What makes a great leader? Nationally recognized leader and executive coach Jackie Jenkins-Scott provides her perspective as she explores examples of responsive leadership in her new book, 7 Secrets of Responsive Leadership. While you may be a strong leader, she asserts, the ability to adapt your strengths to each new organization, or to changes within the organization—new board members, new staff members, new shareholders—is the quality that will help you remain successful. Jackie Jenkins-Scott has more than three decades of experience in executive leadership positions in public health, higher education and corporate and non-profit governance. We recently asked her more about responsive leadership. What is responsive leadership?Leadership is sometimes described as the process of developing people and the organization in order to deal and cope with both complexity and change. Responsive leadership focuses on the people—the humanity within the organization—to deal and cope with complexity and change in order to achieve organizational success. In your book, you talk about the four attributes of great leaders. What are these qualities and why are they so important?Over my decades in leadership roles, in reflecting on my own development as a leader, talking with colleagues, reading and studying leadership, I have come to believe that there are four essential attributes that drive the responsive leader. These are the attributes that sustain and make a person’s leadership strong in both triumph and crisis, as well as transportable and transferrable in different environments. I call these leadership attributes The Big 4. 1. Curiosity: The desire to continuously learn, discover, and grow intellectually. Curiosity will play a critical role in steering an organizational transformation, creating a new product, innovation or better understanding the competition. With a curious mind, the leader will seek knowledge and understanding from a variety of sources including subordinates, peers, experts, and trusted advisors. And as a result, she and her organization will be wiser and stronger. As a turnaround expert, you’ve taken several struggling institutions and transformed them into thriving leaders in their fields. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who may be looking to revive their businesses?Organizations (like people) are always in transition. We often do not look at the current challenge as a transition, but indeed, it is. Some transitions are more consequential and important than others and in the case of reviving a failing business is at the extreme of the transition continuum. When the company is in turnaround mode, consistent incorporation of the big 4 leadership attributes as the leader’s way of “doing” and “being” becomes even more important. Curiosity, understanding how and why the company arrived at this point and learning from others who turned around similar situations (or didn’t) will be key to revival. Humility, seeking out the very best expertise and help one can find—learning from their experiences, getting and using good advice—is a natural companion to curiosity. Staying connected to the mission and people engaged in the work gives the leader purpose and confidence that the company can move ahead. Finally, resilience, the ability to stay focused and keep at it, will eventually lead to the breakthrough or the decision to move on. In my book, The 7 Secrets of Responsible Leadership, I describe tools that responsive leaders employ in their leadership journey. These secret “tools” are especially useful for leaders who are leading their company through a turnaround challenge. What’s one leadership mistake you’ve made in your career—and what did you learn from it?During my tenure as CEO, our company had an opening to fill a critical and influential position in the organization. I appointed a search committee to recommend a candidate. The search committee recommended two finalists for this critical role. The committee rated both candidates equally and did not indicate a preference, stating that both candidates were equally qualified. I was very conflicted. My instincts told me to take the candidate with more practical experiences and my intellect told me to take the candidate with more academic credentials. I ended up selecting the wrong candidate and within 3 months on the job I, and many people in the company, knew the selected candidate was not a good fit. The next 18 months were a nightmare for the company in part because I took too long to transition the person out of the role. In this experience, I learned to trust my instincts and make sure I incorporated all of the Big 4 attributes in my decision making—gathering good and reliable information, receiving good advice and input, understanding how one person’s approach might impact others in the organization, and looking for signs of how the candidate deals with challenge and adversity. I learned that the Big 4 work for me and when I stray from using them, I can get in trouble! What are the top five takeaways that you hope entrepreneurs and CEOs will glean from your book?
