subject: Make Your Business Profitable By Building A Winning Team [print this page] To make your business profitable and take it to the next level, you have to hire, cultivate and train a great team. So what are the keys to building a winning team?
Strong Leadership
First and foremost, a winning team needs a strong leader. Be the best leader you can be in your business. Challenge yourself to consistently improve in this area. Read books, get a good mentor, and attend workshops to help you grow your leadership skills. Investing in developing your own leadership skills will pay dividends toward making your business profitable.
Common Goal
If you don"t know where you are going, any road will get you there. How clear is your goal for the business and for each person? Have common, measureable goals that are well communicated, and part of the culture of your company. How can you expect your team to work toward specific goals to making your business profitable, if they don"t know what the metrics are to work toward that?
Rules of the Game
Know the rules of the game. That"s why you have processes, systems and employee handbooks. Everyone needs to know what"s expected of them, what behaviors, attitudes and day-to-day activities need to be done. So many times when we are first introduced to businesses we find that certain important things aren"t getting done. We"ll ask, "who is responsible for it?" And they say, "everyone." What happens when everyone is responsible for something? No one does it.
Action Plan
Why are action plans so critical? Are you getting the results you want in your business and in your life? Are you getting the financial results, making your business profitable? Are you getting the growth results you want in exchange for your time and effort? Are you having fun? Are you excited when you get to work or do you just sigh? When you have an action plan that motivates you, you jump out of bed. When you share it, everyone else on the team with the common goal will feel the same way.
Support Risk-Taking
An employee at a huge company was involved with a project, and had been on the team working on it for about a year and a half. He had a good amount of responsibility on a project, until one day he totally blew it. He made about a $500,000 mistake that his department had to eat.
The next day he came in to work and handed his boss a piece of paper. His boss said, "what"s this?" He said, "It"s my letter of recognition." The boss said, "Why are you resigning?" He said, "Well, I cost the company a half a million dollars. I know you"re going to fire me, so I might as well just quit." His boss said, "Are you kidding? I just spent a half a million dollars on your training! You can"t quit now!" Failure is only failure if you quit. If you get up, shake off the dust and get back at it, then it"s a learning opportunity.
100% Involvement/Inclusion
Everyone needs to be involved in what makes your business profitable. There should be no "them" and "us." There isn"t a back office and a front office or a production team and a management team. Everyone is involved. So many businesses have profited tremendously by engaging all their employees when they strategize. When they ask, how can we better serve our customers, improve our products, how can we improve everything we do? Making your company successful is everyone"s job and is in everyone"s best interest. Your entire team should be involved with improvements that make your business profitable.
