3 Leadership Strategies for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, do you ever ask yourself this question: “How can I get all of this done?”

1. Take a timeout.
If you have kids, you’ve probably seen them get possessed by their emotions and you’ve put them in a “timeout.” You want them to think about their actions. You need to do the same thing with your timeout.

It could be a series of evenings, a weekend getaway, or even a short vacation. Use it to catalog everything you do in your small business. You can organize this on your computer or with a series of Post-it notes on a white board or wall.

Be thorough and include everything. For some bigger operations, you’ll start thinking in terms of an organizational chart and responsibilities at this point.

Once you complete this step, you can visualize your workload, and the next step is starting to offload some of it.

2. Bring in the replacements.
If you have a group of employees already, are there any who can start taking over some of the tasks you’ve made yourself responsible for over the years?

This is also the time to consider freelancers, virtual employees as well as software services. The more you can automate tasks, the better.

Start with aspects of your job that you think can be easily accomplished by someone else, if a quick “victory” will feed your enthusiasm and give you energy to continue. Alternatively, you might want to spend time off-loading your biggest burdens first to see a difference sooner.

3. See yourself differently.
A writer friend of mine was once hired by a catalog company to fill in for the president while she was on medical leave. Previously, the president did all of the writing and much of the merchandising. When the president came back after her medical leave, the day-to-day tasks she had been doing were being done by others and she couldn’t adjust to the new situation. She eventually left and although she never realized it, a central and vital “vision” left with her.

Once you have others handling the tasks necessary to keep the business rolling, you need to see yourself as the leader with a different job description. You need to inspire your team, enable employees to do their jobs better, keep growing professionally, as well as discover new business opportunities and cost savings. You can’t walk away from your small business, but you have to see yourself as addressing a new slate of challenges.

There are, of course, many critical details involved when you start handing off your areas of responsibility to others. The people need to be right, the training adequate, the authority given and the instructions clear. But without the all-important first step of removing yourself from the chaos so you can get clarity, you can never enjoy the success you deserve.

Must Have Gadgets for the CEOs

“What is a James Bond 007 without his Bond girls and suave gadgets? And, what is a chief executive officer without his gadgets that make a style statement?”

The CEOs and gadgets go hand in hand given the technological development and its dependence to manage business.

The amount and type of gadgets owned by chief executive officers might vary from one industry to another, as well as by the number of business trips they have to take.

Business travel isn’t all about work, it’s also about waiting either at the airports or at the hotels or even at the conference halls and in transit.

But more than ever, loads of gadgets and new technologies can equip CEOs to deal with nearly every contingency, be it personal or business.

With all the tech firepower available, from smart phones to software to LCD projectors that can pinpoint a complex sales pattern that’s otherwise imperceptible, there are fewer excuses for being less than pitch-perfect in business.

These gadgets help CEOs understand the power of getting closer to customers, keeping their fingers on the pulse of their culture, looking at new market opportunities, getting quick feedback to know what is working and being able to adapt when it is not.

Here is a list of a few gadgets that we call it as the “Must – Have Gadgets” of a CEO:

Smart Televisions

Make presentations on a larger and slimmer screen, Video Conference with your clients across continents using Skype, watch market news, all on one smart television screen that is internet enabled. With the markets being flooded with Smart TVs of various brands, all you need to do is enable net and with a Skype kit and you are good to go.

Laptops

Though there are dozens of laptops hitting the stores continuously but the elite still prefer iMacs to make a style statement. Other than a mac book there are brands like IBM, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Samsung and others which are being sought after.

Tablets

The tablets have become a mix of a telephone and a laptop and are easy to carry which means people prefer to use the 7-inch slates with wi-fi and 3G to check mails and make phone calls whether they are inside their comfortable air conditioned cabins or on the move.

Though there are many tablets flooding the market, iPad still rules the roost. It’s incredibly thin and light yet has a superfast dual core A5 chip and a battery that lasts 10 hours. Over 200 new software features in iOS 5 and it works with iCloud, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices.

Among android based tablets Samsung is ahead of everybody else. Powered by the latest Android 4.0 , Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 connects you with your friends with the convenience of Voice Calling or chat with pre loaded messenger Chat On!