Jackie Jenkins-Scott is commited to improving society through active community and civic engagement. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Century Bank and Trust Company, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, the Center for Community Change, and the National Board of Jumpstart. Jenkins-Scott serves as President of the Massachusetts Women’s Forum, an affiliate of the International Women’s Forum. The post 4 Secrets to Responsive Leadership appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/2TlIYhD
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Contributed by Annie Button, a content specialist in business growth and development. Many people want faster action from their government on climate change, some are taking steps to do what they can to reduce their carbon emissions at home. The workplace, however, often lags in environmental considerations. Offices can be very wasteful in terms of energy use. There are simple steps employers can make to improve their carbon footprint—and many are even beneficial to your bottom line. An organization that’s environmentally aware may even be more attractive to the younger workforce. Here are six ways that your office can cut its carbon emissions. 1. Cycle to work.One of the biggest ways that workplaces contribute to carbon emissions is in the ways that staff travel to it. To inspire change, why not launch at least one bike-to-work day? Your business can do many things to make it easier for those who want to cycle in, such as providing information on routes and helping employees save money towards the cost of a bike. For any staff who can’t bike to work, encourage them to carpool or use public transportation. 2. Recycle!Recycling is second-nature to many families, but it’s not always top of mind at the office. Make sure that your business has a process for recycling as well as clearly labelled bins for items that don’t need to be trashed. Remember that many more items than paper can be recycled! Consider all the electronics, batteries, plastics and other resources that may be diverted from landfills in order to help slow climate change. Reach out to a specialist organization for help.
3. Turn off everything, every night.To lower carbon emissions, it is important to avoid wasting electricity. Leaving computers, lights and other equipment all night can add significantly to your energy usage. Not only does this practice impact the environment, but it also costs your business money in the form of a higher electricity bill. Make it company policy that everyone switches off their computer every night. 4. Digitize your documents.Another way to cut down on carbon emissions is to move toward being a paper-free office. Sure, this may sound a huge step, but it’s actually quite realistic. To get started, make a plan for reducing your printouts, adjusting processes to be paper-free and making digital copies of important files. Consider removing printers, updating server storage and assigning an environmental task force to make it happen. Digital documents have a number of benefits beyond environmental considerations . They are easily accessed 24/7 from anywhere in the world. They can be securely and easily backed up on cloud servers, so you don’t need to worry about losing files. Plus, imagine the reduction in the cost of paper and printers! 5. Upgrade your lighting.This small change adds up to big savings. Every time a bulb dies, replace it with an energy-efficient one. LED bulbs are longer lasting than halogen bulbs and they cause far less harm in the way of carbon emissions. 6. Be smarter with heating and air conditioning.We are accustomed to the idea of adjusting our climate with the tap of a button. When we feel warm, we turn on the air conditioning. When it cools down, we turn up the heat. (And every office worker can attest to the workplace temperature wars!) Unfortunately cooling and heating are a great contributor to carbon emissions. Be smart about your use of heating and cooling. Use your air conditioning only as a last resort—when opening the windows and creating airflow is not effective. Encourage staff to dress warmer for the cold conditions. Turn the thermostat down; even a single degree can have a big effect. The post 6 Ways Your Office Can Cut Its Emissions appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/2PwHDDp Contributed by Jackie Carrillo, a content coordinator and contributor who writes on technology, marketing, business management and education. SEO is often touted as one of those essential business practices that are simple enough to do yourself. After all, you probably have the power to edit your business’s website, so you can stuff pages with keyword phrases, sprinkle links galore and alter other factors that could improve your performance on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Thus, you could conceivably save tens of thousands of dollars by going the DIY route — unless you run into some SEO trouble. SEO is simple until it isn’t. Unfortunately, SEO can get exceedingly complex exceedingly quickly. To prove the point, here are a four relatively typical SEO problems that tend to be too complex for the average business leader to solve. 1. Your Website Indexing Is All WrongYou can put all the care into optimizing your webpages—researching keywords, tinkering with metadata, etc.—but if Google can’t find your webpages, it is all for naught. Websites and pages don’t automatically join Google’s search. Google deploys digital spiders to crawl the web looking for new pages and content, and then the search engine indexes those new pages, or adds them to it search capabilities. Some creators intentionally hide webpages from Google’s spiders or prevent Google from using those pages in search. In fact, this is a good SEO tactic if some of your content is lower-quality or non-vital to the user’s experience of your website, like archives of tags. Then again, many more websites accidentally prevent their pages from being indexed through shoddy coding. Unfortunately, you can’t tell your website developer to fix the problem because they don’t know what pages to index and what to leave hidden from Google. If you are wondering what an SEO company is for, it’s knowing the difference between webpages that should and shouldn’t be indexed. You should work with an SEO agency to help you with indexing your website properly, so the right content has the chance to rank on Google’s SERPs. 