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Be Irresistible: THE 7 Key Steps to Becoming Your Own Boss

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I woke early Sunday morning. I beat the sun again. I started the coffee; turned on the computer; and while they fired up, I cleaned up and fired up myself. After I poured that first cup of coffee, I sat down to see what was happening on Twitter and one interesting Tweet from @WamdaME timed at 03:49a.m. was waiting for me.

After another tweet or two, we established that WamdaME was asking about “starting your own company,” so I sent the following stream of tweets to her under the hashtag #owningit and favorited them too.

It seemed a good idea to share them here too.

THE 7 Key Steps to Becoming Your Own Boss

The seven steps I tweeted might seem to have come easily at 4:00 a.m. that morning. But every success is build on our skill set and talents — what we’re good at — and experience. Strategy and strategic thinking come naturally to me. However, I learned this strategic process by testing it constantly and doing it wrong until I found the way to “right.” After the experience of building a conference business from a blog post and a consulting business from that, I can tell you this is what works.

  1. Look over your successes to find what they have in common.
  2. Recognize the skill sets and experience that you’ve already acquired.
  3. Name the values that define you.
  4. Know how to recognize the people who believe in those same values.
  5. Get to know the people who share your values and understand their goals, dreams, and problems better than your own.
  6. Identify a problem that you enjoy solving at the crossroads of your success skill set and your values.
  7. Build a strategy to serve the people who share your values and the problem you solve for them.
    • Make it your mission to be mission critical to the mission of the people you serve.
    • Understand your position – how your size, skills, visibility, competitive place, and relationships offer opportunity.
    • Leverage conditions – find the opportunity inside every trend, cycle, shift, change in power, etc.
    • Make command decisions – commit to where you’re going, persuade the right people to help, focus on the things that move you forward.
    • Build Networks and Systems – Connect the people who help you thrive. Have an ever simpler process for serving them.

    And the most critical …

  8. Be in with your head, heart, hands, and both feet.

Offer those ideal customers (the people who share your values) the solution to the problem (something that makes their life easier, simpler, or more meaningful) and make that offer everywhere they gather in ways that are easy for them to say yes. And keep listening to their responses , tweaking your offers, and practicing your craft to give the people who love what you do more of what they love, less of what they don’t like, and something uniquely surprising and valuable that only you can bring.

Success in establishing a business grows from what has always has always made us successful — those talents and gifts that define us expressed in the ways that only we can bring them to the world — and such a deep seated commitment to an idea, a quest, a goal that we’re willing to focus all we are to make it real.

It takes commitment to become your own boss — a commitment to yourself, to the people you serve, and to the value of what you offer.

That commitment has been in every success you’ve won.
Make the commitment and you’ll become an irresistible force.

Ever had an experience like that?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Is Internal Competition Giving Your External Competition the Win?

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A Guest Post by
Natasha

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Taking care of the internal competition to compete better with external competition

Think of an organization, having different departments competing with each other, to the extent that they wouldn’t mind sabotaging each other’s work, or bringing a project to a total halt, just for the sake of jeopardizing another department’s reputation, without even thinking of the loss that the company has to suffer.

Sounds quite absurd? However, this seemingly absurd contention exists in more businesses than what you can imagine (and the chances are that it exists in your own company as well).

Many resources get wasted, brilliant ideas never get implemented, and the businesses fail to take off, just because different departments fail to collaborate with each other. And it’s not limited to large businesses, when the business is too small to have different departments, this tussle might exist between individuals.

So, how to make sure that the company’s resources are not getting wasted, just because some workers are focusing more on getting the better of each other instead of trying to outperform the real competitors.

Organizational Culture:

If probed, nine times out of ten, you will find that the organizational culture is the root cause of the problem, so the blame should be placed on the higher-ups who are responsible for influencing the culture of the company. At times, lack of collaboration between different departments can be a direct result of the higher up trying to use “divide and rule” policy, and encouraging people from different departments to come and share negligence or slip-up reports of other departments or fellow workers. When the managers’ start taking interest in such stories, the employees will try to make some on their own, and instead of focusing on their core duties, they’ll be trying to find some “material” to feed the higher-ups with more and more negativity about other departments.

