Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Cloud Computing Options for Small Business

by Guest Author Sonny Byrd, Head of Marketing at www.Shoeboxed.com

Cloud Computing has been a hot concept for years now, yet for all of its benefits and useful features, the cloud is largely underutilized by small businesses.  A recent study by Verio revealed that 72 percent of respondents said they know the same as, or even less than, they did last year about cloud computing solutions. 

Yet, if you take the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) [read: cloud computing] route to running your business, you will be able to access your important information any time, anywhere via the Internet.  And since your information is securely stored online (most SaaS providers use the same Internet security technology that banks and hospitals do) and not on your hard drive, if your computer gets lost, stolen or crashes, it will be more of a bummer than a disaster.  

If you switch to cloud computing, you can spend around $50 a month on the things you would otherwise pay accountants, bookkeepers, assistants and marketing professionals hundreds per hour to do.  And you’ll also save time along the way. 

Here's how it works for Bookkeeping, Financials and Tax Prep Solutions

Shoeboxed.com : With Shoeboxed, you mail your receipts and business cards to them and they will scan, data enter, review for accuracy and upload everything to your online account.  From there, you can track expenses, create expense reports, manage contact information and easily export data to Excel, Quickbooks, Quicken, PDF, CSV, FreshBooks, Outright.com and more.  And since their scanned receipts are accepted by the IRS, you can rest assured that you’ll be prepared should you ever get audited.  Plans start at just $9.95/mo., a bargain compared to the $15 per hour or more you would pay an assistant for the same work.

FreshBooks.com: FreshBooks makes client invoicing fast and easy.  FreshBooks allows you to create professional-quality invoices, track how much you’ve billed and how much is outstanding. If you need to bill a client for an expense, FreshBooks automatically snags the digitized receipt from Shoeboxed.  When invoices are paid, FreshBooks exports them to Outright.com where your income can be automatically tracked.  FreshBooks offers a free plan, and paid plans start at $19.95/mo.

Outright.com: With Outright.com, you can import expenses from Shoeboxed, paid invoices from FreshBooks, and other financials from sources like business credit cards and PayPal, allowing you to easily track your P&L and the overall progress of your business.  You can also automatically populate your Schedule C tax form at the end of the year and calculate the amount you owe for quarterly estimated taxes.  And one of the best features of Outright.com, it’s free.  Compare that to a CPA at $150/hr! 

Using Shoeboxed, FreshBooks and Outright.com together is like putting your business financials on autopilot.

Taking Flight

The services outlined above are a great place to get started.  And because these companies understand that not everyone is a cloud computing wiz, they have knowledgeable customer support representatives standing by to help walk you through using the services.  Chances are they’ve heard it all, so don’t be embarrassed to admit you’re having trouble.

Six ingredients to becoming an employer of choice.

Most people believe that what is apparent is important, but employers of choice recognize that what is not apparent is most important.

Here are the top six lessons learned by employers of choice about the important – but not always apparent – elements of the best places to work.

1.  What makes a company a great place to work? The short answer is: good managers.

2.  Most people have learned not to listen to what management says but to pay attention only to what is going on around them on a day-to-day basis.

3.  If you build your organization’s credibility, word-of-mouth will spread this reality, and new employees will come to you.

4.  Is your company the best place for the best people to work?  Senior executives in the “Most Admired Companies” (surveyed annually by the Hay Group [haygroup.com] for Fortune magazine [fortune.com]) believe in and use employee-based measurements to encourage cooperation and collaboration.

5.  All employees have quitting moments when they entertain thoughts of leaving.  One of the best ways to guard against employee disconnect is to implement a process of providing and receiving feedback to and from the employee.

6.  Employers of choice know that ordinary people don’t change that much, yet the power of a positive corporate culture can help them achieve extraordinary success.

