Business ownership requires the wearing of many hats. There’s staff management, customer relations, administration, and forward planning, but not all roles come naturally to all people.
If your forte is the fine print but not the finer details of staff negotiation and leadership, here’s how a Business Strategist can help you build your personal and leadership skills.
Communication
Effective communication with staff is the key not only to a smoothly running business but also to staff morale. When you take a look at how you communicate with your staff and clientele with the assistance of a coach, you can quickly identify ways to improve customer relations, staff retention and daily operations.
With a trained eye, a coach can help you see that one business meeting or teleconference a week with staff might suffice, that performance targets could help you get where you want to go or that providing staff with clear definitions of their roles and how they engage with customers might allow them to do their job more effectively.
Systems and Procedures
By implementing systems and procedures in the workplace you provide your staff with clarity and take the legwork out of management and problem solving. Most small businesses have grown over a space of time, increasing their customer and staff base. Often that growth may not have included creating the essential “how-to” document that sets out what role each staff member has, the chain of command, and core ethics for the business.
A business coach can assist in the development of these systems and procedures. Essentially these are the guide for what happens, when in a business, who is responsible and how each staff member goes about it to maintain the professional and consistent business image. Initially these systems and procedures take time to create yet ultimately they leave you more time to concentrate on where your business is going over the next few years, rather than how you need to deal with staff and clientele today.
Management Training
While management and leadership comes naturally to some, the majority of the most effective managers in the workplace have had specific training on how to deal with people. A management refresher course for you or your senior staff can bring positive perspective to your business. It not only assists in creating new strategies for communication and procedures, but provides new tools to motivate and problem solve.
Management training allows you to identity your preferred style when it comes to dealing with the public and staff. Most importantly it helps create a happy, comfortable workplace where senior staff are all on the same page. If you also provide training for your upper level staff it enhances their career development and creates value in their role in your business.
Taking a look at how your business is run by looking at communication, managerial styles and the systems and procedures behind them provides a comprehensive overview of the internal workings of a business. It allows business operators to acquire new tools and methods to move forward in a positive, productive manner, and provides more time to focus on the path ahead in the knowledge your team will get there together.
Talk Strategy with Clive
With more than 30 years’ experience in mentoring small to medium-sized businesses around Australia. Clive works with company owners and their teams to grow their business and achieve goals through strategic coaching.