Needless to say, if you are looking for better synchronization, you must not encourage, or approve of any such immature behavior.

Emphasis on common goals:

It is the leadership’s responsibility to get across this message to each and every department, that no matter how significant or non-significant the job seems to be, each and every department is in it together. So, when someone tries to disrupt or interfere with another department’s work, it will eventually hurt the organization benefits, and when the organizational benefits get hurt, the damage will ultimately come back to hurt each and every department, pretty much like a circle … together you rise and together you fall.

Rewards and Appraisals:

If not handled carefully, rewards and appraisal system often ends up adding fuel to fire, especially when different departments have goals or targets that coincide with each other. In such scenarios, departments will naturally try to take the credit for each and every accomplishment; this “credit war” is quite the same as the “turf war” (and we know the consequences of turf wars). Not only they’ll try to take the credit, the departments will go to the extent of hiding their successful strategies or techniques from other departments.

Enhance collaboration:

There are many ways to enhance collaboration, for example you can conduct joint meetings, training sessions, or recreational activities, where manager and employees from different departments can mingle with each other. But more importantly, at these joint sessions, meetings, or trainings, you can discern some tension going between two specific departments, you can call them up in person later on, and resolve the issues ASAP.

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Author’s Bio:
Natasha is an internet marketing expert by profession. When she’s not working, she likes to work out, read, and even draw (though she shares her paintings with very few people who are good at containing their laughter). Currently, she’s working for Loft conversions London that provides the services like Loft conversions in Hertfordshire .

Thanks! Natasha!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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10 Reasons to Go on a Vacation

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by Patty Azzarello

I want to share 10 of the many sound business reasons to go on vacation — in additon to the fact that you deserve it and are supposed to enjoy your life and have some fun in return for how hard you work…

1. Going on a vacation shows you are competent at your job because you can manage and plan enough to free up some time in your schedule, and not leave a festering mess in your absence.  

Not being able to take a vacation mostly shows that your work and your team are so out of control that you can’t even be gone for a week.

2. No one is impressed that you have not had a vacation in years.  If you think your company, or your team appreciates your super-duper, extra-work ethic, they don’t.   

3. Your team is motivated from seeing that you support and allow people to have a life — as long as you don’t send them email every day!  Set the expectation you will be generally out of touch.  Arrange 1-2 check-in points if you can’t stand to let go entirely, but don’t just go somewhere else and keep working.

4. Your team gets more productive when you go away.  You give them a break from worrying about all the things you throw in their way when they are trying to get their work done.  After about 2 weeks they will miss you and need you again, but in the mean time their productivity will go up.

5. Being unavailable is an effective technique for developing people.  It forces them to step up.  Just be careful not to un-do everything they did in your absence just because it was different than the way you would have done it.

6. If something comes up in your work that you can’t avoid and you need to cancel your vacation, reschedule another one while you are canceling.  This will minimize resentment and disappointment, give you something to look forward to… and ensure you don’t go too long without a vacation.

7. You will be more productive at work, if you step away from it and give your back-of-mind processes a chance to chew on things while you are otherwise in a good (or at least different!) mood. 

8. You will realize that some of the things that you thought were important before your vacation don’t actually need to get done after all.  When you step away, the most strategic things re-assert themselves and all the clutter drops several notches in volume.

9. Your company prefers people who enjoy their life because they have more positive energy for their work.

10. You need a break whether you know it or not!
 

How do you feel about work and vacations?

Let us know in the comment box below!

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advisor. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…

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Get Off the Bus and Head Toward True North With Burning Desire

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Leaders Live Up to Their Own Standards

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It’s a story of politics at work …

Blindedsided by a Romulan Warbird

It was a Friday afternoon in a past life, as they say. I was working late when Dina stopped by. Dina managed a new editor, Marilyn, who also worked on one of my projects. We often conferred on Marilyn’s progress. I thought Dina had come in to add something to our discussion.

