fbpx

4 Steps to Frame a Change and Manage Your Team During a Transition Period Within Your Business

When business owners, business partners, and leaders learn to carefully frame a change for their team, group, or employees, they assume the position of role model and outline how they intend to approach the change, and how they expect others to respond and behave. This 4 Step approach to FRAME IT ensures greater success and more efficient outcomes. Unanticipated change within your company can elicit a wide range of emotional responses in you and your team. On one end of the continuum, change is sometimes met with enthusiasm if it's perceived as a positive. For example, if you provide increased healthcare or child care, or time off benefits, you will likely see relief, even joy, among your employees. Other types of changes however may be met with anxiety, even fear, when perceived as a threat to the status quo. This often occurs when there is a change of ownership when new leadership is brought on or there are shifts in roles and responsibilities. A third reaction to change in the work environment is a more neutral — a go with the flow, matter-of-fact, seemingly resilient response to shifts being implemented. This indicates the change is not threatening. No matter the size of your business, owners, business partners, group leaders, and team managers are faced with many demands in the work environment. Decisions made at these times roll out a series of change events for small business teams or for multiple business groups in a large organization. Success, for [...]

Coaching for Business Partners: 4 Times to Work with a Skilled Business Relationships Coach

Business partnerships have a lasting impact on how and where a business will grow. It takes clarity and communication to make it work. All parties understanding their responsibilities, fulfilling the expectations of the mutually agreed-upon objectives for growing the business. Establishing processes to maximize each other’s strengths, focusing on commonalities in values, and shared visions for business outcomes creates a foundation of trust from which to grow. Business partner and owner coaching lead to successful outcomes. Figuring out how to bring unique individuals together in a successful business partnership is the goal. Because when things are going well, there’s an almost indescribable energy. And when things are going well between you, it carries throughout your organization and all relationships. Together you create better. You communicate better. You work better. You play better. You just do it all better. - Jan Hoistad This article takes a look at coaching for business partners and breaks down 4 times when you need the expertise of an experienced Business Relationships Coach whether you've been in business for a while or just starting a new business. How To Make a Business Partnership Work Business Partner Case Study Focusing For Better Alignment and Successful Outcomes Preventing or Repairing Difficulties in Business Partnerships Summary If you’re looking for guidance on improving your relationships in the business world, you’ll find lots of information on developing sales and management or leadership styles. Some resources focus on aspects such as presence, empathy, confidence, and listening skills. Information on how these [...]

Coaching Helps to Evaluate the Next Stage of Your Career

  These past few years have catapulted some personal and professional lives forward. Yours may have been one of them. Especially if you were in the right industry at the right time. Or if you were lean, mean, and agile. Maybe you took the time to explore or add on a new skill that's paying off now, post-pandemic. You may even have have been one of the fortunates if your position was indispensable to the company. You'd have been a lucky one—staying on securely in the midst of other's cutbacks. Working from home (WFH) may have been seamless for you and your employer or your business. It was comfortable for many. Unless they shared a small space with mates and kids schooling on zoom. Pets roaming in and out. Yet many professionals and families settled in and are now weighing the consequences of employers reinstating back to the office or hybrid schedules. This shuffle is disrupting what may have become comfortable. Or you may be part of The Great Resignation 2021 an example of which is a record 4.4 million Americans who quit their jobs in September 2021. The trend continued through 2022 with another record 4.2 million voluntarily resigned in November 2022—millions more than anything ever seen before. With a backdrop of market slump and recession talk going on all that year.  This chart of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics highlights a continuing trend.   With fewer workers across many industries, the trend toward negotiating a high wage and [...]

