This is the week that we celebrate America’s birthday and her Independence. This is a special holiday for me because I am such an advocate for freedom – to go and do what your God-given talents are, to be all that you can be. We do this with fun in the sun, barbecues, picnics, boating and some sporting events. As an entrepreneur, the freedom to explore opportunities, to go out and create, shows what this great country is about and is symbolic with our flag and this day. I want to wish this county a Happy Birthday and give a special thanks to all those who we have lost and to the families that have lost loved ones to keep us free, now and over our history!

Great things come from great leadership, as we have experienced over this country’s history. Leaders are key in companies, as well, and things that make them great are not always what we would think. Leaders don’t have to know everything. Check out this video that Daniel Marcos from the Growth Institute sent me. It features Chairman Anne Mulcahy from Xerox discussing qualities of leadership.

Anne Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox

Mulcahy discusses how leaders don’t have to have all the answers and don’t have to be the ones doing all the thinking. When you act like you have all the answers, you lose credibility very quickly. Leaders build teams that have answers, and they are not afraid to ask and receive from their teams. A key aspect of a good leader is one who makes building a good team a top priority. You need a team that possesses the right people, with the respective strengths necessary to move your company or organization forward. Mulcahy also talks about being humble, by not being afraid to say you don’t know or that you made a mistake.

Enjoy your “Freedom Holiday” and my wishes for you to have a safe and enjoyable time with family and friends!

One of the things about running a company is we get caught up in the issues that pop up daily. This, at times, blinds us to what is going on out in our business sphere – new technologies, new methods and to future opportunities. In my experience, this happens with everyone and none of us are immune. How to best deal with this is to get a coach and get help envisioning what you could achieve, but because of the constraints of our surroundings, we don’t.

The best of the best have a coach. Tiger Woods has one, Peyton Manning has one, and even the big business CEOs have one. I have written a post about the coaches to the business icons before. Why would it not serve us to have one also? At Efficience, we are pulling in a coach to help us with sales management. As I shared when I was at the EO Nerve conference recently, I saw Jack Daly’s high octane, intense and funny presentation on sales management. He said, “If you are a small- to mid-size business and you don’t have a sales manager, you will stay a small- to mid-sized company, or you will go out of business!”

An option, if you are not ready to make the leap to hiring a sales manager, is to hire a coach that will make sure you have the right processes in place and will coach your sales person or team to help get you to the level of hiring a sales manager. We have been able to get by without a formal sales process, but it does catch up with you. We are putting the position in place to make sure that we are getting what we need to maximize our value proposition and sales team to reach their potential.

I have worked with my personnel success coach, Steve D’Annuizo, for a number of years to have the highest version of who I am showing up more often than not. Steve has helped me with many facets of my life, from my spiritual and personal growth, to my business growth. One of the keys I realized from working with him is that happiness comes from within, not from what you have accumulated, what or where you have been, or what you have done. Steve came to me when I was having great business success and achieving all that I had dreamed of, but I didn’t feel a sense of completeness.

I recently received from my dad this quote that says, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time,” by Thomas A. Edison. I have found that a really good coach can give you the encouragement that, when it all seems bleak and you feel like giving up, will give you the right words and a gentle nudge to move you to get up and put the game face back on and keep going. As I have learned, any success I have had didn’t come the first, second, or tenth time. It happened because I didn’t stop!

Do you have a coach to help you break out or break down the right things to get you where you want to go?

As I come back from an EO Insignia and Quantum Leap conference in Park City, Utah, I carry with me some great experiences. This conference brings all the segregated forums together to have time to interact with each other and gain a personalized approach to the EO experience. Insignia is for people with 7 years or more in EO, and Quantum Leap is for those with $15-million or more in revenue. We get time with the large group as well as with our own forum, which includes a coach to take us through exercises.

Our coach, Phil Kristianson, incorporated some adjustments and tools worth sharing. One, the Wheel of Life, allows you to look at the key areas of your life and rate them by how satisfied you are with that area. These include family, significant other, health, career, finances, relationships, spirituality, and adventure or fun. See the form here and print it out and try it for yourself.

When you fill this out, you see the areas where you are lacking fulfillment in life and where you are fulfilled. With that awareness and some introspection, you can create goals based around the areas you should be focusing on in order to better your life. If you go around the circle and find it to be up and down like a roller coaster, your life may not be as balanced as you may optimally like. Thus, an effort can be made to balance it out.

