Word Count: 698 Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 5:26 PM
Secrets Of Successful Small Business Management
The transition from work at home professional to executive can be traumatic. As work at home business people watch their businesses grow, they are forced into rolls that require more skill and education. However, many fear success, limiting their chances of building a viable company
Many top managers have the skills to excel but are consistently overlooked for a promotion. These people knew what needed to be done, but are unable to explain to others the necessary steps needed to complete the job properly. This is a similar situation to the one faced by work at home professionals.
I have also seen people who are unable to pop a cork without messing up, but they can encourage ten different people to develop ten different methods of popping corks, while everyone thinks they are taking part in a foundational company project.
Most managers and executives spend hundreds of hours upgrading their skills. Few will spend a few minutes a day upgrading their communication skills. The problem with poor communication skills is that they are yours, a part of you, something you understand perfectly. Your communication skills are built around your IQ and EQ. This renders you blind to the problems until you take the time to study the art of effective communication.
What Will Excellent Communication Skills do for You?
How Effective are Your Communication Skills?
Learn how to communicate a Strategy.
Learn how to Build Rapport with Every Member of Your Team.
Public Speaking 101: Techniques and Tips
What Will Excellent Communication Skills do for You?
You have the skills, reputation, and determination to succeed. You spent ten years paying your dues and winning the chance to prove yourself to the world. Instead of gaining the freedom to show how profitable your department can be, the VP hands you a projection for the next year, including cruel demands on your department, and a list of requests that someone must have pulled from a fantasy novel.
You have one job, to meet the projections and deadlines, whether it is possible or not. Failure cannot be shared with anyone, not the department heads, team members, or the three professionals who only work a combined two hours a day. The failure, and consequences for the failure is yours alone.
Excellent communication skills provide a platform for controlling intangibles like gossip, discord, outright hostility, and even internal sabotage. From this platform, you build an attitude in the team, which fuels your own success.
The attitude must be the first thing. If you give everyone a task to do and make them reliant on others, then office hostility increases. Forcing them to work as a team is no better. One person will do all the work while others take the credit. As an executive, there is no time for you to play schoolyard monitor, so the transgressions go unnoticed until a key member of the team quits leaving you stranded.
Building a team attitude requires a set of rules to be followed, including things like no toxic conversation, consequences for breaking the rules, and consequences for enabling others to break the rules.
There are millions of employee handbooks in the workplace that do not work. Most of them fail because they are not enforced. An employee handbook must have a cascading effect. One rule is broken at the bottom level causes ripples all the way up, enforcing a chain reaction of consequences. The consequences of management’s inaction is worse than their fear of confrontation, so the rules are enforced.
The second reason why strategies do not work is their wording. Telling a person they need to behave in a certain manner is much different than changing their attitude. You cannot control a person’s attitude, but you can manipulate it. This is were excellent communication skills comes into play.
A good communicator achieves several things.
Analyze Communication Styles
Analyze Personality Types
Select a Vernacular the Team Understands
Learn to use Audio Visual and Text to Communicate
About the Author
Mark Walters is a third generation entrepreneur and author. He offers free training and investing videos designed to speed you towards financial independence at http://www.CashFlowInstitute.com
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