2. Your Pages Are Competing Against Each OtherMany SEO DIY-ers use a tool like this one to research viable keywords, choose a couple relevant phrases and integrate those keywords into every bit of content on their website. This strategy is called keyword cannibalization and it is not an effective strategy for getting multiple webpages on your site to rank. Instead of competing against other sites, your pages compete against one another, hurting the chances of all pages involved at ranking high on Google’s SERPs. The solution is to create a keyword map, which will help you identify which keywords are used on which webpages. Then, you should strive to diversify not only your keyword phrases but also the topics of your content, so you avoid overcrowding. Again, you should work with SEO professionals to choose the best keyword phrases for your pages and compete with other websites, not only yourself. 3. Your Content Isn’t Structured to Google’s LikingThe number of backlinks to your website matters. The quality of your content matters. However, these factors matter a bit less if your content isn’t taking the right form. Consider this example: You spend days developing a comprehensive, 3,000-word list of the best travel destinations for this year, replete with a few stunning, high-res images of a few destinations—but when you publish it, it doesn’t come close to ranking. That might be because Google only deems content of this sort acceptable when they take the form of an image gallery with minimal text. You can determine this with a bit of research using keywords similar to your content, like “best travel destinations 2020.” However, the differences in format between what you publish and what Google likes might be all but indiscernible to the average web user. Thus, you should rely on an SEO pro to perform thorough research on content styles before proffering instruction on content development. 4. Your Website Speed Is Embarrassingly SlowSurprising to many SEO DIY-ers, website speed is one of Google’s top-ranking criteria. Google’s spiders don’t like wading through a slow website, and users hate waiting for pages to load, too. Thus, Google knocks points off websites that aren’t prioritizing haste and hustle, and that goes double for mobile. SEO isn’t the only reason you should invest more energy into increasing your website’s speed on traditional and mobile platforms. Research shows that users will only wait about three seconds for a page to load before bouncing in search of a swifter page. Slower pages don’t just rank lower; they also are less likely to cause conversions because of their subpar user experience. Yet, increasing speed isn’t as easy as it sounds. Typically, you need to tinker with exceedingly technical aspects of your site, like compression and code optimization, caching and content distribution. A simple speed boost comes from reducing the size of your images. Still, it helps to have a pro on hand to help you optimize your website for speed without compromising its quality. Ostensibly, you can manage basic SEO on your own—but when your business encounters obstacles in its efforts to rank, you shouldn’t try to solve any problems without professional help. Your website is simply to valuable to harm with shoddy SEO practices. The post Not All SEO Problems Are Easy to Solve appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/2SXJEKT
Contributed by Raj Thakkar, founder and CEO, Charter School Business Management Inc. Could you step away from your company unexpectedly for months on end—and know everything would run smoothly? What would you do if you had to step away unexpectedly from your business for four months, just days after you’d landed your biggest client ever? That’s the quandary I faced in July 2019. My company was growing―fast. We had recently signed a client that was 10X larger than our other clients when I got that dreaded phone call: My mother had been diagnosed with stage four cancer, with only months to live. It was an easy decision for me, in that it wasn’t a decision at all. I would travel to her home state (1,500 miles away) and live there to take care of her every need during her final months. And I wouldn’t simultaneously run my company during this time; my focus would be fully on my mother. The only silver lining in this scenario is that when I announced to my team that I was stepping away, I knew they could handle it. How did I know? Because my second-in-command and I had recently acquired the tools and professional development to handle it. How to groom your second-in-commandHere’s what we did: In the previous year, Karen Daniels, my COO, and I forged a deeper level of communication and trust by participating in the Master Key Executive program. Don’t get me wrong—we had a great relationship prior to the program. Karen and I created and maintained a strong relationship forged from working together for more than a decade. And yet, though I could be vulnerable when sharing business concerns with other entrepreneurs through my EO Forum, I realized there was a level of disconnect between Karen and me in our mutual blind spots. The Master Key Executive (MKE) program changed that. It provided us with the tools and knowledge to build a bridge across that small gap of disconnect, and now we are stronger and more aligned than I ever imagined possible. This next-level alignment empowered Karen with the capability to run the company according to the priorities and strategies we discussed in-depth each week for the previous year. She was in my head; she knew exactly what my concerns and priorities were for each facet of the business, and that built next-level confidence and trust. 6 critical tools that empowered me to step awayThe tools that MKE provided us that enabled me to confidently step away from my company at such a critical point in its growth include:
