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Over the last three years, I’ve asked hundreds of business owners this question:
What’s Been Harder in Your Business Than You Expected?
More than 95% of the time, the answer was immediate and unequivocal:
The People!
Jason Colleen owns Colleen Concrete and when I interviewed him he employed about 50 people. Jason’s response to the question captured the essence of what I heard over and over again. He said,
“I didn’t expect so many headaches to come from the employees. Every little problem they have somehow becomes my problem. People are just so high maintenance.”
Dealing with employees seems to be a universal challenge. The truth is, people have issues and the more employees you have, the more issues you have. But there’s another truth as well, and that is:
Great Companies Grow One Person at a Time
Or more precisely, great companies grow one great person at a time. One of the things I’ve discovered in my own business and in the experience of the owners I’ve interviewed is that you can’t stack enough good people up to make a great one. Good simply isn’t good enough. Great people are far more likely than good people to do three things on a consistent basis:
- Initiate: Fundamentally, initiative is thought or action that is not prompted by others. It’s the ability to assess independently and the willingness to take charge before others do. The soul of initiative is an intensely active engagement – engagement with the company, client, problem or opportunity. Initiative requires thought, which as Henry Ford said, is probably the hardest work we do.
- Stretch: Stretch is about setting your sights higher, much higher, than what seems reasonably achievable. Unless there is a critical mass of people in your company that are willing to reach for incredible, you’ll never achieve incredible. When you stretch, even if you fall a bit short of incredible, you will inevitably wind up doing better than you would have if you didn’t stretch.
- Grow: Employees usually have an expectation that you’ll pay them more next year than you paid them this year. But why would you? The only logical reason would be that they contribute more next year than they did this year. Great employees get that. They’re always looking for ways to make themselves more valuable. They improve their skills; they learn how to use new tools; they take classes to expand their knowledge.
That’s what great people look like. Now, I’m not saying these great people won’t also have some issues. But if I have to deal with people issues, I’d prefer to be dealing with the issues of highly productive contributors as opposed to the issues of the mediocre, uninspired or disengaged.
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