Improve My Business

Spring is in full swing, at least it is here in the southern part of the country, the trees are green, the sun is out and the flower are blooming. This has me thinking more and more about spring cleaning, and today specifically about spring cleaning for your ideas. Most people have a bunch of ideas that just come to them throughout the year, and if your involved in the running of a business a lot of those ideas probably relate to your business. Many of the business people I know record their ideas either in journals, or e-mail to help them remember the ideas later when they have time to act on them. Ideas always seem to have a way of always coming to you when you don’t have time to work on them.  So today, I want to talk about doing some spring cleaning of our ideas.

First thing to do is to consolidate your ideas into a single list. This may mean pulling together multiple entries into your journal, or searching through your E-mail for notes to yourself, or maybe you just have them all rolling around in your head and just need to right them down. One way or the other it is important to get all of the ideas you have been storing up in one place so you can look at them all together. Once we have our completed list we can being sorting through our ideas using the following steps.

1. Combine. I like to start by taking ideas that are related or similar and combining them, that way I won’t accidentally through out one part of a two or three part idea.

2. Review. This will inevitably happen when you go through to combine, but you want to review your ideas with a critical eye. Things to be looking for are ideas that are no longer relevant, meaning that either your business or the business environment has changed significantly sense you had the idea and therefore it no longer seems like a good one. Other types of ideas you might want to identify are ideas that are just too out there, unless your at a place where pursuing a pretty out there idea is what you are looking for, and ideas that are too grandiose, while we all like to dream big, putting these kinds of ideas on your to do list will only stress you out.

3. Discard. Any ideas that you identified during your review you should discard from the list, the goal after all is to reduce the number of ideas we have in our idea bank, thus making room for more ideas, not to mention giving us some space to actually work on the ideas not just have them. Other items to discard from the list might include ideas that never seem to get done, if you have had the same idea for two or three years and aren’t any closer to realizing the idea then you were then, it might be time to let it go. Alternatively these types of ideas can be great candidates for our next step.

4. Organize. In this step you want to organize your ideas in order of importance. The goal is to come away with a clear picture of what the next idea you want to work on is going to be, and the one after that, and so on. Often times with so many ideas floating around it is hard to pick just one to work on, so organizing your list is a way of focusing your energy on realizing the most important ideas first. Items to look at for moving to the top of the list are probably either, recent and time sensitive ideas, or those old ideas we discussed in number 3, if they still seem like great ideas and you just can’t let them go then try to get them off your list by making them happen.

5. Get to work. Now comes the easy part right? Just start working on realizing the idea at the top of your list. I know its typically not that simple, but at least by cleaning your ideas you can get more targeted and focused and clear up some mental space to really delve into your ideas.

Another thing that some people have found helpful but that I didn’t include in the list, is making two separate lists in the organize stage, sorting ideas into big ideas and smaller ideas. Typically this is done based on the amount of time it would take to accomplish the idea. This way you can always be working on one quicker easy idea and one more long term idea. The goal in either scenario is always the same though, get your ideas in order, get rid of the ones you don’t need, and make space for working on the ones that are most important.

Technorati Tags: Business, de-clutter, goals, improvement, organizing, working smarter

I recently wrote a little article for our upcoming newsletter (sign up through our homepage at www.mcdcg.com) about the internal auditor refresher classes we offer and the benefits they provide. It got me to thinking about the idea of looking at problems from a new angle or a new way of thinking. You see part of what we do in auditor refresher classes is work with the auditors to give them new tools that allow them to approach audits from a different perspective. For experienced auditors it is easy to fall into a rut where you no longer look critically at the area you are auditing so much as go through the motions of your audit, it has become too familiar. While this blog isn’t about auditing or how to be a better internal auditor, I think that auditing isn’t the only place where we can tend to have rut syndrome.

Rut syndrome is what I am calling our tendency in life and in business to get stuck in the same groove. After a while we wear this groove so deep it’s more like a trench and it can be quite a struggle to climb out of, but if you think about it, if you are so deep in your groove that you can’t climb out of it, you probably don’t have a very good view of the world around you. This is not to say that there can’t be progress made by working in your rut, you can move forward and go deeper, but the progress at some point becomes undirected. Unless we step outside our rut to check our bearings every once in a while we may wind up grooving our way right to where we don’t want to be.