Renewed focus on “What, and more importantly, Why?”I always knew the importance of my getting out of the way of the great people we hire to do their jobs extraordinarily well. The MKE program helped me regain the clarity that I must remain focused on “What, and more importantly, why?” and let my team focus on the “how and when” of our business. As an entrepreneur, you have to trust your people. The more I surrender and let go, the better outcomes are happening. It’s the opposite of Founder’s Syndrome―when you want to micromanage every aspect of the company you created. You just have to let go. Here’s proof: After being stuck at a revenue plateau for three years, the year after we participated in MKE, my company’s top-line and bottom-line growth were 20 percent each! If you’re an entrepreneur who’s considering joining the MKE program, don’t hesitate. Invest in your people. The MKE program is good for you, and good for your team. It will free up your time so you can get back to doing what you love and will help you create more impact in your community. It’s one of the best professional development programs I’ve ever encountered, and it’s forever changed how I run and scale my business. Raj Thakkar is founder and CEO of Charter School Business Management, an Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) company in New York. The company empowers charter schools with financial knowledge, accounting services and back-office support. The Master Key Executive program is run by Kent Gregoire, an EO Boston member. The post Could You Step Away From Running Your Company? Here’s How I Did. appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/2SJxTaS Contributed by Rob Dubé, CEO at imageOne. Rob is a member of EO in Detroit, speaker, author and an avid proponent of mindful leadership. If you’re like most business leaders and entrepreneurs, you know what it’s like to be stressed. Those years of nonstop work provide us with exciting dream careers and anxiety-ridden sleepless nights. Stress is simply part of the deal, right? To an extent, sure. Nobody said entrepreneurship was easy. But, if the pressures of leadership are unavoidable, do we have to accept stress and the consequences that come with it? Not by a longshot. Admittedly, it took me years to find a useful life tool--mindfulness and meditation. I know. I know. Sitting alone in silence probably sounds like the worst way for a busy business entrepreneur to spend their precious time. However, this small time investment has paid me back in ways I never could’ve imagined. Becoming a Mindful LeaderI first started my meditation practice back in 2005. By that point, I’d been running my Detroit-based print management business imageOne with my co-founder for over a decade. The company was thriving. I felt like the complete opposite emotionally. The responsibilities of leadership were overwhelming. I was under constant pressure, even during the moments when I said I’d let myself relax. It all came to a head when I was on a family vacation with my wife and two young kids. They were all outside together, enjoying the beautiful Northern Michigan day. I was inside the house working away. Even here, I felt no escape from the pressure. Was this really the life I wanted? That’s when meditation popped into my head. I’d heard about the practice before, but always pushed the idea of actually trying it to the side. I didn’t have time for doing nothing. But now, nearly on the verge of tears, I thought, “What do I have to lose?” I looked across the room, saw a comfy chair, and told myself, “Rob. Go sit in that chair and breathe in and out for five minutes.” So I did, and at the end of those five minutes—I felt better. My frustrations didn’t disappear. My problems still existed. However, for the first time in a really long time, I was calm, clear-headed, and maybe even a little relaxed. Intrigued by the experience but still a little skeptical, I began to look for evidence supporting how I felt after meditating. I uncovered academic research from top universities like Harvard and accounts from big-name business leaders that further established the advantages of taking on a mindful meditation practice. That’s when I knew that the emotions I had after sitting in the chair weren’t a fluke. They were real, and I was hooked. Bringing Mindfulness Into the WorkplaceSince that day, meditation has become an integral part of my daily life. I also take bi-annual silent retreats to strengthen my practice. The benefits have been astounding. For one, I’ve become a better leader in countless ways. I’m more productive, make smarter business decisions and connect on a deeper level with my team members. Meditation has also changed how I view my leadership role. I became motivated to bring positive, supportive energy into the office every day while encouraging my employees to do the same. Now that I knew the impact of a healthy, happy work-life balance, I wanted my team to enjoy the benefits of mindfulness as well. Since then, imageOne has received multiple workplace culture awards, including recognition as a Forbes Small Giant, which acknowledges 25 U.S. small businesses every year with having an exceptional culture. I couldn’t be prouder of my team. Start Your Meditation Practice HereIn the below video that I’m honored to share with other entrepreneurs and EO—a community I’ve proudly been a part of for 25 years—I’ll dig deeper into the benefits of mindfulness and meditation for leaders and entrepreneurs. I’ll also give a brief introduction about how to start a meditation practice of your own. Lastly, I’d love to connect personally with you on LinkedIn and Twitter. Feel free to reach out anytime with questions about meditation, leadership, business, or just to say hello. You can also find more mindfulness insights, interviews, and articles with other mindful leaders, information about my annual mindful leadership retreat, and more at www.donothingbook.com. Happy meditating entrepreneurs and fellow EO members! The post Mindful Leadership for Business Owners and Entrepreneurs appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/2uc1dxr Contributed by Frank Hamilton. Starting a business is an exciting adventure. It’s understandable why some people choose to do it with friends. After all, who could be a better partner than your best friend? You might be surprised by the obstacles you could face as friends in business together, though. Here are just seven reasons to think again before you launch a business with your buddy. 