While the iPad and Android based tablets are the most preferred, Windows based tablets are also not far behind them and are promising to make a dent in the leaders market pie soon.

Smart Phones

Think of smart phones and the two brands that come to our minds are Apple’s iphone and Blackberry. Even though iPhone 4S makes a style statement and has a lot to offer, Blackberry stands synonymous for its safety and reliability. And of course there are phones loaded with features from Samsung, Nokia, Motorola and other brands.

“Mobiles are no longer a check-off item. Now it’s, how do we use mobile technology for business value?” said Mobiquity CEO Bill Seibel.

These smart phones not only help one send and receive mails instantly, send texts, make conference calls, video chat but also manage to store hundreds of songs and office data too. With the availability of thousands of apps one can keep a tab on their calories intake, read and watch news or even switch on the air conditioner at home from your work place.

Swiss Watches

When you think of luxury watches, which a CEO wears, chances are you will be thinking of a Swiss brand.

A look at the top luxury brands which are most sought after by the chief executives reveal their cool quotient- Tag Heuer, Maurice Lacroix, Breitling, Omega, Rolex and Patek Philippe.

All these tech toys add confidence; complete the style statement and coolness quotient of the top executive officers apart from the work that speaks for them.

Business Transformation Services

Want to grow and expand but do not know how

•Feel stuck / confused in the business

•Business has been flat for some years

•Unable to control manpower, costs

•Do not get information at the right time

•Systems are unorganized

•Expectations are not delivered by team

If you are facing the above challenges, you need Business Transformation

The Retail market is dynamic, and market trends change rapidly. In this ever-changing environment, retailers must have complete insight into their business. They should be holding a greater control over their entire internal functions as well as their external supply chain.

The secret formula for all successful Retailers across the world has been a combination of Successful Productizing, Successful Customer Relationship management | Successful Promotions and Marketing |Successful HR Systems | Successful Sourcing Management | Right Information Technology

Retail Business Typical Performance Indicators

• Achievement of Sales Targets / Budgets

• Achievement of Break Even / Profitability

• Space Utilization and visibility of Products

• Walk-ins Assessment

• Conversion Rate Management (Rate at which a walk in is converted to a sale)

• Average Bill Value per Walk in / Customer

• Billing Service Time

• Inventory & Pilferage Control

• Stock Holding & Rotation

• Vendor and Supply Chain Management

• Brand value and Customer Satisfaction

• Performance Management System (Incentives Management)

• Training & Development of Staffs

• Multi Locational Control

Align Associate’s solution

Business Strategy:

• Mission Establishment

• Business Planning (Financial & Operational)

People Engagement:

• Organization Structuring (Define Role Clarity,KRA, KPI)

• Goal setting for all the levels of organization

• Appraisal and Variable Pay-scale System

Process Streamlining

• Inventory Systems Cleanup

• HR Policies & Procedures Streamlining

• Finance & Accounts Systems Streamlining

• Sales, Outlet Management Streamlining

• Purchase Systems Streamlining

Management Monitoring

• MIS Implementation

• Monthly Monitoring Meeting Set Up

• Coach Mentor / Owners / CEO / CXO in business Management

We can provide the above solution at a rapid pace, long term in a facilitative approach.Further, our team have the expertise to bring change right from the lowest level employees working very closely with them and thereby elicit excellent response. Align Associate consulting with wealth of experience (135000 hours) have perfected an engagement model to transform your Retail business to best in class in the world. We have mastered the various approaches below to make our engagement model successful.

Best Practice Advisory | Coaching & Benchmarking | Knowledge Sharing | Coaching | Building Management Frameworks | Process Re-engineering | Technology alignment | ERP implementation | Facilitation Sessions | Strategy Support |Research Support | Workshops | Brainstorming sessions | Design Review systems

Collaborating in the Cloud

Unlike newspapers and televisions, collaboration on cloud has democratised information dissemination and enables ordinary users to become creators!

Sometime in the year 2000, John Gage of SUN Microsystems came up with this monumental phrase: “the network is the computer”. When I heard it for the first time, I didn’t get it. How can a connecting device be compared to a programmable device?