Choosing Among 4 Business Partnering Styles to Understand Their Impacts Your Business

Business partners work successfully together when they are coached to acknowledge individual differences but work toward common agreements. By doing so, they acquire the mindset, tools, and skills of a long-lasting and successful partnership. In this article, you’ll be introduced to four relationship styles entered into by business partners. In the four articles indicated throughout and at the end of this overview, each style will be discussed in greater detail. Unlike relationship therapy or counseling, coaching for relationship style empowers you with skills and tools so you start and stay aligned as business partners. This way you can focus on building your business together! Unconscious Assumptions and Expectations of Varying Relationship Styles Each business partnering style comes with conscious or unconscious assumptions and expectations. These in turn contribute in different ways to the communication and decision-making between the business partners or owners. These interpersonal aspects include: Feelings of ease, trust, respect, and the ability to count on one another. A sense of individual contribution, recognition, and loyalty. Ease and openness of communication. Invitation, support, and encouragement of unique perspectives as part of creative culture. A commitment to working on the “same team,” An attitude that “We can resolve anything together,” in navigating decisions and differences that impact personal satisfaction, as well as business success. Unique Differences Between Relationship Styles Each style is briefly analyzed along the following dimensions: The conscious or unconscious relationship mindset or perspective. This dimension is about ultimate decision-making power within the partnerships. It [...]

5 Ways to Improve Feedback So You Energize and Retain Your Valuable Business Team Members

A Growth Mindset approach to feedback will grow your team. Focus employees on how their contributions meet desired outcomes. It brings purpose to their work and energizes everyone to share creativity, be more efficient. Change occurs more quickly with clearly stated expectations and mentoring from you as a leader.   The media often presents a contradictory picture of young people, focusing on their almost constant need for praise and feedback. While the desire for a little praise and feedback is true of all generations and some personalities, too much praise—without problem-solving encouragement—has been found to be detrimental for individual growth from early childhood on. It can affect personal and professional growth. A few years back, the concern about over-praising and feedback was focused on Millennials. In my experience coaching professionals at all stages, it is more common among that generation. For those who are older, I notice a maturing of this need as they are guided to develop their talents. However there are others who rely on their out-going personal style and exhibit a people-pleasing drive. Everyone in the work world has experienced this aspect of the millennial charm. They’re the first to describe themselves as energetic can-doers — fast, smart, eager, and exuding self-confidence. They’re often great in an interview and show up to take on many tasks. Plus, they’re usually fun to be around. For this group and any generation, Professor of Psychology and researcher at Stanford, Dr. Carol Dweck, explores how doling out praise and [...]

How Successful Leaders Help Others Navigate Change

Learn how successful leaders help others navigate through changes to their business especially when there is staffing turnover, policy or restructuring involved. https://youtu.be/P8bf16wdwT4   Managing Responses to Stressful Situations—In Yourself and Your Employees can be achieved when three simple and steadfast rules are applied and few pieces of key information are committed to memory. Even in the most self-aware professional, the stresses of our world’s increasing change cannot help but trigger a range of emotional responses that you can learn to manage in yourself and others. All change is a form of stress. This stress is not necessarily bad. The change may ultimately bring about a very positive, even exciting, outcome. However it may not be perceived that way initially and it is stressful none-the-less. Every individual’s response to stress is varied and shaped by many factors—many of which are seemingly out of control because they are physiologically and hormonally based. They are the body’s natural response to a perceived threat or danger. It started as a survival response when we had to escape being eaten alive. While our current lifestyle may be much less survival driven, the reactions to change—of any minor to major level—remain hardwired into our body’s “fight, flight or freeze” responses. As a business owner or executive team member, you lead or manage a lot of people in your work and home life, so it’s important to become aware that, when under stress, the higher brain systems in anyone can be hijacked by the body’s response [...]

Crafting Your Career and Life Story One Life-Stage at a Time

Careers, businesses and family lives develop through a series of phases. When fully—some would say success"fully" lived—each phase has an arc that rises, peaks, descends and resolves as the next begins. If you approach your career, business and personal developments with this natural structure and rhythm in mind, it allows you to live the current stage fully, anticipate and plan for next phase. This is true no matter your age, life stage or generation. Coaching can help you excavate these aspects of your life, oftentimes making a life feel richer in the reflection and taking intentional action. Nowadays, with such long-life, you have the opportunity to approach each decade, each 10 - 15 year phase acknowledging an underlying natural rhythm, focusing the arc of your activities toward outcomes—the personal and career growth, self-development learning and chronological life-stage accomplishments you desire—as you design, craft and create your life story. If you are a business leader, business owner or entrepreneur, on this foundation you can successfully craft the arc of business developments and plan the future with eyes wide open. Couples and Dual-Career Couples can integrate personal and professional with eyes wide open.   It's Your Story—You Get to Rewrite and Build Each Stage When you acknowledge the context of multiple 10-15 year phases, your career story takes on personal meaning—because you write it, and live it. Like many authors, the outcomes for their characters are not always fully known, but various factors compel the actions and eventual outcomes. The [...]