1. Friendship Doesn’t Equal Business CompatibilityOne of the biggest—and most disappointing—surprises about starting a business with your friends is realizing your friendship doesn’t automatically mean business compatibility. In fact, it is often quite the opposite. If you can’t find a way to manage the business together, you won’t make it far. One challenge in running a business is that there are certain tasks that must be performed on a daily basis. Your friends might end up being the ones performing these day-to-day tasks. If they feel like they should be the ones in charge, they might rebel and stop doing what they should be doing. 2. It Will Be Challenging to Define Business RolesThere will be some kind of hierarchy in your newly formed business. But the difference between a friendship and a business is that friendships don’t have pre-determined structures with clearly defined roles. You will need to start brainstorming what each person should do—and that often leads to conflict. One way friends can try to resolve this issue is simply by avoiding it. If they don’t define roles, then nobody will be angry, right? Beware, though, because a lack of hierarchy in a business can lead to its failure. 3. The Price of Failure Is Much HigherWhen working with friends, the price of failure is great. Remember that about half of all businesses fail during the first two years of their existence. Business failure obviously affects you financially and professionally. But if your business doesn’t succeed when you’re working with friends, you will also be affected on a personal level. Can your friendship survive? 4. Your Business Goals May DifferBe sure to thoroughly assess your goals and motivations. While you might want to launch a business because you want creative freedom, your friend may want financial success. When motivations vary, goals often turn out to be different too. Having different goals can lead to ineffective efforts. If you really want to achieve something, you will need to concentrate on one single aim. 5. Emotions Often Override Common SenseEmotions can be incredibly effective in ruining both your workflow and your relationships. If you let them control and manipulate you rather than controlling them, emotions can ruin your startup. When your friends make a mistake, you may be more likely to forgive them for it because they are your friends. You might be less objective during essential business decisions and less likely to act according to reason. 6. Such Businesses Often Lack ExpertiseBusinesses based on friendship often lack expertise. Are your friends really suited to the roles you need in a startup? Of course, to solve this, you can look for professionals to add to your team, but what use are your friends then? 7. Your Finances Will Be Quite StrainedIf you’re relying solely on funding from your friends, you may quickly run into trouble. With no actual influx of capital into your business, you’re looking at a dangerous mix of emotions, finances, and ego. If one of your friends invests more, will they expect more control? Do feel comfortable asking for more money? What are the terms of repayment? Carefully consider all the disadvantages of starting a business with friends before you do it. While there are some stories of success among business partners and friends, there are many tales of friendships falling apart in the process (just look at Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook). Identify the obstacles and move cautiously forward if you’re will to take the risk. Frank Hamilton has been working as a translator at The Word Point. He is a professional writer who focuses on blogging, digital marketing and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English. The post 7 Reasons You Don’t Want to Start a Business With Friends appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/2vHCPUy Contributed by Katty Douraghy, president at Artisan Creative, a member of EO San Franciso and the MyEO Women of EO Champion. In January of 2000 my husband, Jamie, asked me to come work with (for) him. His creative recruitment business was growing and he needed stronger personnel management skills, which was an area I had spent the previous 10 years developing in my own career. It all sounded fabulous—on paper. We would work closely to create the next chapter of our business together. We would lunch together and even walk to the office together. I was excited to start this perfect wedded-working venture together. Building a Foundation for SuccessOver time, reality set in. There were times when I inadvertently called him “honey” in front of our staff, followed by my being miffed when he asked me to re-do a report. I was so annoyed at times that I didn’t want to talk to him all afternoon…nor at dinner, once we got home. Very quickly, the realization set in that if this new working union was going to be successful we needed to re-think the arrangement and make certain that we had clearly defined roles with guidelines to work within. Twenty years later, this collaboration has become a partnership in life and work with many lessons learned along the way. Through EO, my husband and I have developed a friendship with fellow EO couple Brian and Jean Brault. We soon realized that we had many experiences in common. We also share similar learned lessons over the course of our respective marriages and entrepreneurial journeys.