These types of exercises help us to understand one another in the forum. We get to know each other and our areas of strength or weakness, so we can share experiences and changes to help one another in those areas. This is a key aspect of forum: to get help and see if you are being real with where you are and how you are getting where you are going.

How balanced are the areas of your life? Do you have a peer or peer group helping you strive to improve?

In previous blogs, I have shared my admiration for Robin Sharma, best-selling author and business coach, and when I viewed some of the mostly highly watched videos from him, I wanted to share one that most resonated with me. The video “How Remarkable Entrepreneurs Build Winning Teams” had a great message and had accumulated almost 18,000 views.

I have been working for years to build a great team, and I am excited about the one that is in place today! We have gone through different team members, and it seemed to be an evolution on the talent that we were attracting. Today, the team is full of highly skilled and dedicated people that want to give their all to make the company improve and grow.

Here are the 5 things entrepreneurs do to build a winning team:

1) Appreciation – show appreciation and give praise. A gallop study said that the #1 reason companies lose talent is that employees don’t feel appreciated. I am thankful for my team and could do more to share that with them.

2) Belonging – create a sense of belonging. People like to feel like they belong to a special community. Our team just seems to like each other by the way they joke and laugh so often.

3) Develop Your People – grow their talents, challenge them to be better, and take them where they want to go. Mentor and help them be better. We ask them weekly what they have learned, and we pay for educational programs for our team.

4) Celebrate Your Team – celebrate the big things but also the little things that happen along the way. We have had little celebrations such as going to lunch together and even a coupon book that can save over a $1,000 to local retailers. We could do more to celebrate our team and will work on this.

5) Communicate a Compelling Purpose – share a common goal and passion. People like to feel like they are making a difference. Here at Efficience, we believe that there is a better way to leverage technology in your business. We are passionate about creating life-improving solutions, such as more affordable mobile apps for small businesses, so they can connect with their customers and grow their business.

I know I could do more and I will work harder in these areas. What are you doing to help your team to be the winners you know they can be?

Last week I talked about how nature and group activities inspire creative thinking.  I also talked about my EO Forum’s zip line experience and how it builds a connection between people to help them know and understand each other on a higher level.  A lot of people seem to think these kinds of team building exercises are a waste of time and don’t help, but I disagree.  Although they may not always provide you the level of results you are seeking, I do think they help move you in that direction.  Bestselling author and business coach Marshall Goldsmith recently sent me a paper on how to do team building more effectively, without wasting time.

Marshall says that focused feedback and follow up are the keys to successful team building.  He has a 14 step process that alone is fairly simple to implement, but it’s the follow up that requires determination to make it successful.  I will share the first 7 steps below:

STEP ONE.  You ask two questions, the first being, “On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being best) how well are we doing in terms of working together as a team?”  The second question is “On the same scale, how well do we need to be doing in terms of working together as a team?”

STEP TWO.  Calculate your results to define the gap between where you are and where your team believes you should be.     

STEP THREE.  Now ask everyone on the team to write down 2 key behaviors, broad spectrum across the team, that they believe would help close the gap.  Record each person’s response on a flip chart. 

STEP FOUR. Eliminate the duplicates and prioritize the rest to determine the two most important behaviors that all team members will work to change.

STEP FIVE.  Next, the team will disperse into one-on-one groups, spending 5 minutes with each person on the team.  During the 5 minutes, they will each make a suggestion to the other of 2 personal behavioral changes that they think that person could make to help the team as a whole.

STEP SIX.  After everyone has met, each team member will pick two of their suggested areas for improvement and behavior change that seem the most important, and then they will share them with the rest of the team.

STEP SEVEN: Team members are encouraged to get 5 minute progress reports from all the other team members to show that they are making progress on their two behavior choices.  Suggestions may occur where behavior doesn’t match desired expectations.

The remaining steps are on the follow through and maintaining feedback that is useful to both the individual’s and the team’s progress.  You can find all of the steps in Coaching for Leadership:  How the World’s Greatest Coaches Help Leaders Learn.  It exhibits how this process will identify the gaps and give your group the needed direction in areas that need improvement.  With the monthly reviews, the feedback keeps the team focused on getting better, both individually and as a team.