So I encourage you think about what kind of ruts you are digging right now. When was the last time you stopped and poked your head up for a look around? You may find that the landscape has changed dramatically sense the last time you stopped to examine it, and that in fact what you thought was your productive rut is actually holding you back from an even greater opportunity. Just like auditors get too comfortable with the audit process we can get too comfortable with our work, our life, our business and stop exploring and examining. At this point our rut is limiting our opportunities for growth and success.

I would also like to point out that sometimes it can be hard to get out of your rut, ruts are after all comfortable and routine. Just like it takes training and new techniques for auditors to gain a new perspective and get out of their auditing rut, there may be some techniques we can use to help us get out of our ruts and survey our surroundings. One of them that I know works for me is as simple as taking a vacation, and no I don’t mean going to a hotel where you will plug into the wi-fi and turn on your cell phone, I mean taking a true vacation from your work. Vacations from work allow you to escape the day to day run around and take a good look around, survey the surroundings, and examine the value of your rut. I am sure there are other techniques that you use to help you get out of a rut. What are they? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: Business, living your life, working smarter

There are several things in life that are almost universally true. One of these universal truths is that, if you work at a company that has more then two employees, you are going to have meetings. Meetings can be a huge time sink for your day, not to mention totally throw your time management plan out of whack if you were not told about the meeting in advance. I know plenty of people who feel like they spend half of the time they are at work in one meeting or another, so it’s understandable how meetings could seriously cripple your ability to be efficient at work. Here are some tips to help you time manage your meetings so you can spend more time doing your actual work.

1. Avoid meetings that don’t have a specific goal or problem to address. This is a very simple place to start, if someone asks you to be at a meeting, your first question should be what is the meeting about? If they can’t give you a firm answer to the purpose of the meeting, chances are you don’t really need to be there.

2. Ask for an agenda, or if none exists create one. Assuming that the person who requests your presence at the meeting does have a real issue that the meeting is addressing our next thought you be organization, and this is where the agenda comes in. Without and agenda the meeting will probably take at  least an extra thirty minutes because it will take time for everyone to get on the same page and make the transitions as you  move through the topics of the meeting. Also, having an agenda will set a definite end time for the meeting, this way you know how much time you are committing and if the meeting starts to run over you can simply excuse yourself by saying you made another commitment for after the meeting assuming it would end on time.

3. Do as much pre-meeting prep as you can for yourself and the other people at the meeting. An agenda is a great place to start but beyond that, if you can prepare discussion questions, or anything else that will help guide the meeting towards reaching a conclusion on the issue at hand your meetings will run more efficiently and smoothly.

4. Make sure everyone coming to the meeting is up to speed BEFORE they come to the meeting. Remember the agenda and questions you created for the meeting? By sending the questions and agenda out in advance to all the participants in the meeting and asking them to come with to the meeting with their responses ready you can minimize catch up time and get right down to business at the start of the meeting.

5. Identify time wasters and avoid going to meetings with them. Time wasters is a term I use to refer to those people in an office who either don’t have enough to do or don’t want to do the work they have, and instead invent creative ways to fill their time while appearing to be busy. Many of these people have realized that holding meetings and/or prolonging meetings they attend is a great way to avoid doing real work. If you can identify who these people are in your office and be especially careful to avoid getting sucked into their meetings you can hopefully avoid the dreaded two hour status update from last week when nothing happened.

These five tips will hopefully help you cut down on wasted time away from your desk and increase your productivity at work. One final thought on meetings, is that I have rarely encountered a meeting that needed to be longer then an hour. This is not to say that many meeting don’t run longer then an hour, but it is rare that they need to. Typically most any topic needing to be covered in a meeting, if well defined upfront, can be covered in an hour or less. If someone is trying to schedule you for a three hour meeting, it had better be a really important meeting and cover a whole lot of material.

Technorati Tags: efficiency, managing your time, Planning, preparation, Time Management, working smarter

To close out this relationship themed month on our blog I want to talk about online relationship building, and before you ask, no I am not going to talk about online dating sights. By now everyone knows that your business needs a website, and if you are reading this blog chances are you are relatively tech savvy and have a nice website set up. What is the purpose of your website? Does it give information? Is it simply a place to list your phone number where prospective clients can find you? Or is it a community? Are you using your website as simply an informational tool or are you using it to build relationships with clients and prospective clients? This is what I mean when I say I want to talk about online relationship building.