As a social person, Dina was part of a catty little clique that had opinions on everything. I avoided both the group and their opinions when I could.

Dina smiled sweetly as she came into my office, sat herself down, and offered some minor pleasantries — always her style. Then she dropped her cloaking device and hit me head-on like a Romulan Warbird.

“We’ve been talking about you, and we’ve decided that we don’t like you talking about people when they’re not in the room, . . . in particular, we don’t like you talking about Marilyn.” She proceeded to use a good twenty minutes describing everything that was wrong with me as a person, which included a sidebar on why no person on the planet could possibly stand to work with me. I should have seen it coming when I heard that lovely phrase, “It’s probably none of our business, but . . .”

I lived the word stunned.

As I sat facing rapid fire, I literally had to restart my brain to process the information. My thinking kept looping around the same question in amazement. Did she hear what she had just said? It was a full-out admission that she had been doing exactly what she was shooting me for. In my neighborhood that wasn’t fair. Add to that the fact that she was the only one with whom I had discussed Marilyn.

My brain was misfiring. The opening narration from The Outer Limits was being read by Rod Serling as Salvadore Dali painted the scene in my office somewhere in the far reaches of my mind.

This female sitting across from me was an editor and a manager. What had she done with the facts? The only plausible answer was: she had no use for the facts. Dina had been passive-aggressive since I’d arrived at the company. She thought that my job should have been hers. So I don’t suppose that she was predisposed to caring about the facts. I let her say her piece. It was brutal. I went home.

My natural response is to fix things. I looked for ways to resolve this. Every solution that presented itself had me giving up ground. I didn’t want her friendship, but I didn’t need to be bullied again either. It was a miserable weekend. It took self-respect to go to work that Monday.

Had I been wiser then, I wouldn’t have wasted a weekend trying to fix the un-fixable. I know now that even if I’d saved Warbird’s life, I’d be that awful person who’d somehow done a good thing. That’s how those things work.

Every now and then I hear about Warbird and occasionally bump into her at conferences. I always stop to talk. She always seems nervous. I like to think that I’ve changed. Maybe she will too. Then again, maybe she won’t. She’s still at the old company — in the same job she got when I left.

Me? I’m long gone from there.

How did I get to be someone who worked with people like that?

I had changed myself to fit into the transportation that took me to the buildings where I worked in the jobs that I got because I mastered the right skill sets. Often I was bored and didn’t feel successful. I was managing not leading. I didn’t know it, but I was working for a paycheck or working just to work.

Some days I asked myself, “Am I good enough to be here?” and “What am I supposed to do next? Will I be on the bus that’s going from good to greatness?” I was on a path — the one laid out before me — but I had totally lost track of myself

Once I even said yes when the right answer was no.

Now I see that I’m not the only one who has done that…

Yet leaders don’t ride a bus to get from good to great. They walk their own path.

The more Ghandi, Oprah, Mandela, Catherine the Great, Bill Gates, Melissa Mayers, and Steve Jobs came to know themselves, the better leaders they became. They lived and lived up to their own standard of greatness.

True leaders do their own thinking; they know who they are and know that their true north comes from the inside. They own their values, skills, and experience. They are moved by a burning desire to build what they can’t build alone. That burning desire is what defines their path.

It’s not whether you’re an entrepreneur or working in a warehouse that makes you a leader. It’s whether we own our values and our path. Then we can contribute deeply and clearly to any business we choose to make part of our lives.

We become a leader the day we decide who we are, where we’re going, and how we’ll get ourselves there.
Who’d want to follow you if you haven’t done that?

What have you decided about yourself and your own true north?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

12 Blog Posts that Tackle the Problem of Self Promotion

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No Need to Be Shameless

A while back, Mack Collier, raised the question Is ‘no self-promotion’ the great unwritten rule of social media? I don’t believe it is.

Though promoting the great work going on around us is the fastest way to get positive recognition, sometimes it’s we’re called upon to let people know what we do and how well we do it. A solid business person, especially someone in social media, needs to be fluent and facile in discussing the skill with which he or she can get the job done.

