According to Duncan Brodie, there are five common barriers to team success.  Here they are and what you can do to avoid them.

1. Fuzzy outcomes
If a team is to prosper and deliver results, it needs to be crystal clear about the expected results or outcomes. Too often, teams set outcomes that are fuzzy and vague, which unsurprisingly leads to little in terms of results. Make the outcomes specific and measurable. For example, reduce waste from product X by 10 percent by December 31, 2010 is both specifi c and measurable.

2. Unproductive conflict
All successful teams need to have challenge and conflict, otherwise it all becomes too cozy. On the other hand, it is important to ensure that conflict is productive rather than destructive or unproductive. Lively and heated debate that actually results in a better outcome or solution is an example of productive conflict. Challenge that focuses on all of the negatives without offering any alternatives is unproductive.

3. Playing it safe
Making a step change in performance or turning things around requires teams and team members to take some risk and step outside of their comfort zone. This will only happen if the culture within the organization supports and rewards this type of innovative and balanced risk taking approach. For example, if the culture is to look for scapegoats when things go wrong, people will keep within the safety boundaries rather than take a chance.

4. Individual agendas
If a team is to prosper, all members need to sign up to and be committed to the team goals fi rst and foremost. For many, this is particularly challenging. As in business, we are used to being concerned about our own individual situation. Creating a reward system that relies on the group can be a useful stepping-stone to encouraging teams to focus on the team agenda.

5. Leadership
As with any team, someone must take on the role of the leader. A team without a leader is like a ship without a captain. The team might select a leader, or as the team develops someone may emerge who is the natural leader. However, any successful team needs a leader.

Bottom Line - Teams can achieve great results, but it is essential that the barriers to team success are identified and addressed. So what barriers are getting in the way of your team’s success?

It’s been said that one of the strongest factors in small business failure is the owners’ refusal to ask for help.  I think that’s amazing.  I mean, when you think about it, could the difference between success and failure simply be uttering the words, “Could you help?”

I believe that acknowledging that you need help is definitely the first step (kind of sounds like AA, doesn’t it?!?), and then asking the right person for that help is the next step.  The right person is one who will listen and either be willing to help you or refer you to someone who can.

As a business coach, I see many people who think that asking for help is a sign of weakness.  It’s actually the opposite.  It takes strength and courage to take an honest look at your business (or your life) and recognize opportunities for improvement.

Are there areas in your business or career that you’d like to be different?  Maybe asking a trusted advisor for help should be on your to-do list today.

The Importance of Business Coaching

Business coaching is defined as an interaction intended to enhance performance and facilitate change. It focuses on sound inner judgment and that leads to the best possible outcomes. Business Coaching has been practiced for years. When you have business coaching in your company, you are opening the door for advancement in the performance of your employees, thus your organization. Some benefits you will realize by implementing this well known practice of business coaching are:

1.Employees will perform at their best ‒ When you incorporate business coaching into the employee developmental process, your employees will challenge themselves and seek to perform at a higher level. It is very important in any business to have efficient and effective employees. One-on-one interaction with a business coach provides the environment for employees to un-tap their hidden potential; demonstrate their additional capabilities and the added value their enhanced performance brings. This far exceeds the investment you have made in this person.

Under all circumstances it is prudent to stay ahead in the business world and this becomes more important in times of restructuring and uncertainty. When you want your business to grow, you need to think about how your employees will help secure this growth. Business coaching is your answer.

2.Recognizes their experiences ‒ This goes along the same lines as employees performing at their best. With business coaching, the employee works with their coach to reinforce their current strengths and to surface new opportunities where these skills can be utilized, allowing the employee to expand their contribution to the company. Business coaching allows for employees to share their work experiences and feel more involved for doing so. Their attitudes change when they feel they have contributed something to the company. This benefit increases the level of the employee's engagement to the firm and has a multiplying effect throughout the organization.

3.Increases your bottom line ‒ When you have business coaching available to your employees, you recognize and communicate their worth to the company. The main goal of business coaching is to offer the tools and support individuals need to enhance their performance and to facilitate change. Outcomes that you can expect when you have business coaching in practice are higher levels of engagement, as well as, more efficiency and productivity. Investing in your employees is a sound business decision that will yield a high ROI (return on investment). Always thinking and staying ahead in the business world is what is going to make your business grow. Business coaching is what you need if you want to achieve this.

I wanted to share this article by my friend and colleague, Howard Shore.

