Small Wins

When people start devoting their time to meaningful work, they become more energetic, open-minded, and creative. According to Barbara Sher, author of Live the Life You Love, people who do work that they are passionate about do not feel as if they are working at all.

Put all of those characteristics together, translate them into corporate idiom and this translates into increased productivity. Employees are searching for work that is more satisfying internally.

Anything that may increase corporate productivity-and employees’ happiness-is worth pursuing. Meaningful work involves developing and supporting other people.

Managers can play a valuable role in helping employees find meaning in their work by helping them identify their talents and skills, uncover their work and life values, and assess the environments and activities in which their values are met while their talents are utilized. Workers, all together, are re-evaluating their lives, their jobs and their employers. They are asking whether it is worth it to spend time at organisations where they feel no passion or commitment.

Typically, when employees devote their talents to projects and companies that support their values, the work is meaningful. Some employers are helping employees uncover their talents and values that usually happen during out placement when an employee is already halfway out the door.

Imagine the kind of commitment companies could generate by helping employees find and apply their passions while they are still in their employ. They become more energetic, open – minded, and creative.

On the other hand if managers help employees uncover what is meaningful for them, they run the risk of their leaving–unless they structure the discovery process in such a way that people stay focused on finding meaning in the current work environment.

When managers help employees find meaning in their work, they are helping to light fires that have a better chance of staying lit. Even if managers affect only 5 percent of the population, imagine the productivity gains if more employees felt more passionate about their roles.

It is important to note that work is not everything and therefore people should search for fulfilment outside the jobs. This is the problem. Few people in many populations around the world have been conditioned to think of work as something that should be meaningful.

People go to college, learn job skills, and then find organisations that use those skills in exchange for a pay cheque. Few courses and classes emphasise the importance of doing work that is satisfying. Consequently, generations of the worlds populace view work as a place to make a living.

There are real tangible benefits to employees finding meaning in their work. People by nature need purpose. When employees understand their contribution in their role to the overall success of the organization they become more committed to the organisation. Commitment, leads to higher performance.

According to HR Consultant and Blogger, Mike Haberman, employees will commit to their work, if and only if that work is meaningful. When the organisation has a committed employee, the organisation has one that is performing at a higher level. This usually can result in better customer interactions. Organisations want the employees to be committed and engaged so that enthusiasm is reflected in the customer experience.

Employees need to understand how they are doing. To keep the work meaningful to the employee they need to understand how they are performing, what they can do to improve, and receive the appropriate reward and recognition for performing in a way that leads to increased results for the organisation.

Workers are not likely to find meaning in what they do unless they see themselves as a contributing part of something that is bigger than they are. In most work situations, this is a function of the relationship between the workers and the immediate boss. The leader at any level has two primary jobs. They need to accomplish the business mission and care for the people in the leader’s charge.

Accomplishing the mission includes communicating, repeatedly, what is required and why it is important. It also includes communicating what part of the work an individual has and why that is important. Caring for the people means, first of all that the manager works to keep them safe. Keep them safe from forces outside the organization that might harm them and from the organizational authorities.

It also means helping them grow and develop. The manager can help them develop skills to keep them out of trouble in the future. The manager can help them learn things and achieve their personal objectives. Finally, it also means creating a great working environment. Fortunately, managers know what that looks like.

Below is the final article in our $150 competition sponsored by BizSugar.com. It’s submitted by Cathy Iconis, who provides Virtual CFO & Consulting services.

We all know that cash is critical to running a business, no matter the size. But as small businesses, we generally have less cash than the big guys, so we need to know how best to manage it. The first step is to better understand how much cash you have and how you are using it.

First, I want you to know that just because you have profit at the end of the day/month/year, that doesn’t mean you have more cash. The Income Statement (or Profit & Loss) is a tricky thing. It shows you how much revenue you have for the period and the costs related to just those revenues. It might not include cash spent on a large investment, money you received from an investor, or even disbursements you’ve made to yourself as the owner.

The best way to understand how much cash you have and how you are using it is to look at your Cash Flow Statement. It is a simple report giving a ton of information in these four parts:

* Operating Activities: How much cash you have at the end of the period from your daily operations
* Investing Activities: Cash outflows from purchasing a new asset or making loans to vendors or customers
* Financing Activities: Includes cash you have received from banks or owners or cash you’ve taken out of the business
* Cash at End of Period: How much money you have at the end of the day, net of the above

The Cash Flow Statement is fairly easy to get your hands on. Even businesses running on QuickBooks can run a quick Cash Flow Statement from their Reports menu. You can also ask your accountant to supply you with one when they review your books.

Now that you know how much cash you have and where it is going, spend some time thinking about the best uses for your cash. If you are eating up all of your cash from daily operations, then you aren’t able to invest in assets that could potentially help grow your business, like an additional server to give you added capacity so you can have more customers. Here are some ways to manage your cash:

* Budgets: Budgets can save you money and time! In a few hours, you can create a simple budget. Just look at what you spent last year and adjust any items that you don’t expect in the future. Enter your budget in your accounting system. Then run a report to see if you are on track. Easy as pie!

