Ptips

3 Steps To Eliminating Workplace Drama

Workplace Drama: A Leak In The System

Shannon: Let’s jump right in. How do you define drama, and how will people know what drama is and what it’s not?

Cy: The simple definition of drama is emotional waste in the workplace. So it’s energy, focus, productivity, time—whatever metric you want to apply to it—that took away from results and happiness rather than added to it. It’s a leak in the system.

Examples of drama include venting, tattling, gossiping, score-keeping, judging, resisting change, focusing on why we can’t rather than how we could, not being aligned to this organization, and arguing with reality.

And what we were shocked to discover in our research is that currently, the average person, good performer, good person, spends two and a half hours a day at work in drama.

This doesn’t mean they aren’t working hard. This doesn’t mean they’re constantly complaining or venting. That’s just one part of drama. It does mean they’re working, but working with a bit of a grudge or chip on their shoulders or a sense of a story that they’re not valued or that they’re underappreciated or that they’re under supported by their world.

And when you look at the numbers, two and a half hours a day means 816 hours a year. If you’re a leader or business owner, and you’re looking for how to really give your business a shot in the arm, if you think about the opportunity to recapture and upcycle 816 hours per year per person in your organization and focus it instead on customer service, or sales, or innovation, or product development, it’s really a “terrimazing” opportunity—terrifying that we have this much waste, but amazing that we have this opportunity.

7 Steps To Being A Great Interviewer

Both you and your interviewee need to be crystal clear on the purpose of the interview, which means understanding your target audience: Who’s meant to benefit from this information?

If you don’t know that, you risk having all their wonderful knowledge and experience fall on deaf ears … and wasting everyone’s time and energy in the process. The purpose of sharing information is to create value, and value is specific to the audience.

In other words, it’s not about you.

As an example, the most interesting discussion in the world about building a deck won’t do much good to an audience of condo owners. Likewise, that fun anecdote about the time you met Bill Murray might be better suited for your next dinner party than a talk on long-term care facilities.

Knowing your audience means knowing what excites them, what motivates them, and what frightens them, and value creation comes down to addressing all of those concerns.

Want A Great Company Culture? Do These 7 Things Immediately

Acknowledgment is important—and so is how you give it. Part of your role as an effective leader is to help grow and elevate your team members and to give direction about how they can improve.

When you reinforce positive behavior, it lets your team know what they’re doing right and encourages them to repeat it. It also makes it easier to course-correct later.

Consider how often you take the time to slow down and pay attention to what’s going on around you and to other people’s contributions. Your focus doesn’t need to revolve around what’s next on your to-do list.

These situations become suddenly abundant because you have an idea and then you and your collaborators define and create new Free Zones. It’s all gain when it starts because the price is whatever you’re charging. No one else is charging for it yet, so there’s no comparison. The pricing mechanism of the marketplace isn’t working there yet.

The price you set will be dictated by how quickly you want to grow the market, so you’ll likely make it very reasonable so that as many people as possible can enjoy this new product or service you’re offering.

But your emphasis is entirely on the new customers, not who’s competing for your new customers, because there is no competition for them.

You can be more focused on your clientele, your creativity, and your innovations because there is room freed up in your brain now that you’re no longer distracted financially or creatively by what other people are doing or worried about competition.

The Best New Thinking On Leverage And Leadership

Shannon: Kent, I’m thrilled that you could join us because I think the story you have to share—your company’s spectacular growth, your unique perspective on leadership, and how you approach leadership and leadership development in an entrepreneurial company focused on regardless of industry. Could you share a bit about who you are, where you started, Estes Construction, and your background?

Kent: Certainly, Shannon. Estes Construction was founded in 1970 by my uncle, Jim Estes, and he and my aunt grew the company through its fledgling years. I joined them in the mid-1980s and took the company over in 2003. My aunt and uncle gave me tremendous business values and a very good foundation.

As of last week, we completed our fourth acquisition, giving us four different construction companies including Estes, which is the largest, as well as an architectural firm.

Over about eight years, we’ve gone from about $35 to $40 million in revenue to somewhere around $250 million this year. So we’ve had pretty substantial growth, and to your point about leadership, we’ve been able to do that while achieving what we call in our industry ”best in class” results—our 14th consecutive year doing so.

The Only Two Reasons To Hire

We tend to think certain tasks go with certain roles and resign ourselves to taking the good with the bad. But that’s a very corporate way of looking at business, and it negates the awesome potential every one of us has for excellence when given the right opportunities and the freedom to do what we love.

If a task isn’t something you’re unique at, if it’s not something you love to do, and if it’s something you procrastinate on, you’re probably not the best person to be doing it.

Smart hiring (and great teamwork), then, is less about filling a standardized job description and more about matching the right activities to the right people.

How Strategic Coach Will Keep Growing Over The Next 30 Years

Circumstances in the world will change, including how big a part technology plays, but we’re going to continue to do what we do because the desires of entrepreneurs—freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose—will stay constant.

In fact, I’ll say right now that the number one industry in the world in the 21st century is going to be coaching.

This will apply both to industries that are around now and industries that don’t yet exist.

Communication networks in which creative people can create new things are the main enabler for everything in the global economy, and if these creative people are properly focused and feel properly supported, they can create amazingly bigger and better results in the years ahead than were possible in the past.