Have you noticed that the higher up people move in their organizations or the longer someone has been in a sales role, whether it be in professional services or a traditional sales role, the farther away they move from the daily regimen of outbound prospecting calls to schedule appointments to increase their sales pipeline? Furthermore, they are typically not in the top 25% of sales volume producers for their industry group, which means they could be producing a lot more but have allowed themselves to get complacent. The only people that do not need to set aside time for daily prospecting calls and potential networking are the people who generate enough of a consistent sales pipeline to put them in the top 25% of all producers in their industry segment. Everyone else has to find a way to develop their pipeline either through networking and making phone calls.

For everyone else, aside from company leads and people calling you unsolicited, there are only two ways to build your pipeline: getting out to network and using your phone. After studying this for some time, I am convinced that people do what is comfortable for them, but not what is best for them. What is comfortable for most people is getting out of the office and meeting people.

It is very common to find people who go to every networking meeting available, hoping to run into a few decision-makers. If they attend an event with 100 people, there may be 10 that would be good client candidates; however, they may or may not meet any of those 10 people. By the end of this event, they are likely to walk away with zero meetings and, best case, perhaps some people who would take a phone call about future meetings. Of these, maybe 1 is a real prospect. Including travel time, attending the event was a 3-hour decision and time commitment. So all you accomplished was marketing your organization, introducing yourself to some new people who now know you exist, and possibly setting one future meeting, if the person you met ever takes your call.

Now let’s take that same 3 hours and use the phone. The average person starting out may not have a very large contact list and may need to do a lot of cold calling. But a seasoned salesperson and partners in a professional services firm should have amassed more than 2,000 contacts willing to take their call. The people being called also know people, and may be willing to give referrals. So, imagine how many people could be called and connected within 3 hours. Whether cold calling or warm calling, it is reasonable to expect a large number of outbound calls. Even if a large percentage of the calls result in leaving messages, all calls can be directed to a decision-maker in a company with which you want to do business. Conservatively, depending on the nature of your business and the level of the person you are calling in the organization, you should achieve 12 phone meetings and 2 to 3 prospect meetings scheduled for new business opportunities. If you are good at pre-qualifying your meetings, at least one of those meetings is likely to result in new business within your sales cycle. This is a much better result than attending the networking meeting above. In essence, you networked, but you did it over the phone. These results can be achieved whether you are calling people you know or cold calling a list of good prospects from a purchased list.

I am not suggesting that people do no networking. I believe that your networks make you powerful. However, I am suggesting that most people are making 2 mistakes with networking.

1. Too much time is allocated to networking. No more than 10% of a salesperson’s time should be spent on networking. If you are in professional services and have to deliver, it should be no more than 5%, in order to allow enough time to get on the phone to properly fill the pipeline and to attend meetings with prospects.
2. Too much networking in the wrong places. Do not go to a networking event unless the majority of the people there are the people that you would normally sell your product or service to. Do not go to events consisting of a bunch of salespeople from other companies. An exception is a networking group like Business Networking International (“BNI”), providing that you regularly get referrals from the other people you are meeting with. These relationship-based groups can be valuable if you are surrounded by the right people.

Another distraction of networking is board involvement. While this is can be a rewarding and important activity, it should not be confused with a productive sales activity. When you compare the amount of time it takes to sit and play the role on a board with the number of people on the board, amount of interaction with those people, and the amount of business received, a person would be better served taking the phone call route. So when someone decides to sit on a board, it should be a community involvement decision rather than one to help them make their sales production numbers. Many times I have seen people’s board involvement significantly detract from their production. They will develop business from their involvement, but it is far less than these people would produce had they chosen more productive networking venues and/or called on their rolodex to find business.

The key take-away is use of time. We must be careful not to confuse what makes us feel good with what is best for generating business. Most people do not put the time into making phone calls because they do not view this as an exciting part of their day. Because it does not fit their self-image, they avoid the most effective use of sales time. If everyone put as little as an hour per day, or five hours per week into filling their pipeline with meetings, they would always have a full and productive pipeline and find themselves in the top 25% of their peer group.  Many people have found that they complete the whole sales process without ever leaving their desk.

Howard Shore is a business growth expert that works with companies that want to maximize their growth potential by improving strategy, enhancing their knowledge, and improving motivation.

