I have known Shannon Byrne Susko for over a decade and in all that time she consistently has shown up with an amazing toolkit of solutions to help entrepreneurs increase their success—both revenue and profit growth. You can now access her amazing set of tools in her book The Metronome Effect: The Journey to Predictable Profit.
You stand up to present to your entire company. Together all of you moved through the challenges of the last year. After the polite applause died down, you press the forward button on your remote control. No one except you know for sure whether the ambitious goals that you and your senior team together came up with were achieved. Instead of showing financial numbers and progress against your goals, you show them a picture of the strip in Las Vegas. Cheering erupts in the room as everyone realizes that the each of them and their spouses are going to Las Vegas for three days to celebrate achieving those very goals you put in front of them a year ago.
In his book The Seven Things Your Team Needs to Hear You Say David Dye shows us what we say as well as how we say it has massive impact on ourselves and those we lead. David’s list is in close alignment with what I have written about here. Examples of his ideas include how we as leaders can be of service to those we lead (#4 How Can I Help?), treating everything in life as an experiment (#2 Try It), and by celebrating the wins (#7 Nice).
Every chapter of my book Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth ends with the section Take Action Now. Here are my actions to look after and engage with the people in your company.
Thirteen years ago, we sailed from Kos, Greece to Bodrum, Turkey. It was the last and shortest crossing between two countries of the two years that we lived and sailed in the Mediterranean. Our son Kevin was twelve as we sailed across the Aegean Sea. We have seen enormous change in Kevin over the intervening years as he met challenges, changed, and grew.