A long time ago we talked about the concept of empowerment and how it applied in the workplace. Your employees will work more effectively if they feel empowered but what I want to know today is whether or not you feel empowered in your own life.

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say you’ve tried but nothing has really worked. You’ve worked hard to take control of your life but things just never seem to go your way. Today I present 5 tips to help you gain a sense of self-empowerment.

Decide what YOU Want Out of Life

Do you really know what you want out of life? Most people say they do but I think in many cases we’re lying to ourselves. We’re always quantifying and justifying the things we want so that they make others happy as well. Forget the rest of the world. If you had no one else to answer to, what would you really want to do?

Put Your Goals in Writing

Get a piece of paper and make a list of your personal goals – both long and short term. It’s a proven fact that having a written plan is more effective than simply having one in your head. Put that piece of paper in your wallet or purse so that you can refer to it as often as necessary – especially on bad days when you need to remind yourself what you’re working towards.

Find a Mentor

Yup – you read that right. Go out and find yourself a mentor or life coach. The mentor you work with doesn’t necessarily need to have anything to do with your professional career. You need an impartial person to work with you as you plan your goals and move forward on your self-empowerment journey. A coach or mentor will hold you accountable for what you do or do not do during that journey.

Become Action Oriented

It’s not enough to simply write out a list of goals and carry it around with you. It’s time for you to decide what steps you will take to meet each goal. Once you know, start taking those steps. Becoming empowered means taking control of your life and doing things – not just thinking about them.

Once you feel in control of your life on a personal level your professional life will fall right into place. Your management career will blossom and you’ll have a lot more to offer your employees as they learn to become empowered as well!

Thanks again,

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Every individual on your work team has a different personality. Each different personality type will have a different way of reacting to a situation. While it may be difficult to predict just how each individual you work with will behave on a regular basis you can learn about the four main behavioural categories.

There are four categories, and four only, that each person’s behaviour will fall into at any given point in time. A person determines how he will act in only one of 4 ways, and rarely even knows the choice is occuring – it’s subconscious. The four categories are as follows:

• Automatic
• Back-up
• Creative
• New Capabilities

Automatic behavious are habits people have created throughout their lifetimes. They’re comfortable with them and rarely stray from their usual attitudes and actions.

Everyone, on the other hand, has a back-up plan – a repertoire of behaviours we turn to when our normal behaviours aren’t compatible with a given situation. For example, the class clown will automatically adapt his behaviour in a serious business meeting or while attending a funeral.

The creative personality isn’t as creative as you might think. It’s a person’s ability to adapt the behaviours he has already established, combining them in a different way for a unique result or pattern of actions.

Finally, everyone has the ability to learn new behaviours, whether in a formal setting or subconsciously from being around others.

Now that you know a little bit about the four categories of behaviour, and how one chooses his actions, can you look at each of your employees and pinpont which category each currently falls into? Are there things you should do to modify their current behaviours? And should you even bother?

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Quite a few of you are probably relaxing with your friends and family, enjoying the holiday season. I might add that doing so is an excellent time management strategy because it is just as important to take time out for yourself as it is to attack the lingering list of chores you’ve probably made for yourself.

Sadly, not many people make time for themselves and their inability to do so is a huge time management mistake. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about tips for more effectively managing your time but we haven’t focused on some of the mistakes people make. Here are a few to consider.

• Do you pay too much attention to the minor details instead of doing what you can to get a perfectly acceptable job out the door? While attention to detail is great it can also be distracting or detrimental when you’re facing a deadline.
• Do you find that you often have too many projects on your plate at the same time? Doing so will stretch your resources and instead of finishing one great project you’ll turn in multiple sub-par projects.
• Are you dead set against changing your routine? Sometimes deviating from the norm will free up your time so that you can get your most important tasks out of the way sooner.
• Do you prefer to do mundane tasks before focusing on your major projects? Putting some time into your larger projects earlier in the day might motivate you to get them done sooner – and those mundane tasks will be a welcome break after all of your hard work.
• Are you good at anticipating problems? If so, that’s great, but people who expect problems to occur usually waste a lot of time focusing on them even if they haven’t happened yet. And if that problem never actually comes to fruition you’ll find you wasted a ton of time.
• Are you surrounded by unhappy and unmotivated coworkers? They’ll drag you down and waste your time whether you realize it or not.

Can you identify with any of these issues? If so, you may want to work on making some changes in the way you manage your own time in the New Year. Until then, enjoy your time away from the workdesk!

Thanks again,

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

A lot of people view marketing as the method of selling a product. Marketing, to them, means creating a print ad, television commercial, or radio segment and hoping it brings traffic so that they can make a few sales.

Marketing, in reality, is really much more than your ability to advertise your products, though. Marketing is your ability to brand yourself and make yourself known amongst members of your target audience, including your current client base. Marketing includes the way your organisation treats the public as a whole. It’s a culmination of your values, your philosophies, your team members, and their mindsets.

So when you next start to train a group of new employees, how will you explain your company’s marketing campaigns? The truth is that most of your employees don’t have all of the real skills necessary to develop a strong marketing campaign from A to Z but if you utilize the skills they do have and supplement them with outside resources you’ll do a bang-up job putting your company in the public spotlight.

These are a few things you should consider as you market your organisation:

• Develop a customer service agreement outlining your organision’s mission or goal with respects to customer service. How will you let your customers know what your standards are and how will you get your customer service team to live up to those standards?
• Set a procedure for complaints. Your customers should be allowed to complain if your customer service team doesn’t meet their goals or expectations. You should set a complete system, including who will take the initial complaint and how it will be handled up until it is resolved.
• Don’t ignore those complaints, either. The better you handle them, the less likely it is you’ll lose a customer later on down the line. Even handing a complaint well is a mark of good customer service.
• Constantly communicate with your customers. Let them know what’s going on within your organisation and how you are working to solve problems with your systems to make their experiences with you even better.

Keeping your customers happy IS a marketing method and its one you should take very, very seriously. After all, your current clients play a huge role in your marketing as well – and if they are spreading information about bad experiences you won’t receive as good a response from your traditional marketing campaigns either.

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

What’s one of the best ways to keep your team motivated? Help them avoid negativity in the workplace, of course.

Here’s what I mean. The other morning I was sorting through some emails that had piled up in my inbox. Amongst them were a bunch of newsletters from sales experts. I decided to glance at a few of the articles and by the time I was done I was feeling glum about the state of the economy and sales market. If I had kept reading I might’ve been convinced that my team and I would be out of the job by the end of the year.

What did I do about it? First, I recognized that it was the newsletter itself that was causing me to have so many negative thoughts – so I unsubscribed. Then I thought about the sales newsletters, customer service newsletters, and emails that get sent to my team members (from myself and from others within the organisation). I wondered – if I feel so bad about reading these things, how must my team members feel?

Pretty horrible, I imagine.

I urge you to take a few moments out of your day to reassess the types of communication you send to your team members or employees. Are they mostly positive or negative? It’s often difficult to completely avoid adding a piece of negative information (the loss of a friend, retirement, illness, etc.) but does every newsletter need to be made up of mostly negative articles? No way.

Keep this in mind as you write your next employee newsletter, update email, or communication. Remember that the more positive the information you present, the better the mindset of the receiver. The better they feel, the better they’ll work.

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Leadership Development

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”