How a Dominant Decision-Maker May Dominate the Direction of Your Business

There are 4 Business Partnering Styles that can have an impact on you and your business.  This article focuses on The Dominant—Non-Dominant Relationship Style. At the end of this article you'll find articles on the impacts of Business Partnerships With Undefined Roles, Unilateral Decision-Makers, and finally, the highly successful Big Picture Partner approach. One Primary Decision-Maker A key feature of the Dominant—Non-Dominant relationship dynamic, is that one person is in charge and ultimately makes the final decisions. Typically this is a one-owner or business leader situation, where full responsibility falls on the shoulders of that individual. When carried into a business partnership, the Dominant—Non-Dominant dynamic may be a clearly stated agreement. In this case, it is an agreed-upon mindset or perspective from which all discussions are had, goals are set, decisions are made, action is laid out, and accountability is followed—achieving the end results, and the expectations of the dominant person. Without such clarity, confusion may ensue. Domineering When the “who’s in charge” question is apparent, theoretically differences, disagreement, or conflict would not arise nor be addressed. It would be clear that the dominant individual’s preferences take the lead. If we focus on power and productivity in day-to-day relating within a Dominant—Non-Dominant dynamic, it will be experienced as more autocratic when it is demanding or domineering in nature. Such leaders are referred to as dominating, bossy, or dictatorial. Sharing of ideas and information feels unwelcome or stilted. Respect is absent, trust is not built, nor is it possible under these [...]

Impartial Management: Doing Away with Favorites

DJHP / Leaders Nothing is more disheartening for employees than being on a team where its leader just seems to play favorites — unless, of course, you’re one of the chosen few. You get your pick of projects, find yourself constantly tapped for input, and may even enjoy a little preferential treatment when it comes time for promotions. Even then you might not feel you can trust the spotlight, especially if your leader shows any fickleness. But that’s really a story for another day. The thing about favoritism is that it’s become almost an epidemic. Sounds alarmist, I know. But according to a survey by McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University,92 percent of senior business executives have seen some level of favoritism in the workplace. While this number may appear high, it does stand to reason. If you click, you just click, and this can inadvertently lead to favoritism when you’re in an advisory role. Even something as innocent as a standing lunch date can turn into bias toward subordinates. We’re human, after all, and it’s difficult not to let our emotions hold sway over our decisions. To determine whether or not your attitude and actions are led by favoritism, I recommend taking stock of the following: Feedback. Everyone has his or her own managerial style. There’s nothing wrong with that, and this style inevitably affects how you deliver feedback. But this feedback should always be constructive in nature. It should set consistent expectations for every member of your [...]

Why Career Coaching is Important in Today’s Economy?

This was first published in 2000, but the principles remain the same today. Not so very long ago, Time Magazine published an article entitled “Play of the Day - Fostering employee loyalty in a tight labor market, companies are offering workers personal coaches as tools to help them thrive." The article describes how companies, many of them FORTUNE 500’s, such as IBM, Dow Chemical, Glaxo Welcome, Marriott International, and others including Eastman Kodak, Abbott Laboratories World Wide and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, all have found the merits of hiring career and executive coaches to help their employees discover what it takes to make them content in the workplace. When this article was originally published, the economy was booming with no signs of slowing down, and they reasoned that offering coaching to your employees was a good thing to help retain them in an employee driven marketplace – if they are happier, hopefully they will stay. “Companies also see it as a way to help valued employees evolve in a swiftly changing business environment.” (Time, 9/25/00, p. B27) Just 5 months later, we might characterize the business sphere as more “unknown”, definitely rocky, with analysts walking the fence not knowing whether to predict stability in the near future or more economic difficulties throughout months to come. Companies are feeling the domino effect of slowing sales and revenues, a growing number are choosing to layoff a first round of workers as everyone tightens their belts. There is an atmosphere of taking [...]

Go to Top