we need to have – at work, at home and in life. She provides a framework for building your message so it’s effective and maximizes your probability of getting the results you want. There is no guarantee of getting your desired results, of course, when dealing with people, but by building a productive and effective conversation, your chances are far better.

Fierce Conversations should be required reading for all business professionals and used as a textbook in communications training programs. Following her models isn’t easy — they take us out of our comfort zones, out of our all-too familiar patterns of avoidance or lashing out. You may be tempted to declare that you shouldn’t have to do this work – you are the boss! But by taking the time to have those difficult conversations and to be clearly understood, you’re likely to see your stress levels drop, your relationships grow stronger, your bottom line improve. That’s a great yield from the simple investment in communicating clearly.

The Disorientation Of Selling Your Business

There is a world of difference between being a successful employee of a large corporation and the successful owner of a business that was started from scratch. If you are one of the latter, you know just how much work you had to put into it, with all those sleepless nights, the long days of work trying to get those first clients interested in your products or services and the uncertainty of the first years of business. These are things that all entrepreneurs remember as they gain more success. Inevitably, there comes a time when they need to find someone who will take over the business. In many cases, their children aren’t interested in the company or aren’t capable of running the business, so their only option is to sell their business. Some of them decide to maintain an ownership or leadership role — remaining as Chair of the board, or Chief Operations Officer, but at some point, they recognize that the key to financing the rest of their lives lies in selling the business and collecting enough profit to live the rest of their lives without worry.

This whole decision making process can be a very disorienting experience for owners because their business basically became part of their essence, their identity. At some point it ceased just being a way to make a living. Everything that they have achieved, the things they own and the experiences they’ve had are all linked to this company they built from the ground up. When they decide to sell it, it is like going through a grieving process that is similar to the loss of a loved one. The only difference is that they are relieved of all the hard work and the feeling of always having some responsibility.