When the internet first came around it was a great source for easily search-able information, and this is still true. Now days most any question can be answered if you know how and where to look on the internet. However, this is not the only use for the internet, like anything else it grows and evolves. Recently we have seen the rise of social networking and what is being called Web 2.o. The importance of these new innovations from a business standpoint is that they are shifting the way our customers use the internet, and therefore we need to shift the way we use the internet.

Web 2.0 is changing the internet from a simple search-able database of information into a forum for creating community and fostering relationships, and as business people who realize the importance of relationships this is great for us. People are no longer content to simply find information posted on your website, they want interaction, both with you and with other customers. We need to  make sure that we are tapping into this new way of building relationships and using it to reach a new customer base that we may have never thought of before.

To me it makes sense to think of the new internet as one big trade-show. At a trade-show you can have your booth and just put on information for people to come by and pick up and look through, or you can stand at your booth and invite people in, engage people in conversation, and start building a relationship with that person. The growth of web 2.0 has given us the opportunity to stand out front of our online booths and interact with the people coming in, not just let them pick up information and leave. As anyone who has worked at trade shows will tell you, it is the interaction more then the information that is valuable, and this is becoming true on the internet as well.

One final point that I think a lot of people forget is that the rules and tips for building personal relationships apply just as much on the internet as they do in person. This means that whatever you do to start building your relationship presence on the internet you need to make sure it is honest and genuine or you won’t get the desired response.

So I encourage all of us to start thinking about how we can increase our presence on the internet not just from an information stand point, but from a relationship standpoint. That is part of what we are trying to do with our blogs at McDCG. We want to use these blogs to not only provide information, but also start growing a community. This is why we always encourage you to leave comments and start discussions. So how is your business using the internet? Leave us some comments so we can all see what you have done and learn together.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Business, Business Relationships, communication, twitter

This week I want to continue our relationship theme and talk about how we relate to the people we work with. Whether they are employees, bosses, or partners, at some point in time we all have to work with other people, which is sometimes a great experience but can also be a total disaster. If you are like most of the people I know you have had both kinds of experience, sometimes you really click with a co-worker and your collaborative productivity is great while other times you just don’t seem to mesh and you spend as much time trying to get on the same page as you do actually working. Have you ever wondered why this is?

One way to start to figure out why we have such different experiences with different people is to look at Myers Briggs personality type profiles. If you are not familiar with the Myers Briggs questionnaire and personality types you can find more information here. Basically what Myers Briggs does is go through a series of questions designed to assess your personality. By personality I mean your personal strengths, weaknesses, motivating factors and, perhaps most importantly, communication style.

Myers Briggs testing has been successfully used in the workplace for quite some time to improve teamwork and understanding with in a department or organization. Typically each member fills out the questionnaire then the facilitator will go through the results with everyone, thus you and your team gain a better understanding not only of your own type, but everyone else’s too. Through this process it often becomes clear why you click so well with one coworker but struggle to communicate with another.

Perhaps you will discover, as Mary did when she did her first Myers Briggs test, that you are a big picture person while your boss is much more detail oriented. This can be incredibly valuable information, now you know how your boss thinks and can anticipate what they will be looking for when you present something to them, in this case a higher level of detail. The boss on the other hand can understand that perhaps it is not due to laziness or lack of skill that work and reports aren’t meeting his satisfaction as much as because employees have a different view of what is necessary. This mutual understanding of how the other person operates can make everything in the office run more smoothly. In this example the employee now knows to cover things in more detail and the boss now knows that they need to be specific in asking for detail because not everyone is going to just assume it is necessary like he does.

This is just one example of how a Myers Briggs test can improve workplace productivity. If you find you are constantly butting heads or disagreeing with someone in your office place, chances are it’s because of some personality difference. Once you can understand these differences you can learn to work around them. This is the true power of Myers Briggs, it allows you to understand personalities and like anything else, the problems caused by personality differences can’t be addressed until the cause of the problems is understood. Think of Myers Briggs as root cause analysis for work relationships.

Technorati Tags: Business Relationships, communication, Myers Briggs