For the complete "Turning Heads" article, go to: http://coachedtosuccess.com/coachthee/Archives/turningheads.html

When Things Go Wrong

Managing long-term, multimillion-dollar projects that involve dozens of people and several workgroups is a complex challenge, and things are bound to go wrong. How managers respond to problems has a direct and measurable impact on both the employees and the project.

Researchers Margaret Greenberg, president of The Greenberg Group, and Dana Arakawa, a program associate at the John Templeton Foundation, asked employees:

·    “When a problem crops up on my project, is my project manager able to help me come up with solutions?”

·    “What steps does your project manager take when such a problem arises?”

Here’s what they found:

·    Managers who maintain a positive perspective don't turn setbacks into catastrophes.

·    They don't fly off the handle; they control their emotions.

·    They recognize what's within their sphere of influence (and what's not).

·    They see and discuss the problem as an opportunity.

·    They provide a solution-oriented perspective.

Greenberg and Arakawa also discovered that managers who maintained a positive perspective when things went awry experienced greater project performance.

Managers who scored in the top quartile for positive perspective (as reported by their employees, not self-report) had significantly higher project performance than those in the bottom quartile.

Reflect on how you as a manager and leader can implement positive leadership by practicing these behaviors:

1.   Focus on and work with people's strengths.

2.   Improve the frequency with which you give praise and recognition.

3.   Respond with your best game face when the going gets rough.

 

The Problem-Seeking Mindset

It’s not enough to wait for performance reviews and project completion to deliver feedback. Praise must be frequent, ongoing and specific to current behaviors—not vague or general. 

Sadly, we’re predisposed to look for the negative: in ourselves, in others and for external events. We rarely scan our environment and ask:

·    “What’s working right now... and how can we do more of it?”

·    Instead, we look around and ask: “What’s broken—and how can we fix it?”

The problem-seeking mindset is one of the brain’s shortcomings, while also serving as a protective device to spare us from danger and making mistakes.

In Switch (2010), Dan and Chip Heath write about “finding the bright spots” in our work and lives. After extensive research, the two business school professors have documented how we’re wired to focus on bad over good.

It’s no wonder performance reviews and feedback are usually aimed at what’s not working.  Yet, some successful individuals can override this brain tendency and focus on the positive, at least enough to create successful relationships both at work and home.

John Gottman, a psychologist who studies marital conversations, finds that couples who sustain long-term marriages use language that reflects five times more positive statements than negative ones.  In fact, he calls this “the magic ratio” and claims it will accurately predict if a marriage will last. He urges managers to use a ratio of 5:1 positive statementsin conversations with employees.

 

 Chip Heath: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Taking a Strengths-Based Approach

There's a reason why managers’ focus on strengths and weaknesses is so important.

Most organizations are obsessed with fixing weaknesses. They conduct performance reviews, 360-degree assessments and the like to evaluate how well employees and managers are measuring up to predefined goals and competencies.

Managers are instructed to look at an employee’s assessed gap and coach for greater performance in areas of weakness.  But such assessments usually pay only cursory attention to an employee's strengths.  Performance reviews and subsequent remedial programs focus almost exclusively on weaknesses.

Focus on What Works

Too many managers assume that employees need to be good at many things, rather than excellent in the key areas.

Recent studies have firmly established that focusing on what works, followed by a program to scale it to greater levels, is a more practical and efficient approach to developing people and their performance.

Managers who take a strengths-based approach help employees identify strengths and align their talents with their work.  These managers don't ignore employee weaknesses, but fixing them isn't their primary focus.

Managers who focus on strengths enjoy superior team performance, as opposed to managers who focus on weaknesses.

Power of Positive Leadership

The No. 1 reason why most Americans leave their jobs is the feeling they’re not appreciated.

In fact, 65% of people surveyed said they received no recognition for good work last year, according to Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton, authors of How Full Is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life (2004).

According to Gallup research, what employees want most — along with competitive pay — is quality management.  When they feel unappreciated and disapprove of their managers, they leave or join the growing ranks of the disengaged.