How much do we really show our gratitude?  I mean, I’m sure most of us say “Thank you” when we need to, but how often do we really tell (and show!) people how much we appreciate them.  This goes for spouses or significant others, family members, co-workers, employees, bosses, and customers, as well as service providers in our lives.  It’s often so easy to get aggravated with people when they don’t live up to our expectations.  When we stop and step back for a minute, though, we can probably find something to appreciate in them.

Showing gratitude goes a long way in building relationships.  It also helps in maintaining a positive attitude.  No matter how bad a day you’re having, you can usually feel better when you stop and think about 10 things for which you’re grateful.  Then, when you’re feeling more positive, you can convey that to those around you, and you become much more appealing to others.

Can you think of anyone that you could express gratitude to?  My guess is that you’ll both feel better when you do!

1. The relationships we form.  Relationships help us to define who we are and what we can become.  When we interact with others we exchange energy, emotions, ideas, and values.  Here are some relationship rules:
   • Get along with yourself.  The one relationship that you have as long as you live is yourself.
   • Value people.  You cannot make another person feel important if you secretly feel that he or she is a nobody.
   • Make the effort to form relationships.  The result of a person who has never served others is loneliness.
   • Understand the reciprocity rule.  Over time, people come to share reciprocal, similar attitudes toward each other.
   • Follow the Golden Rule. The timeless principle of treating others the way you want to be treated.
2. A life that counts is determined by the decisions that we make.  Good decisions sometimes reap dividends years into the future, while bad decisions have a way of haunting us.  Good decisions, along with daily discipline, yield a masterpiece of a successful life.
3. And it’s determined by the experiences that we encounter.  Our lives are shaped by pivotal experiences.  Whether triumphs or tragedies, these experiences immerse us in emotions and challenge our convictions.  We must gain the most from the experiences we encounter in life.  We can do this by:
   • Evaluating the experience.  Learn from mistakes and victories alike.  Draw upon experiences to grow and gain wisdom.
   • By managing the emotional expects of experience.  Teach yourself to counteract negative feelings and learn to harness the momentum of positive emotions.
   • By sharing them through storytelling.  Make a habit of sharing the lessons learned from the experiences that have shaped your life and your leadership.

Here's some great tips from Dr. Ivan Misner, founder of Business Networking International (BNI) on being a better networker in the social media arena: 

From a business perspective, social media is ideal to build your brand and your credibility; it’s about providing value for your connections and followers.  It is important to offer them useful information balanced with a dash of personal insight. Whether you’re talking about face-to-face networking or online networking, credibility and relationship building are critical to the process.

With social media, the key to success is outlining a strategy. You should consider the amount of time you can realistically dedicate each day to online marketing efforts so as to be consistent.  People have a tendency to get online at random times and start clicking away.  Then something mysterious happens to the space-time continuum. Suddenly, two hours go by and you have nothing to show for it!

Avoid falling victim to that trap: Write up a plan for how often and how long you will work your social media.

Map out a weekly schedule that outlines specific days and times you’ll spend developing your social media strategy.  Figure out what’s realistic and what makes sense for your company.  For example, you might schedule yourself to post daily updates at 9a.m., 1p.m, and 5p.m., and then dedicate ten minutes to responding to comments and direct messages at 10 a.m. and 3p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you might dedicate ten minutes at 10a.m. and 3p.m. to retweeting people’s comments which you find valuable. You can also use this time to thank people for mentioning you or retweeting your posts.

Leverage Your Time

As you design your plan, make sure you integrate tools to leverage your time in your social media efforts.  Sites like http://ping.fm, www.seesmic.com, and www.tweetdeck.com are designed to send your social media updates to multiple social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook, with one click.

Some sites even allow you to link multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts (if you have more than one) to one desktop application where you can post updates to all sites as well as view and respond to your friends’ posts on those sites and keep a log of all your past posts.  This means no more logging into multiple social networking sites . . .  you can manage all your social networking accounts from one place!

Also, there are sites such as www.cotweet.com where you can schedule updates in advance so your updates will post even while you’re not online.  With all the traveling I do, this is a tool that is very useful.

ROI of Social Media Networking

Once you have your strategy in place, you will no doubt be anxious to start seeing a return on your online networking investment, but it’s very important to remember one thing:  Networking, whether online or face-to-face, is more about farming than it is about hunting.  It’s about cultivating relationships with people.  The bottom line is – it takes time.  It is about building the credibility of your brand, and we know that doesn’t happen overnight.