What he actually meant was the computer can realise its true potential only when it is connected to a network. Just like a telephone connected via a telephone line. A telephone means nothing without the telephone line. Today, the same is true for the computer. The network, that is, the Internet gives meaning to the computer. A number of services we use today such mailing, chatting, blogging, tweeting and document editing rely on the Internet. These are popularly called as cloud services.

These services were earlier part of the computer itself. To use them, you had to install them in your computer. From the user standpoint, this might be more convenient than accessing them via the Internet. You don’t need Internet connectivity and it will also be faster to assess this software on your computer. Then, how did users accept cloud services in the first place?

Clayton Christensen, in his book “Innovator’s dilemma”, explains this phenomenon through “solar energy”. He explains why alternative energy like solar power is struggling to succeed, even though big companies are spending billions of dollars on research. Even though solar energy is cheaper and greener, it can never be as reliable as fuel energy (thanks to rainy days). So, people who are used to the reliability of power generation stations and fuel energy will not accept solar power in advanced markets such as the United States.

On the other hand, solar panel TVs (stuck on glass instead of silicon) sell like hot cakes in Mongolia, because half of Mongolia’s population has no access to electricity. They don’t mind if they couldn’t watch TV on a rainy day, because watching TV itself is a bonus. In other words, when a new technology does something that was not possible earlier, it will succeed, even if it is inferior to the existing technology in some other criteria like reliability.

Similarly, Cloud might be less reliable than installed software, because it needs the Internet to work. But it enables something that was not possible earlier – Collaboration. It will be difficult for Google docs to compete with mature software like Microsoft Word on feature richness. Instead, it enables something that was not possible in Microsoft Word – collaborative document editing. Collaboration is not just a feature of cloud. It is the differentiator that completes the prophecy: “the network is the computer”.

Collaboration on cloud – Who? & How? Who collaborates on cloud?

Cloud is used by two broad categories of people – consumers and the enterprises. Consumers use cloud to collaborate with other consumers, that is, with their social network. Enterprises use cloud to collaborate with employees and partners who are related to that enterprise.

How do they collaborate on cloud?

Both consumers and enterprises collaborate on the cloud as creators or as users.

• User-to-user collaboration is similar to traditional communication channels like telephones, that they communicate in the same capacity.

• Creator-to-user collaboration is similar to broadcast channels like newspapers and TV. It enables creators to have one-to-many communication with users and puts them above users.

However, unlike newspapers and televisions, collaboration on cloud has democratised information dissemination and enables ordinary users to become creators. You don’t have to be a superstar to be able to broadcast information. The new media revolutions like the recent Lokpal campaign and Egypt revolution are a standing example of consumer collaboration, where ordinary citizens have become broadcasters of an idea.

On the enterprise side, collaboration is taking democratisation to a new level. In most enterprises, the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months.

• Google Forms has made this process of creating web forms simple enough for ordinary users. Now if the marketing department wants to put together a form and get an opinion about a market idea from their employees and partners, they can do it themselves in a matter of minutes.

• Similarly, Orange Scape allows process owners to build processes themselves and publish it to their department users. You don’t need sophisticated tools and infrastructure to do this anymore.

This creator-user collaboration is bound to explode and liberate users to experience the full benefit of technology on the cloud.

Utility value of collaboration

In 1980, Robert Metcalfe proposed Metcalfe’s law which states that the value of a network is proportional to the number of connected users of the system. For example, a single telephone is useless. Two telephones are useful only for each other. But the value of every telephone increases with the total number of telephone in the network, because the total number of people with whom each person can talk increases. Every collaboration network works as the telephone network described above. The greater the number of users with the service, the more valuable the service becomes to the community. Deriving from Metcalfe’s Law, every new “friend” accepted or added on these social networking sites makes the user’s profile ever more valuable in terms of the law.

An interesting corollary of this law is that the cost of the network decreases as the number of users in the network increases. When we have two users on the telephone network, the cost of the network has to be shared be those two people. But when it is used by millions of people the cost of network is shared by millions of people. This increasing utility value, but decreasing cost of collaboration, is the characteristic that makes cloud a sustainable business model. It has also given birth to the free and freemium business models that were never possible earlier.

