Our hope with this blog series is to allow you an inside look into the thought process and voices of support team so you can better understand and communicate with yours.
In our last two blogs in this series, we shared what team members had to say about what their biggest joy in their job was and what their biggest frustration working for an entrepreneur was. In this final blog of this series, we are sharing what team answered to the question “If you could change one thing in your business, what would it be?” We hope you see, in these responses, what valuable insight your team has.
Team members who are intrapreneurs, team members who feel, act and are committed to a business as if it were their own, though they have no financial ownership of it, will help a business owner see their blind spots. Together, your insight and perspective can invite powerful change in your business.
If You Could Change One Thing In Your Business, What Would It Be?
1. More dedicated focus. We always have a backlog of cases/files to tend to. The person that is supposed to support me keeps getting pulled off of helping me “clean up” backlog. It is never-ending because the focus is always trumped by the emergency of the day.
2. My boss wants to grow and wants to keep pulling me into marketing and I can’t get my “work” done. We don’t have the infrastructure and capacity to grow so we are stuck in this fanatical cycle. If we could stop for a moment and put some intentionality behind what we are doing, we could go such much further without all the pain and panic.
3. Eliminate the fear of success. Right now we can’t handle any new business. We don’t have the right team in place and systems in place to grow and we are crippling ourselves.
4. If they would just get out of my way, I can do my job and help them grow.
5. Detox the program junky. He will travel around the country to get the new shiny system/product to “help” us get more (insert the key word: organized/more money/systems). It would make my year if there was a way that I could “unplug” my boss from buying any new system and just do nothing but implement what we have and commit to one thing. (EVERYONE on the group said “here, here” and agreed to this.)
6. A way to get my boss to focus and delegate more because he is a perfectionist. He constantly changes everything before we even try it the first time.
7. My boss is very, very creative and very smart but every time something gets back on his desk for the final stamp of approval he will recreate—always wants to recreate—maybe fear of the failure or fear of success and never can pull the trigger to put anything out there.
8. We never finish anything before we really try it in our marketplace or internally before we change it again.
9. Get the little nonsense things out of the way so the new stuff can blossom, keep life simple. It doesn’t have to be this difficult.
10. I would love a constant alignment on the priorities of the business. The business owner and team priorities never match up which is a shame because we have a common goal.
11. Meaningful priority alignment. Days, weeks, months go by before we ever get back to a meaningful priority alignment, so we just react to whatever is thrown at us day in and day out.
12. Stop the “Meeting Amnesia” – we meeting to death and everyone leaves excited but then nobody ever remembers what we met about and nothing ever gets implemented.
13. Stop stepping over the constant “little” things that pop up and not addressing them until they are a big issue. Then we have to drop everything and recreate to tend to these emergencies.
14. Stop always playing catching up!!!
15. Stop operating by the amount of fires we have to put out “right now”.
16. Stop having to always have to chase/ride my boss because we never have time to meet.
17. Outsource the stuff we are not good at and eating the entrepreneurs’ time, teams’ time, creating unnecessary stress that ends in breaking promises.
If you have a team that is empowered to be honest, while respectful, with you we challenge you to ask your team this question, and listen, really listen to the commitment in their answers.
If you have a team you want to be honest, while respectful, with you about what isn’t working in your business consider enrolling them in the Don’t Be a Yes Chick tele-training series to participate in conversations such as these. Next series begins September 4th – contact info@yeschick.com to register or with questions.