More and more, in every area of entrepreneurship, every person who’s in a position to create a new enterprise needs a framework, a structure, and a process for establishing both short range and long range progress, and someone to bounce their thinking off of.

And that’s a coach.

Every quarter, I get better at three things: being a coach, creating new thinking tools, and doing certain marketing activities. And that’s going to continue decades into the future.

Babs and I, and all of our team members, are fully committed to the next 30 years.

The One Thing That Will Derail Your Rapidly Growing Business

Adrienne Duffy, owner of Big Futures Inc., was trained in the fine arts and had an early career as an orchestral musician in Chicago, as well as owning a thriving business teaching music.

But during that time, she realized that what really drove her, above and beyond her love of music, was helping people transform their current reality into a bigger future.

Recognizing that this was her ultimate passion and purpose was a turning point for Adrienne. Though she loved music, she had found over time that the music arena was limiting her ability to make a greater impact in creating transformational change for others.

Being Adrienne, she embarked on a mission to get all the training that would allow her to work organizationally and move into the work that she does today.

Adrienne believes that growing up in an entrepreneurial family naturally led her to entrepreneurship, working with business owners in both her own business and in her role as a long-standing and well-loved associate coach to entrepreneurs in The Strategic Coach Program.

Are You As Successful As You Need To Be Or Want To Be?

I’ve observed a marked dividing line between extremely successful entrepreneurs and those who peak after reaching a certain level of success. The dividing line seems to consist of two words: needing and wanting.

There are the vast majority of entrepreneurs who are as successful as they need to be, and then there’s an elite group of entrepreneurs who grow and grow and grow with no apparent ceiling. The difference I’ve noticed from studying these two groups extensively is that the second group of entrepreneurs is as successful as they want to be.

When you’re as successful as you need to be, there’s a stopping point you reach when you’ve satisfied your needs. It’s unconscious, of course, so the entrepreneur won’t even notice it happening. But when you’re as successful as you want to be, you just keep growing and expanding. The moment you reach one level of wanting, there is another just beyond that.

I began to see this distinction make a huge difference among entrepreneurs. And it all comes down to the difference between needing and wanting.

How To Leave The World Of Competition Behind

What you hoped might be true.

What may have seemed like fairy tale visions of your future that you kept to yourself during all of your years of competitive frustration and failure can actually take on a greater daily practicality than you ever imagined.

You can leave behind the negativity and feelings of scarcity that are such a big part of most entrepreneurs’ lives. Everything can be positive, encouraging, and exciting. A future without competition is possible.

That’s what a Free Zone is: a world without competition. New Free Zones don’t last forever, but it’s not your concern whether or when other people move into a Free Zone you’ve created. Your goal is just to create more and more Free Zones.

Why Talent Diversity Matters: Expert Tips For Building The Perfect Team

But not all teams are created equal. Some have energy and momentum built right into their DNA, with everyone’s unique talents and perspectives combining and multiplying, while others just get stuck, with each person waiting for someone else to pick up the slack.

The difference between them? Talent diversity.

Great teams are diverse teams, yet most entrepreneurs start out by hiring people just like themselves. They gravitate toward people who think like them, work like them, and act like them.

Believe me, I get it: It feels good to be around people like us. It’s comforting, like a cozy blanket, to talk to people whose energy and perspective match our own. We already know they’ll get excited about our ideas and will handle projects (and their timelines) like we would, all of which provides a big confidence boost.

However, this kind of talent bias limits your personal and professional growth more than you might think. If your ideas are never challenged, neither are you. It’s total stagnation.

Our teams should be a complex tapestry of capabilities and perspectives, strengths and weaknesses, each supporting and complementing the others. In reality, they’re often a monochrome portrait of our own preferences and biases.

How Poor Communication Affects Your Bottom Line—And What To Do About It

Intrigued? So were we.

The thing is, as all entrepreneurial companies grow, certain activities and habits become a part of your culture, but they don’t always facilitate your growth. At Strategic Coach, we’ve always had a very positive culture. We support everyone’s Unique Ability and Unique Ability Teamwork and invest in each other’s growth. We regularly do The Positive Focus, provide opportunities for goal setting and training, celebrate birthdays and babies, have fun company meetings, and give appreciation awards when people go above and beyond.

And yet for all that, for a time we still had one major challenge—we were too nice. We didn’t have the tools or context to address problems and issues head on, which meant people would start to do work-arounds and bypasses, both of which hamper productivity and are just plain inefficient. Or, people simply wouldn’t speak up because they didn’t want to upset anyone.

We needed a way to work with one another that would help us tackle challenging issues in a supportive way that would elevate our teamwork, not tear it down.

Thanks to a client’s recommendation, we found it in Collaborative Way. It allows us to Listen Generously with fewer filters (after all, it’s progress, not perfection we’re after!), Speak Straight, do Clean Ups with one another, be better at meeting our commitments and helping others meet theirs, and give meaningful appreciation. It’s deepened our relationships, helped us navigate tricky interpersonal situations, and sped up our teamwork.

One of the unexpected by-products is that people are also taking what they’ve learned home, transforming their personal relationships at the same time they transform their professional ones.