Lessons Learned as an Entrepreneurial CoupleWith Brian and Jean, we have compiled a list of our top lessons from life as an entrepreneurial couple:
Together, we’ve also developed a few questions to help entrepreneurial couples engage in conversations to gain clarity, communicate more easily and connect with one another at a deeper level and to live a life by design.
There are also a few tools that can benefit couples—5 Love languages, CliftonStrengths, Kolbe and DISC, among others. Using these tools regularly allows you to get to know yourself and your partner better. Jamie and I adopted CliftonStrengths and refer to it often in our communication, both at home and at work. We have built a common language for support and growth as a couple. Having an external tool to refer to has also helped us reduce misunderstandings and focus on one another’s strengths and recognize when we need to step in and support one another in business and in life. This Valentine’s day, I hope these simple concepts can lead to better communication at home and at work. Katty Douraghy is president at Artisan Creative and an active member of EO San Franciso. She is also Champion of MyEO Women of EO, a group of entrepreneurs who are committed to learning together, supporting each other and creating a powerful network of women in business. The post How to Build a Successful Partnership in Work and Life appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/31RxQg6 Contributed by Lionel Felix, founder of Felix Media Solutions and a member of EO Austin. My wife and I both work full-time in our commercial audio-video (AV) company and it’s been very rewarding for our relationship as well as a strategic benefit. Our company, Felix Media Solutions, landed a spot on the 2019 Inc. 5000 list, but getting there came with many, many landmines that could have blown up the business—as well as our relationship. I started the company in 2015 as a side-hustle with my old friend Mike Watts. We both had full-time IT jobs which paid well, but I wanted to save for a house and he wanted to bring home more for his family. When we found ourselves working through many of our weekends, our vacation days and (ahem) sick days from our main jobs, we both jumped in completely and cut the tethers. Our IT contacts helped us drive sales of video conferencing systems to our IT friends. About the same time, I started dating Lindsey Rima (pictured at left). She managed the co-working space I was working in. She found what we did interesting and liked the idea of working with technology and making things work. She has BS in Biomedical Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology and she had worked as a product expert at the technology firm Zeiss. She soon donned a hard hat, filled a Husky bag with cable termination tools and started moonlighting on the field team terminating CAT5/6 cables, balanced audio cables and showing the guys how wire-management was supposed to look. While the business grew quickly, she learned quickly and went into systems programming where she learned how to design and program complex automation systems from Extron, Biamp and RTI. We worked side-by-side and she moved full-time into system bidding, design, and programming. Within a year she had made herself integral to the field team as well as the sales team where she was bidding $250K whole courthouses, 100,000 square feet offices and getting us projects that were bid exactingly and profitably. I was relieved by not having to do all the bidding and programming. I was able to focus on business growth, business development, hiring and sales. Growing PainsBy late 2017 it was clear there was a problem with our bookkeeping and accounts receivable (AR) was so backlogged we nearly ran out of cash, just in time for our bookkeeper to quit without notice. We had payroll in a few days, hundreds of thousands of dollars in AR getting moldy and not enough in the bank. I’m lucky to know people who can float me an entire payroll run while I get my house in order. Lindsey—who, at the time, was my girlfriend, programmer and designer—said, “I will take over the finance piece, you go sell and run the shop. I’ll handle this side of things.” And she just ran with it. She said, “I got this.” With us working on different parts of the business and having ownership of our pieces, we didn’t step on each other’s toes. While I am CEO, I knew that she had total ownership of what she had on her plate so I never needed to “manage” her. That autonomy, respect and trust let us work on the things we knew we needed to get done. Our goals were aligned which meant we knew what needed to get done. Instead of all of this coming from an employee, it was from the woman who I also went out to dinner with and was involved with. Our conversations often moved from things we cared about in our personal life to business strategy and hiring and finances. While work romances create many conversations about work and a relationship between two working people features work as a common topic, being at the helm together created a very strong bond between us. Within three months of Lindsey taking on the organization’s finances, our AR went from an average age of 71 days to 21 days, our line of credit was at zero, our credit cards were at zero and we had two months of payroll in the bank. Lindsey had recently attended the EO Accelerator Cash Day where she learned about profit first. She worked with our new outside-finance person, Chelle Martinez of Tax Trailer, and we implemented the profit-first model—taking every dollar that comes in and putting it into discrete accounts, starting with profit, then taxes, operational expenditures, work in progress, and a vault account which became our internal line of credit to smooth out the bumps. (We are a project-based company and money comes in unevenly.) Solutions Without ConflictOver time we have been able to keep work