3 Steps to Positive Leadership

In 2005, Jerry Krueger and Emily Killham shared the results of Gallup research that showed managers play a crucial role in employee well-being and engagement—but the research didn't study what managers specifically did to elicit positive responses.

That's why Margaret Greenberg, president of The Greenberg Group, and Dana Arakawa, a program associate at the John Templeton Foundation, put the theory of positive leadership to the test. They wanted to know if managers who apply positive leadership practices have teams with higher project performance and employee engagement.

As it turns out, positive managers practice three leadership behaviors:

1.    Use a strengths-based approach.

2.    Provide frequent recognition and encouragement.

3.    Maintain a positive perspective when difficulties arise.

None is an innate behavior, but all can be learned.

 Tom Rath: How Full Is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life

There are no secrets in business

Technological advances have often presented new threats to privacy.  In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.”

But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet.  Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site.  Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month.  There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites.  Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

Source: The New York Times Magazine, July 25, 2010

How do we manage deflation?

The old bogeyman of deflation has re-emerged as a worry for the U.S. economy.

Here's something else to fret about: After studying more than a decade of deflation in Japan, economists have slowly realized they have no idea how it works.

Deflation is usually associated with a Great Depression-like drop in demand.  Consumer prices, incomes and asset prices fall.  Interest rates go to zero, as low as they can go.  As prices and incomes fall, the cost to borrowers of servicing debt does not, sucking life out of the economy and pushing prices down further.  A bad situation, in short, gets worse.

In 1932, U.S. consumer prices fell 10% and between 1929 and 1933 they fell 27% in all.

But Japan's experience has looked nothing like this. Rather than being deep, destructive and concentrated in a few years, deflation has been a surprisingly mild, drawn-out affair. Consumer prices have been falling in Japan for 15 years, but never by more than 2% in any single year.  Japan's deflation has been a morass, but not the destructive downward spiral many economists predicted.  Why?  And what does it portend for the rest of the world today?

Economists don't have good answers.

"We don't know how deflation works," says Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee who has been studying Japan since 1997. "We don't have a way of rationalizing steady, several-year flat deflation," he says.

This is a pressing issue for the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2010

Who is being coached today?

Companies are investing in coaching in an effort to develop a new generation of leaders to replace retiring Baby Boomers.  The ones that use it most effectively develop specific performance goals, financial measurements or other tools to determine what they want the end result of their coaching program to be.

These findings are reported in a major study of business coaching published in June by the American Management Association (AMA) in conjunction with the Institute for Corporate Productivity, an HR industry researcher.

For the study, the AMA and i4CP surveyed CEOs, HR managers and other corporate executives at 1,030 U.S. and international companies across multiple industries. Approximately 41 percent of the participants had 1,000 or more employees, and about 42 percent reported annual revenue of $500 million or more.

Among the major findings:

  Business coaching is more popular than ever, boosted by companies struggling to develop a new generation of leaders to replace retiring Baby Boomers, and due to a proliferation of business coaches and coaching training programs.  Of U.S. companies surveyed, 52 percent said they had business coaching programs in place, and another 37 percent said they would be implementing coaching programs in the future.

  Companies use coaches to work with executives, high-potential employees, problem managers and expatriates headed to overseas assignments.

  Companies that use formal metrics to measure performance of coaching programs are most likely to report that those endeavors are successful.

Once the results were in, the extent to which companies are using business coaches surprised even Ed Reilly, AMA’s president and CEO.  According to Reilly, AMA’s executive management decided the time was right for a formal survey of coaching after noticing a surge in interest in books and seminar registrations on the subject.

Reilly says that prior to the survey, he didn’t realize how the coaching field had evolved over the past five to seven years to become an investment in star performers.  "When you stop and reflect on it, it makes sense," he says.

The impending talent shortage is also driving more companies to use coaches, Reilly says. "For competitive purposes, everybody inside your company needs to be honed and capable," he says.

Source: The Boon in Business Coaching, Workforce Management, www.workforce.com

Where women make more than men....

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