Network effect – the vendor’s honey trap

Google and Microsoft struggling to create a social networking service that can rival Facebook and Twitter is no accident. Once a service achieves mass adoption, it is difficult to beat that service by feature-set. Today, even if Google or Microsoft comes up with a better social networking service, it will be an uphill task to convert a Facebook user to a Google+ user, since all the users’ friends and collaboration history will remain in Facebook. Think about having to reconnect with all your professional contacts in LinkedIn in another professional networking site. That’s the reason for the huge valuation of LinkedIn and Facebook.

Thus, collaboration creates a natural stickiness even without user’s realisation. This can create a huge entry barrier for other vendors to enter the market. But, this is the key for cloud Service Company’s future. Companies such as Google and Sales force are trying to offer Google+ and Chatter as a collaboration add-on with their existing cloud services for the same reason. And it will be interesting to watch which honey trap will attract the maximum number of consumers!

How to make Performance Appraisals Work

“It is one meeting both the employee and the manager dread equally – the performance appraisal. Arvind Suri gets into the details how an objective performance appraisal should be and what are the pitfalls one need to avoid…”

There are always two sides to a performance appraisal:

For the employee:

As an employee, I want to know how I am doing. What do I well and what do I need to work on? How does my work fit in with the organization’s goals, and what are the plans for my future? This process should engage me. By providing criticism or praise, summarizing my progress towards the goals, and assessing individual growth, my role in the organisation is clarified.

For the appraiser:

As a manager, I want to know where my resources stand, how my team is performing with respect to the set standards so that I am able to make sensible staffing decisions regarding promotions, raises, transfers and terminations. I use performance reviews as a health check for my organisation—how are we performing when compared to the rest of the department or company? As a group, did we value-add to the company? How might we be better utilized in the coming year?

But more often that not, these two sides do not coexist in an appraisal. The need of the hour is to make the exercise meaningful for both. A performance appraisal is rated good only when the required Key Result Areas ( KRAs) are set at start of the year and also mutually agreed between the appraiser and the employee. Each KRA should be given a weightage for evaluation at the end of the year. The performance appraisal should be should be a structured, semi – formal meeting which needs prior preparation by the appraiser as well as the employee for it to be effective. It also should involve objective discussions on the set KRA’s and focus on the future performance, potential and improvements of the individual.

Following are some points that need to be prepared before the review meeting of Performance appraisal:

1. Sufficient time should be provided for both the appraiser and employee to prepare the observations and comments about the performance of the employee for that particular year. This document should be shared with each other before the meeting. So that both the parties can be ready with their observations. Arvind Suri

2. The discussion should be objective and not subjective and observation of each other’s should be exchanged and discussed. The discussion should evolve around the performance throughout the year and it is the responsibility of the appraiser to anchor the discussion towards a meaningful and measurable outcome.

3. It is imperative that achievement of each KRA should be discussed and analysed on the outcomes. Positive and negative opinion about the document prepared by each other should be discussed and consent shall be made.

4. The appraiser should avoid the following:

a. Recency effect – The appraiser should not judge the appraise with his/her recent performance

b. Halo Effect – The appraiser should not judge the performance of the appraise with just a single incident or achievement

c. Central Tendency effect – It is a general tendency of the appraiser to rate the appraise on the middle level instead of too good or too bad.

5. The employee should avoid the following

a. To speak about the compensation or the materialistic outcome

b. Confronting or defending mode to the feedback of the appraiser

c. Predetermined mind set

6. The employee and the appraiser should be prepared to discuss and figure out the future aspirations of the employee. The appraisal discussion is not only based on the past performance but also on the future aspiration of the employee and his/ her career pathing. The appraiser should be in a position to chart out a clear long term plan for the employee.

7. The training needs identification should also be an integral part of the appraisal discussion. The apt training required for the employee to take up the higher responsibilities should be identified. This should eventually result in developing a individual development plan.

8. The appraisal should end in meaningful conclusion where the rating of the appraise should be clearly identified communicated and accepted by both the parties.