* Dashboards: These are just graphs, charts, or some other visual representation of your financial data. We all know it is far easier to “see” your company when you are looking at a picture. You can visually compare your data: you can see how you are doing versus last month, see what you are spending the most on, or even see which customer is giving you the most money.

All in all, it is important for you to manage your cash. This means understanding how much you have, where you are using it, and how to track it. I challenge you to move past going from hand to mouth and start managing your cash so you can grow your business!

If you have any questions or want to learn more about how you can better manage your cash, visit my website, www.CathyIconis.com.

As individuals strive for professionalism in every career, the standards remain the same for business, governments, NGO and practitioners. The press is filled with job adverts that require certain skills set and person requirements ranging from strong team players with interpersonal skills to high good integrity.

No matter the yard stick for success, there are some key elements to academic success. The attitude of an individual is critical. Negative thinking can be the ultimate success inhibitor. A complaint free diet can do miracles and it will wake the individual up to how much energy is spent on negative thinking. Rene Descartes – “I think therefore, I am” mentions that a thinking thing is a thing that doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives.”

There is a lot to learn. In my first job I worked as both an accountant and sold myself as a salesman, but in truth I had no idea how to sell. I learned by watching, by listening to the sales pitches that worked and the ones that didn’t, by modeling my demeanor on some of the more successful salesmen we had in the field.

The good ones displayed a quiet confidence. They were never desperate to make a sale, which I eventually learned was because desperation never closed the deal. Their confidence came from knowing they had a good product at a good price. And because the deals they were offering were profitable all round. It is a lot easier to sell when you can stand behind your product or service and know you’ve got the goods.

It is also important not to be rigid in individual goals. Fixating on one thing and allowing nothing to dissuade the individual may be a negative indicator of worse things to come. Many employers seek flexibility and adaptability among their prospects. With the ever changing global economy and increase in worldwide competition via the web, companies and organizations’ must respond to change quickly and easily.

It is good to be focused but realize that being so focused that you lose sight of the ultimate goal – to be successful – can prevent success. Academic just like career success may require going sideways, in a diagonal or changing path completely instead of forging straight ahead with blinders on.

There is this young man I trained on job to support clients; when approached to provide reference to someone to be in his permanent employ the young man turned down the offer on grounds that the remuneration was low by his standards and academic level of achievement. There is need to identify the goals individuals have for their life’s if they are to succeed and also know how to get there.

Most often than not we get frustrated easily and give up. Everyone has academic and/or career setbacks but it is how the individual responds to those setbacks that determines their ultimate academic and/or career success. If the individual wallows in self pity for weeks or months it is time to seek professional help to get them out of their academic huff. They should learn to accept setbacks as par for the course as they experiment with what works and what doesn’t. Small wins as they say lead to big wins.

Successful people understand that it is their power of choice that determines their success. They are not victims. They don’t blame others or other things for their success or failure. They seek out every opportunity to use their power of choice and never say I don’t have a choice.

They understand that whatever they choose to do, there are inherent risks but they feel the fear and do it anyway. They also prepare themselves for possible failure with plan B in mind and always look at failure as a learning experience. Marriage however is not one of those unions for plan B. Life is all about choices and when you cut away all the junk every situation is a choice.

Arthur

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader” – John Quincy Adams.

“Indeed, you are a great leader that is why they called you to attend the leader’s meeting. It is really a blessing to be among the leaders.” - Francisco Mendes

Can rubbing shoulders with the greatest teach to be a good leader? Is a great leader born or made? Alternatively, is there a deliberate effort to find and learn new skills to become a good leader?

A good leader is able to delegate his roles and mentor subordinates to manage tasks allocated to them efficiently and effectively. Many leaders of small and mid –size enterprises are hesitant to relinquish their roles to maintain ultimate control.

Start-ups and growing enterprises require a lot of direct involvement from the owners to provide the leadership and motivation during the inception stages. This period is also a good time to try out delegation skills since the owners are closely involved.

The subordinates get to learn new traits directly from the owners, which makes them appreciate the roles and evolvement within and outside the enterprise. As they manoeuvre around from one challenge to another involving cash and other immeasurable constants.

Keen leaders normally use this period to weigh the abilities and weaknesses of their subordinates to facilitate designing programs to strengthen the areas of weakness. This period is vital in designing operating procedures when both the manager and the subordinate are involved in working through core work processes.

A good leader should allow for some mistakes during the learning period. It is of paramount importance that the leader possesses some qualities of a teacher which include a willingness to listen and observe the within and outside the environment in this case the business.

Finally, good leaders should be willing and able to delegate the roles no matter the level the size of the entity. The leadership cycle is not complete until delegation is evident in the operations of the organisation.

Some lessons learnt through experiences and the best experiences involve failures. All managers should strive to teach their subordinates to be better at dealing with failure during periods of uncertainty.

Those small and mid-size enterprises that have mastered the art have survived beyond the condemned 3 years in Uganda because they have been successful at building and preparing their staff for the tasks ahead. Most importantly, they have spent vast amounts of resources - finances and time- preparing their employees to deal with failure.

Arthur Kaliisa