Many of us out there hold a strong aversion and distaste for meetings. You have heard it before, or possibly even said it yourself: “We do nothing but have meetings around here, so how am I to get any work done?” Why do we have such negative feelings in regards to getting a group of people together to discuss issues and create solutions to move forward?

I believe strongly in the power of the group and think it is vital to bring people together to create the best ideas. If you have read this blog for any amount of time, you have seen me discuss my belief in collective intelligence, an ideal I trust in so much that I even started a mutual fund managed around the philosophy.

When you imagine a good idea occurring, what do you envision? Do you see Einstein with his crazy hair looking up into the sky with a light bulb going off? Do you visualize the lonely scientist looking into a microscope, and then Eureka . . . It happens?

I read about a study in Steve Johnson’s book “Where Good Ideas Come From / The Natural History of Innovation” and was not surprised to find it shows that good ideas happen not in these moments of individual discovery but when a group of people are sitting around a table sharing ideas. I said to myself, “Holy moly Batman! Now I have real evidence to support my gut!”

Psychologist Kevin Dunbar actually set up cameras to watch a research group of scientists work in the early 1990s. His team transcribed all the interactions and tracked the flow of information. Dunbar discovered the physical location where the most important breakthroughs occurred — the MEETING ROOM!

They found the group interactions helped reconceptualize the problem. In his book, Johnson explains, “questions from colleagues forced researchers to think about their experiments on a different scale or level.” Group interactions allowed the more surprising finds to be questioned rather than dismissed, and this led to better ideas and breakthroughs.

So there we have it! Those all day quarterly meetings we have in order to focus, strategize, and plan along with our two day off-site annual meeting have purpose! This can also be said for any other meeting where you need important decisions made or　great ideas from your team. If for some reason the team has doubts, get the book! It is a great piece of evidence.

What an interesting week!  Last week, I traveled to New York City to participate in the Entrepreneurs’ Organization Injected Campus event, which brings the regional EO Forums together.  We met in lower Manhattan to be close to the New York Stock Exchange.

This year during our event, the NYSE opening bell was rung by InvenSense, a company that makes the motion possible in the Wii and in smartphones.  InvenSense was launching their IPO and was going public.  I had always wanted to be there in person to see the opening bell, but it also made me think of my own dream of being up there to ring the bell with the IPO launch of my own company.  That evening, it felt a little closer as my friends on the Global EO Board got to be on stage and ring the closing bell!  WOW!  Click here to see the video I took of the opening bell.

Along with going to the Stock Exchange, we enjoyed a wonderful evening dining and socializing at the Harvard Club in Times Square.  We also heard from three great speakers and spent time with EO members that have really invested time and resources into the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, thus getting a lot in return.  This entire event was extra special! 

Matthew Kelly spoke to us at the NYSE for one of the events.  He does business consulting and wrote the book The Dream Manager.”  His talk resonated deeply with me, so I wanted to share it with you.  Matthew told a story about one time when he was playing golf.  One of the guys he was playing with seemed really down, and when Matthew asked him about it, he mentioned he was having business problems.  After digging, Matthew finally got him to reveal that he has a janitorial company with more than 400% turnover.  This man was spending all his time hiring people and had no time to work on business strategy.

Matthew inquired, “Have you asked the employees what is the problem?”  The man had not and wondered if they would even know, so Matthew said, “Let’s find out.”  They conducted a survey and realized that transportation was the main problem.  They decided to get buses to help the employees, and the business changed significantly.  The turnover rate dropped to just over 200%, so they did the survey again.  This time, they discovered the employees had dreams and desires.  They decided if the employees were helped to realize these dreams, then their respect and loyalty to the company would grow.

They hired a full time dream manager to discuss dreams with the employees.  The dream manager assisted them in creating plans and processes to put them on the path to realizing their small near-term dreams, such as purchasing a laptop or planning a vacation.  Additionally, He helped them work towards their long term dreams of buying a house or getting the proper education toward a new career. 

This approach resonated with me because I am of the type that is always strategizing about working towards the things that make the future better.  I have often asked my team what it is that they are working for and want to have in their lives as they increase their incomes.  It is astounding how the culture of a company can change and how your employees’ perception and loyalty toward their employer improves!

I am working toward my dream of building a company that can go IPO.  What are you doing to invest in the lives and dreams of those around you?