It is always possible that the appraisal discussion may end without consensus made. It is the duty of the appraiser to give more opportunity to the employee to voice out his/her own opinion or concern to the higher authority.

The appraisal discussion should end with setting up the KRA for the next year. Though many companies sport this annual appraisal system, it would make sense to have a more regular performance management system in place so as to follow effort immediately with a reward and inappropriate behavior with corrective feedback in time.

Best practices for Performance Management

1) Set self-reporting quantitative measures in place. Link the MIS directly to the review/reward mechanism on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

2) Evaluate every project. Every finished report,presentation, or project should be graded.

3) Make observation a part of the manager’s routine. Set up a weekly process to record an entry (good or bad) about the employee.Towards the end of the year, this report will show a pattern of behavior that is unbiased towards any recent happenings.

4) Goals should be flexible. Link the measure directly to the strategy. Any change in the marketing, technical, or Quality assurance directions should automatically trigger a review of the employee’s set performance goals.

Why Should I Question?

This article tells us why it makes sense to ask the right questions to lead the right way...

‘Bhoruka Steel does it again: It has once again broken its own record and tapped the heat in 55 minutes flat.’ I still remember this ad released by a Bhoruka supplier during the eighties not just because I was working for Bhorukas then but because of the precious lessons I learnt during my initial years of my career there. The most significant one came from the then production head, N R Pai. Every record the melters made is it tapping the heats in record time (heat is the time taken from loading the furnace with raw materials to the time of tapping the liquid metal into the ladle) or reducing the consumption of power or materials, it can be attributed to the leadership of Pai. His style was simple –he had a way of asking questions in a very non-threatening style – to bring out the seemingly irrelevant data, to trigger thinking and to induce learning.

Why and How Leadership:

Bold red-inked ‘why’s marked by Pai in the previous day’s log book would form the basis for most discussions during his meetings. His daily meetings with the shift managers (who took pride in calling themselves melters) would happen during the overlap time of the first and seconds shift. Although night shift in-charges were exempted from the meeting, most often they would find their way to it, not minding their weariness. Pai would swing his whys and hows between metallurgists and melters and thus melding theory and practice. Whys helped in identifying the cause for deviations and bring them into control so that the set standards were always met. When melters performed better than the standards or broke the old records, Pai never forgot to pat their backs. But he did not stop there – he translated the new record into a new learning by asking a series of hows. The learning helped others to replicate the new record and the new record became a new standard.

Leading With Questions

My early lessons on ‘leadership by questioning’ were reinforced when I happened to read the book ‘Leading with Questions’ by Michael Marquardt, an internationally noted educator and consultant. Here are a few things I got from the book:

Leadership is not about knowing all the answers. It’s about knowing what great questions to ask, and carefully listening to those answers. Leadership is about asking great questions – questions that inspire, motivate and empower the organisation. Astute leaders use questions to encourage full participation in teamwork, to spur innovation and outside-the-box thinking, to empower others, to build relationships with customers, to solve problems, and more. Questions wake people up. They prompt new ideas. They show people new places, new ways of doing things. They help us admit that we don’t know all the answers. They help us become more confident communicators.

LWQ provides a comprehensive foundation on ways to employ questions effectively when leading others. The book offers a variety of principles and strategies for asking questions as well as numerous stories on how leaders have used questions to attain organisational success and personal fulfilment.

From an early age, we are discouraged from asking questions, be it at home or school, as they are considered rude, inconsiderate or intrusive. As we ask fewer questions, we become ever less comfortable and competent in asking questions. When we become leaders, we feel that it is important for us to have the answers rather than questions. The failure to ask questions can lead to a distorted sense of reality.

Questioning Culture:

Leaders need to create a questioning climate where employees feel safe and able to trust the system and the people involved. Without this level of safety and comfort, people are generally unwilling to be vulnerable, and to be comfortable answering questions that might seem threatening. Leaders, through questions, can build a culture in which questions are welcomed, assumptions are challenged, and new ways to solve problems are explored. Questions establish an inquiring culture in organisations, and such an inquiry and culture builds a learning organisation.