discussions at home to a dull roar, but we love what we do. Working together taught us to have hard conversations because we were focused on the outcome and the future. That alone helped us a great deal. Learning how to have hard conversations without conflict, just problem solving, was the most important thing we were able to solidify between us. We were more focused on positive, aligned outcomes than anything else. We learned to take nothing personally, which helped us move quickly to solve issues. We learned to grow and thrive without friction. Our partnership also manifested in a united voice within the larger team. There was no “go-ask-dad-if-mom-says-no” mentality, which often happens in family businesses. How to Make it WorkFor spouses and partners who wish to work together, I believe it’s critical that they work on different parts of the business and do so with autonomy. Hovering, correcting, holding them to different standards can cause problems—particularly in the optics within the company. Lindsey and I are lucky to be able to do our best work in different parts of the business. That’s the tricky part. Can you both do your work and not have too many opinions about how the other is executing? Is the work style between the two people compatible? Are your vision, values and goals aligned? If yes, then give it a go. If you’re both wanting to be the chef, on the other hand, well, two-business households are great, too! As a lifelong techie with 20 years of IT and AV experience, Lionel Felix (pictured at left) is committed to building great solutions that are easy to use. Both he and his wife, Lindsey Rima, are members of EO’s Austin, Texas, chapter. The post Growing as a Couple and a Startup appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/2P6xyx1 Contributed by Gordy Bal, social entrepreneur on a mission to regenerate the planet, shift the current dysfunctional education system and end human suffering. At this very moment, we are facing an evolutionary shift that we’ve never experienced before. As gen Xers and millennials inherit mass wealth from baby boomers, we’re looking at a greater transfer of wealth than we’ve seen before: Over US$30 trillion will change hands in North America over the next 30 to 40 years. This shift will change the world.Consider who is inheriting this money. It’s a new generation of humanity that is more focused on building a regenerative economy. We are coming into an awakening that has the potential to challenge the current capitalist paradigm—a paradigm that is not only causing extreme social damage to mass groups of people, but environmental damage that could lead to our own extinction. The question we need to ask ourselves now is, will we continue to use our capabilities to destroy the planet or will we use them to raise human consciousness? Rather than addressing the symptoms of the problems we are facing—war, poverty, climate change, excessive waste, racism, addiction, sexism—we must investigate at the root cause: our collective state of consciousness. So, what is consciousness?I define it as total self-awareness. We are emerging into a new type of consciousness, homo universalis. We see ourselves as deeply connected to the universe, in tune with nature, co-existing with exponential technology and leading from a place of love. This is where we can make a true impact and begin to evolve into the next iteration of our species. This is where we embrace and encourage human psychological wellbeing. It’s where we develop the understanding that success does not create happiness. Happiness actually creates success. Wellbeing and a self-aware mindset generate more and higher-quality thoughts and ideas, creativity, innovation, lives and experiences. We must use emerging technologies to support us, rather than enslave us. In this way, we can enable mental health, expand emotional wellbeing and enhance human cognition at a scale never before possible. We also must prepare for automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to eliminate many rote tasks in our current jobs, potentially destabilizing work and society within the next 15 to 20 years. The new jobs will be defined by human interaction, problem-solving, and creativity, where social-emotional skills and self-awareness become vital—not just for work but in order to be resilient during the transition. We must humanize the goals of technological advances so that humankind can flourish. How can each one of us become part of the revolution?We can do this by first discovering our purpose and then living our purpose. The Japanese have a concept for purpose called ikigai, which translates to “a reason for being.” It indicates the source of value in your life and the things that make your life worthwhile. The sweet spot emerges when you find something that you love, that the world needs, that you’re good at and that you can be paid for doing. In Indian ancient wisdom traditions, this is referred to as your dharma. Deepak Chopra once said, “When you live in the harmonious flow of dharma, the entire field of pure potentiality opens to you. You’re able to create as much happiness and wealth as you want because you’re aligned with the domain of spirit, the unlimited source of all manifestation.” There has never been a more crucial time for empowered, creative, inventive people to participate in the advancement of humankind. You are needed, to be here now, to be ready, awake and willing to build the future required to support and expand the human mind and heart, for this is the greatest and most impactful work of our time. If you’re interested in diving deeper into reawakening your purpose to make the world a better place, get in touch with me at [email protected]. Gordy Bal is a social entrepreneur and the founder of Conscious Thought Revolution (CTR), a technology platform that measures and expands global levels of human consciousness. The post