What follows are some articles I’ve written on the subject that you may missed if you recently tuned in to my blog.

  1. Branding, Self-Promotion, Selling: Are You OverDoing?

    2. We know those times well, when we try too hard to convince others of our brand, apologize for our writing, ask links instead of earning them, or quote text when we should analyze.

  2. Branding: A Tagline Is Not A Brand — How to Build a Positive Brand in 3 Steps

    3. Everyone has brand.
    Your brand may be as simple as You are unknown.
    Not everyone has a unique and positive brand identity.

  3. Two Important Ideas in a Brand Identity and Why We Have to Live Our Brand

    4. People have a way of letting us know we forgot to consider them. They do that by redefining what they think of us and telling each other the new definition.

  4. Shameless Self-Promotion: What Makes It Shameless?

    5. Shameless Self-Promoters see only the game — not the relationship or the other person’s needs. Shameless self-promoters are focused on getting, not giving.

  5. Self Promotion: A Winning Answer Every Time — Why is That?

    6. No one got tied up in the confusion that usually hangs around self-promotion.

  6. Self-Promotion: How I Learned to Stop Shooting Myself in the Foot

    7. As a result we often shy away from any attempt to talk about what we do — fearing we’d be mistaken for the opportunists that we’re not. I used to be the poster child for thinking about self-promotion like that, and it found me getting myself tangled in knots

  7. Self Promotion: Telling Stories for the Painfully Shy

    8. People looking at me make me very self-conscious. Many folks find that a surprise. I write this post for everyone who is shy.

  8. How Too Much Thinking Used to Screw Me Up

    9. I said something about the “ME” in self-conscious. I’ve always thought about it. RK came back and put to words in a pair of comments that said exactly what I always had wondered about . . . am I shy or am I egotistical?

  9. 3.3: Three Steps to an Intriguing Answer to “What Do You Do?”

    10. Many folks would tell you this is the time for your “elevator pitch.” I suggest that term might not be the best way to look at a relationship. Why don’t we say that an authentic conversation is our goal?

  10. Social Media and Promotion: How to Get Your Network Pulling for You

    11. A friend emailed me asking if I would pass along information about a product just coming out. The email was a sale pitch I could pick up and pass on. The rest of the message was over the top for me — kind of pushy and kind of “wink, wink, nudge, nudge — you help me and I’ll help you later.”

  11. Talking Decisions and Self-Promotion with JenChicago

    12. see video

  12. Mind if I Ask Your Network to Help Me Beat Your Car with a Sledgehammer?

    13. Just because you say you’re going to do it,
    doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t make it any more appealing.

Self-promotion is important to a business. If we don’t tell the world we exist and what we do, soon enough we won’t. Hope you find this helpful.

Let me know if you think a favorite is missing from the list. Thanks!

What do you find is the best way to promote your business?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Check out the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

The Leadership Role of Blending Work, College, and Family

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The Audacity of Tenacity in Leadership
A Guest Post by Val White

I had finished an Associates Degree in Business when I was younger and pre-children. When my first child came along, I found a way to work from home while participating in my young child’s life. Two years ago, I felt it was time for me to go back to work and rejoin the corporate world.

I quickly discovered that a lot had changed in the 10 or so years that I had stepped away to care for my family. My skills needed refreshing. I wasn’t interested in the same things. I had changed and so had my choice of careers. I knew I needed to go back to school. I also needed to tend to my family and contribute to the family budget with a full-time job. After much research and soul-searching, I settled on a state college that combined virtual program with a “brick-and-mortar” college experience.

Today, I’m in the last course before I’ve fully earned my Bachelors degree in Information, Networking, and Telecommunications (with an emphasis on Web Development). Getting here wasn’t easy. I still have to get that degree to payoff in new career opportunities.

But I can easily say that I’ve achieved a lot.

