I was sitting in the sauna at my gym this morning and I noticed a sign on the wall that had several warning bullet points. One of which was “Prolonged exposure to heat can cause the body to overheat.” I thought to myself, is it really necessary to remind people about something that is self-evident? Then I got to thinking a bit more about this. One of the things I share with our members is the importance of keeping your vision and goals top of your mind. Another thing I suggest is that one way to do that is to have them written down and to take a look at them every single day so that it’s difficult to lose site of the things that you know will enable you to get to your desired destination.
With that in mind here are a few bullet points you might care to add to your personal business health notice board:
- Prolonged exposure to the wrong clients can cause you and your firm to atrophy.
- The prolonged practice of charging less than the value you create will detrimentally affect the quality of your life.
- Prolonged tolerance of people who do not share your vision and values will stifle your firm’s growth and in the process will drive out high quality people and leave you with low quality people.
- Prolonged refusal to delegate tasks that could be done by people at a lower stage of development than yourself will encourage junior team members to master the art of reverse delegation, refuse to take responsibility, fail to take advantage of their full potential and ultimately leave the firm.
- Prolonged use of timesheets for the purpose of billing and productivity management will cause your people to focus on activity rather than value created for your clients, this will deny you the opportunity to identify and focus on attracting clients in respect of whom your firm can create most value which will detrimentally affect the quality and quantity of your earnings.
- Prolonged use of top down management based on a carrot and stick approach attempt at team member motivation will make it extremely difficult for you to attract, develop and retain talented knowledge workers.
- Prolonged willingness to take on new clients simply because they have a check book and a heartbeat will keep your firm sailing in the sea of sameness also know as average.
I’m sure you could add some other points to this list and if so I’d love to know what you think.