5 Business Growth Strategies To Decrease Stress, Increase Results
What is the code to business growth today? What does it take to not only survive, but actually thrive in today’s constantly shifting economy? Engagement, it all comes down to engagement. Your ability to engage your customers, your employees, your peers and your community.
So what is engagement? It is the skill of influencing others in a way that taps their desire to get involved, and actively participate at a high level. When you engage people, you ignite their passion and commitment, and in turn harness their energy to achieve your collective goals. Engagement is a powerful source that allows you to integrate your energy and resources with others to create a powerful team focused on achieving a goal.
So why does it matter? In today’s economy, engagement is your greatest competitive advantage. In an economy where everything is changing – globalization, technology and increasing competition. What you sell has become a commodity, but how you sell it, in other words the relationship you build, is your path to success. When you think about it, the only thing you are selling is the experience your customers are having and your reputation. That is whats getting you above the white noise and making you standout from your competition. For companies that understand this, engagement is a top priority. And the results are increased productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. In other words better bottom line results.
So how do you do it? The better you understand the power of engagement, the more you know about how to do it, the better position you will be in to get results and grow your business. So how do you engage others? What are the steps to build strong and meaningful relationships that inspire others to get involved, commit and take action?
5 Business Growth Strategies To Decrease Stress, Increase Results
1. You Not Them – if you want people to engage, you need to begin by focusing on them not on you. The power of engagement begins by focusing first on other’s needs before your focus on your own. That means that no matter your goals and vision, you need to first think about how you can help others get what they want and need. Take the time to ask the questions, and really listen to find out what is important to them. When you help them first achieve their goals, they will engage to you achieve yours.
2. Call To A Higher Cause – engagement is about getting people to be intrinsically motivated and inspired to achieve a goal or deliver on a vision. This is a call to a higher cause and gives them purpose. To accomplish that people need to have a clear understanding of the big picture. For example, if they box widgets just to box widgets there will not be much engagement, but if they box widgets that help people enjoy amazing vacations than that is a whole different reason to pack widgets. Call others to a higher cause and they will engage.
3. Connect The Dots – To take engagement to another level you need to engagement the dots. Help people make the connection between what they do, and how it directly relates to the difference that they make. When people can see clearly how the way they pack the widget makes all the difference in the vacation a family has, the more enthusiastically and passionately they will pack the widget. Connecting the dots opens the door for innovation, creativity and full team engagement.
4. Create Skin In The Game – people support what they help create. The more you give them voice the more responsibility they will take to ensure the vision is achieved. To engage, people want and need skin in the game. As leaders, we should determine the what, what are goals are, what as a company we want to accomplish and on what we need to focus. But to get full team engagement, our roll needs to stop there and we need to let them team answer the question of how to make that happen.
5. Proactively Add Value – take the time to reward, recognize and relish in the difference they are making. People’s level of engagement goes up based on the progress they make. Not reaching the goal, but on the progress that they make. The more attention you draw to that progress, the more you reward it, the more progress they will make. You do not have to wait to achieve the goal to celebrate, instead celebrate early and often and watch as the level of engagement goes up!
The most important skill of our time is engagement. The more you understand it, the more time and energy you focus on developing it. The bottom line is the better you are at engaging others the more successful you are going to be.
Take the time to try these strategies, let me know how you are doing. What if anything did I leave out? I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and opinions. I am invested in developing my “engagement muscle”, and would love to work on this goal together!