The Innovative Leadership of Blending Work, College, and Family Life

A favorite article at NewandImproved.com, The Way of the Innovative Leader resonated with me as it laid out five leadership traits found in those who live and inspire great thinking in the people around them. (© 2006 New & Improved®, LLC. Mailto: info@newandimproved.com) And as I read the article over, I came to realize that those same traits were what I came to value as I grew into the role of non-traditional college student, who also had both a family and a job.

These are the five traits I relied on to keep going when I might have stopped. Whatever your situation, these five will serve you well in getting you to your goal.

Integrity:

Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t make promises that you can’t or don’t intend to keep. In the lifestyle challenges of family, college, and job, you may find yourself overwhelmed if you haven’t developed the ability to say “no” to things that will add more clutter and demands on your time. Inevitably, something is going to fall off the edge if you fill your to-do list with too much. It’s easy to get your priorities mixed up in the attempt to do it all. The lines easily become mixed: family, college, job – college, family, job – dreams of future career, college, family, umm…job. If things get out of hand, it’s best to stop everything for a moment, a day, or a weekend and reevaluate your priorities.

Tenacity:

Wiktionary.org defines tenacity as …
“The quality or state of being tenacious; as, tenacity, or retentiveness, of memory; tenacity, or persistency, of purpose.”

I also love this definition:
“The greatest longitudinal stress a substance can bear without tearing asunder, – usually expressed with reference to a unit area of the cross section of the substance, as the number of pounds per square inch, or kilograms per square centimeter, necessary to produce rupture.”

I’ve endured a few semesters where I truly felt I would “tear asunder!”

There will come days that it’s all you can do to put one foot in front of the other and make sure the essential tasks have been completed. Truly, keeping a firm and unshakable picture in your mind of your goals and purposes is so very important in order to withstand these days when they come.

Curiosity:

As a non-traditional, adult student with some life experience, I found learning much more of an adventure than I did in my earlier years. Instead of just coasting through a class to get the credits, I found more benefit in finding ways to apply this new knowledge to my career goals and asking myself how it applies to right now or 5-10 years from now.

Being curious will surely expand your vision and enlarge your understanding of your world.

Courage:

What will others think and/or say to me when I tell them I’m going back to college? Is it really a waste of time and money? After all, I have more lost career years behind me than I have ahead of me. Will I really be able to apply what I’ve learned?

It takes courage to face your own demons and plunge into the unknown. For some, it’s an ongoing battle or one they don’t even wish to start. I’ve found that whatever it is that you’re afraid to start or when you want to give up, remembering one simple truth is a great motivator: you’ve got something to contribute that is uniquely you and nobody else can do it.

Humility:

Referring again to wiktionary.org, the definition of humble is,

“thinking lowly of one’s self; claiming little for one’s self; not proud, arrogant, or assuming; lowly; weak; modest.”

This doesn’t necessarily appear to be an attractive trait, does it? In reality, when approaching this lifestyle of family-college-job, there will be many opportunities to practice humility … and come out stronger from it. Simply entering a college program is a statement that you don’t know it all and you’re in need of help in achieving your future goals. You’re going to need to engage with instructors and other learners in discussions that might prove that others will have better ideas than you do. But more than this, you’ll find humility when you reach out to others around you for support, advice, and help with daily tasks.

So, how did these experiences and traits contribute to my job of being a role model?

Quite simply, my husband and children watched me – day by day and night after night of late night homework. They cheered with me when I reported my test and homework scores. They listened to my frustrations and they helped lighten my load when they could. I hope that I offered my family.a chance to see and develop these essential leadership traits to serve them in throughout their lives.

You have no choice about being a role model. You are one … it comes with the job. The only choice you have is which role you’ll model. – The Way of the Innovative Leader

Those concise three sentences are the sum of the reasons I chose to finish my college aspirations as an adult.

And why I know I’ll also achieve all of my goals.

What is your leadership role?

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Val White is a mom, web developer, and student at FHSU fhsu.edu. She is just now venturing out of the safe confines of the FHSU online class discussion board and looking for new opportunities to contribute on the web. You can find her portfolio at valwhitewebdev.com.

Thanks, Val! Amazing story. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!