Questions also build a culture of accountability. When we ask questions of others and invite them to search for answers with us, we’re not just sharing information, we are sharing responsibility. When responsibility is shared, ideas are shared, problems become shared – problems and not yours or mine anymore. Asking questions results in empowerment and shared ownership of results.

Six hallmarks of questioning culture:

When an organisation has a questioning culture, the people in it

• Are willing to admit, “I don’t know.”

• Go beyond allowing questions; they encourage questions.

• Are helped to develop the skills needed to ask questions in a positive way.

• Focus on asking empowering questions and avoid disempowering questions.

• Emphasize the process of asking questions and searching for answers rather than finding the “right” answers.

• Accept and reward risk taking.

Questions serve as the foundation for increasing individual, team, and organisational learning. Learning depends on curiosity and asking questions. Questions, especially challenging ones, cause us to think and to learn. When we open our eyes and minds to the perspective of others, we open ourselves to learning.

Questions encourage and enable individuals and groups to understand, to clarify, and to open up new avenues of exploration for solving problems. They provide new insights and ideas for strategic actions and potential paths for solutions. Questions and responses to those questions provide necessary and valuable information to solve problems faster and make better decisions.

Empowering Questions

A key for leaders in asking questions is contextual:“what do I want my question to accomplish?” One of the reasons that questions cause trouble is that we often ask questions that disempower others, that is, those questions that focus on the reasons why the person did not or cannot succeed, for example: Why are you behind schedule? Empowering questions, on the other hand, get people to think and allow them to discover their own answers, thus developing selfresponsibility and transference of ownership for the results. Empowering questions build positive attitudes and self-esteem. Empowering questions help develop alignment within teams and draw out the optimum performance from individual members and the team as a whole. They create a high-energy, high-trust environment and enable people to identify, clarify, and express their wants or needs. Such questions encourage people to take risks, nurture deep relationships, and dissolve resistance to change.

•How do you feel about the project thus far?

•How would you describe the way you want this project to turn out?

•Which of these objectives do you think will be easiest to accomplish? Which will be the most difficult?

Effective questions:

Effective questions are those that accomplish their purpose as well as build a positive relationship between the questioner and the questioned. There are many types of open ended questions:

Why questions. These are perhaps the most important types of open-ended questions for leaders to ask as these questions force everyone to go into deeper layers of cause and effect, and of purposes and assumptions. When asking why questions, the leaders should watch their tone of voice. The why question should indicate curiosity and the search for knowledge, and not anger or frustration.

Explorative questions, on the other hand, open up new avenues and insights and lead to new explorations: have you explored or thought of ?

Affective questions invite members to share feelings about an issue: How do you feel about leaving this job?

Reflective questions encourage more exploration and elaboration: You said there are difficulties with your manager; what do you think causes these difficulties?

Probing questions invite the person or group to go more deeply into a particular issue. Words such as describe, explain, clarify, elaborate, or expand get into more depth or breadth on a topic.

Fresh questions challenge basic assumptions: has this ever been tried?

Questions that create connections establish a systems perspective: What are the consequences of these actions?

Analytical questions examine causes and not just symptoms: Why has this happened?

Clarifying questions help free us from ambiguity, but such questions are sometimes difficult to ask: What specifically did you mean by that?

Building a Questioning Culture:

The goal for the inquiring leader is to change the corporate culture from one of telling to one of asking, to help everyone see and understand that questions need to become their primary communications tool. How can a leader develop a questioning culture? Here are some strategies that can build a powerful learning and questioning culture:

• Start at the top. The questioning culture must begin with the most senior leaders, who model the frequent use of good questions.

• Create an environment that enables the people to challenge the status quo, take risks, and ask more questions.

• Connect the values and processes of the organisation to the use of questions.

• Optimise the opportunities to ask questions by building questioning into every business activity, including formal and informal meetings, sales calls, and conferences with clients, or presentations.

• Report and appreciate questioners; promote risk-taking and tolerate mistakes.

• Provide training for people to be better at it and more comfortable in asking questions. Successful leaders go beyond asking questions; they work to create an environment in which everyone can ask and be asked questions. This means, first of all, that they focus on fostering a climate where employees still feel safe in asking questions and able to trust the system and the people involved.