Return on Investment (ROI) is directly correlated to either – 1. Dollars spent (online paid marketing), or 2. Time and/or effort spent – in saturating and building strong profiles on whatever social media channels are deemed effective for the brand (including blogging).  Don’t forget that some businesses will benefit much more from spending more effort on “niche” networks that may have less traffic, but are more targeted to the brand’s ultimate consumer.

If your network is a mile wide and an inch deep it will not be successful.   It is important to create a network that is both wide and deep.  You do this by being visible and engaging in the conversation.  Over time, this gives you credibility which leads to building your brand and your sales. This, ultimately, will give you the biggest ROI for your online marketing efforts.

Top 5 Common Mistakes of Social Media Networking

Most of what I’ve discussed so far has focused on what you should do in order to carry out an effective and profitable social media campaign for your business. But there are also some things you should be sure to avoid.

Below are the top five social media networking mistakes:

1. Spending too much time on sites you enjoy and not fully evaluating whether or not that particular site is the most effective one for your efforts.
2. Going onto a site for “work” and then running down rabbit holes getting distracted by friends who may have posted something interesting or something that requires a response.
3. Not being able to properly define when it is more cost-effective to delegate certain social media responsibilities to someone else to handle.
4. Setting up a blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter page and then not keeping it populated –consistency and fresh content are key.
5. Forgetting that social media is about engaging in the conversation and not just about selling.

Are you just busy or truly productive?

Do you have days when you’ve gone non-stop from daylight till dusk, yet you aren’t able to really list any accomplishments from your day?  I think we all have had days like that.  It does become a problem, though, when most of your days fit that description.

Many times we confuse ACTIVITY with PRODUCTIVITY.  We may be extremely active, but we aren’t really getting anything done.  Other times, when we take the time for introspection and for planning, we’re probably being much more productive - even sitting still.

Are you setting goals for what you want to get out of each day?  That’s a great way to measure your productivity.  You just make sure your activity is leading you closer to your goals.

Get into the habit of setting one to three goals for each week, and write them down.  Then you’ll know what is necessary to do each day.  You’ll find you’re being productive when you’re working on achieving your goals.

I love this article by Deborah Keep:

Falling into those bad traps that you know full well how to avoid is frustrating, but there are some benefits to slipping off the practice-what-you-preach wagon. Experiencing these issues first hand provides us with valuable learnings and teaches us to have greater empathy and understanding towards our clients.

In neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) though, it’s more valuable to consider how we let this situation arise and how we can overcome it.

The answers relate to our internal values and motivation, and more specifically, they relate to whether we’re motivated towards doing something that focuses on what we want, or away from something that focuses on an outcome we’re trying to avoid.

These examples illustrate the difference: 

Towards: I’m going to the gym four times this week to maintain the level of fitness, energy and muscle tone I love to have.
Away from: I’m going to the gym four times this week so I don’t feel sluggish or have a wobbly tummy.

Towards: I’m going to stick to my time management schedule today because I want to achieve two projects that will have a big impact on the profitability of my business.
Away from: I’m going to stick to my time management schedule today because otherwise I’ll feel frazzled for the rest of the week.

Towards: I’m looking forward to making those cold calls today because I love getting to know prospective clients and starting new business relationships.
Away from: I’m not looking forward to making those cold calls today, but if I don’t there’s no way I’ll achieve my sales targets this week.·

The difference between ‘towards’ and ‘away from’ motivation can be very subtle, but will have great impact on what you do and the results you achieve. This is a classic case of the way you behave being a consequence of what’s going on in both your conscious and unconscious minds. If the two parts of your mind aren’t in alignment, it will be difficult to consistently achieve your goals. 

Think about the goals you’ve reached in the past. Do you tend to respond better when your motivation is towards an outcome or away from it? 

Although some people respond well to ‘away from’ motivation, framing your goals towards a particular outcome is generally more motivational and inspiring. 

Next time you’re having difficulty motivating yourself to do something, list the reasons for doing it and the reasons for not doing it. Clues that you have ‘away froms’ lurking around in your mindset can be found firstly in the inconsistent results you’re getting, and secondly in the language you use to describe the issue. 

Here are a few linguistic patterns to be aware of: 

Negations: I don’t want to miss my deadline.
Compulsions: I should try to win that new project, because I have to pay my credit card bill. 
Comparisons: I need to sell more so I have less debt. 
Fears: If I don’t finish that project I’m scared I’ll lose the client. 

Switch to using different language to talk to yourself about your goals, and you’ll be one step closer to reaching them.