Advancing Humankind Through Individual Consciousness appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/2SwO4Hk Contributed by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky. Effective leaders know they need to be excellent at emotional intelligence (EI), the skill of knowing and managing our own and others’ emotions. After all, the only things we can control in life are our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and if we can manage those, we can lead our organizations effectively. And if we know how our minds work, we can become more intentional about our patterns of thinking and emotions. We can evaluate reality more clearly, make better decisions and improve our ability to achieve goals, thus gaining greater agency, the quality of living intentionally. How do our minds work?Intuitively, our mind feels like a cohesive whole. We perceive ourselves as intentional and rational thinkers. Yet cognitive science research shows that the intentional part of our mind is like a little rider on top of a huge elephant of emotions and intuitions. Roughly speaking, we have two thinking systems. Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his research on behavioral economics, calls them Systems 1 and 2, but I think autopilot system and intentional system describe these systems more clearly. The term intentional system, in particular, is useful as a way of thinking about living intentionally and thereby gaining greater agency. The autopilot system corresponds to our emotions and intuitions. Its cognitive processes take place mainly in the amygdala and other parts of the brain that developed early in our evolution. This system guides our daily habits, helps us make snap decisions, and reacts instantly to dangerous life-and-death situations, like saber-toothed tigers, through the freeze, fight, or flight stress response. While helping our survival in the past, the fight-or-flight response is not a great fit for modern life. We have many small stresses that are not life-threatening, but the autopilot system treats them as tigers, producing an unnecessarily stressful everyday life experience that undermines our mental and physical well-being. Moreover, while the snap judgments resulting from intuitions and emotions usually feel true because they are fast and powerful, they sometimes lead us wrong, in systemic and predictable ways. The intentional system reflects our rational thinking and centers around the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that evolved more recently. According to recent research, it developed as humans started to live within larger social groups. This thinking system helps us handle more complex mental activities, such as managing individual and group relationships, logical reasoning, probabilistic thinking, and learning new information and patterns of thinking and behavior. While the automatic system requires no conscious effort to function, the intentional system takes deliberate effort to turn on and is mentally tiring. Fortunately, with enough motivation and appropriate training, the intentional system can turn on in situations where the autopilot system is prone to make errors, especially costly ones. Here’s a quick visual comparison of the two systems:
The autopilot system is like an elephant.It’s by far the more powerful and predominant of the two systems. Our emotions can often overwhelm our rational thinking. Moreover, our intuitions and habits determine the large majority of our life, which we spend in autopilot mode. And that’s not a bad thing at all—it would be mentally exhausting to think intentionally about our every action and decision. The intentional system is like the elephant rider.It can guide the elephant deliberately to go in a direction that matches our actual goals. It can help you address the systematic and predictable errors that we make due to how our brain is wired, what scholars term cognitive biases. Over 100 cognitive biases exist, and more are found all the time by scholars in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience. These errors lead to dangerous mistakes for entrepreneurs, in everything from mergers and acquisitions to assessing company performance. Recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to notice and address these dangerous judgment errors. You can do so using structured techniques to assess cognitive biases in your workplace, and then use effective decision-making strategies for making quick everyday decisions, for more complex and significant ones, and for critically important and highly complex choices. You also need to avoid failures and maximize success in implementing decisions. The elephant part of the brain—which is most prone to cognitive biases—is huge and unwieldy, slow to turn and change, and stampedes at threats. But we can train the elephant. Your rider can be an elephant whisperer. Over time, you can use the intentional system to change your automatic thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns, and become a better agent in taking charge of your life and career, and reaching your goals as an entrepreneur! Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. With over 20 years of experience as CEO of the training, coaching, and consulting firm Disaster Avoidance Experts, he also spent over 15 years in academia as a cognitive neuroscientist and behavioral economist. He’s an EO speaker, a recent EO 360° podcast guest and author of Never Go With Your Gut (2019), The Blindspots Between Us (2020) and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook (2017). The post The Emotional Intelligence of Effective Entrepreneurs appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. via Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization https://ift.tt/387uV5f |
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November 2020
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