The below article is an excerpt from the book “Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales.”

Have a Vision and Communicate It. Make sure you clearly communicate your vision for the company. No one follows a leader who cannot communicate the way in which the company will succeed. Each employee’s future is tied closely to the success of your company. Make sure they believe in your company, what it stands for, and its products and services and make sure they know that the hard work they are putting in now will pay off.

Show Respect. Treat people, including your customers, suppliers, partners, and employees, with respect at all times.

Share Your Success. Make sure your employees share in the success of your company. As the company is able, provide additional benefits such as healthcare and dental coverage, a stock options plan, and a 401(k) plan. As an employee’s skills and abilities grow, reward them with fair compensation. Finally, consider incentivise your top employees and managers with ownership in the company. Few things can make a person work harder than a piece of the action.

Don’t Be Too Serious. Make the business environment fun at times. While being professional and taking things seriously is important, nothing can beat the effects of company-wide midnight round of bowling after it reaches an important milestone, a lunchtime pizza party once per month, or a spontaneous Nerf-dart duel.

Work With Your Employees. Make sure the employees see you there and working with them. No one likes to work hard for someone who doesn’t work hard themselves. Especially early on, be the first to arrive and the last to leave whenever possible.

Have Your Door Open. Whether or not you have your own office yet, have your ‘door’ open. Make sure your employees and managers know that you are approachable at any time about any problem they are having.

Listen. You have built a great team and are paying top dollar for it. Hold meetings with your management team least every other week, if not more often. Also have informal ad hoc discussions with your partners, managers, and employees often. Get their feedback, discuss the business and its strategy, and inquire every so often if there is anything that you can help with that is frustrating them. A few weeks ago I had a quick spur-of-the-moment meeting with my lead developer for Broadwick. After inquiring if anything was frustrating him, it came out that he felt he was working in an environment in which he became distracted too often. We quickly devised a solution in which he would work at home four hours per day until we could move into a larger office in which the development team could work in a separate room away from the distraction of the sales and support team. This small change has doubled our developer’s productivity.

Build Relationships. Without understanding at least the basics of what is occurring in an employee’s out-of-office life it can be hard to connect with him or her on a professional level. One tactic I’ve used successfully to get to know each employee personally is to take them and his or her significant other to dinner the first evening of their employment. It serves as a way to celebrate the occasion as well as learn a little bit about the employee that would not come out in interviews or through reading a resume.

Commend More Than You Criticize. Too many business owners (and I have been guilty of this as well) will only say something to an employee when he or she has done something wrong or something that has negatively affected the company. While constructive criticism and appropriate guidance has its place, if you seem to only condemn and never praise, your employees will quickly either dislike you or show apathy in their jobs. Continued properly placed praises can be as powerful to getting quality results out of an employee as a large raise. Many people thrive on peer and superior recognition just as much as money. Instituting both an employee of the month award as well as a quarterly performance review can be extremely valuable to your company.

As a manager and business owner, you gain an immense responsibility. You control the activity and purpose that your employees dedicated half of their waking hours to. Make it a meaningful purpose, communicate your vision, respect and praise your employees, and share your success. If you can succeed in building a team of highly motivated and happy employees that take initiative, have a bias toward action, respect you, and truly care for the business, you will have done much of the work in building a strong and quickly growing organization.

Most of us love to choose. It’s always better to let things be a matter of choice rather than compulsion.

Just as in life, in business, choice is an extremely powerful proposition. Here, specifically, I’m referring to the relation between choice and delegation.

First of all, you(as an entrepreneur) chose whom you would like to give the task to. That’s the very first choice — right delegation.

Then you make a choice to give that person his space and freedom to do things in his capacity and deliver the required results. That’s the second choice.

The third choice is a result of the first two — Accountability.

Each time you let the right person do the right thing, he is naturally more responsible and committed to the goal. He is directly responsible for his own actions. And, in case anything messes up in the due course, it is that much more easy to trace it to it’s roots and rectify it quickly.

Hence, a smarter way to involve people and harness everybody’s potential would be to exercise the power of choice.

–
Sudeep Ragunathan, CEO
Esswon Communications

This incident is related to one of my personal experiences. I work as a Business process consultant and my job involves taking up customer projects and helping them achieve their business requirement. Majority of the times the deliverables are in the format of Solution design and functional documents which are developed using my laptop.

Two weeks back just before the delivery of a customer project my laptop crashed. It was a mechanical crash caused by overheating of the hard disk. For some reason I did not back up data for the past 2 projects. Also I had a lot of very important reference material on the same system. The whole idea of loosing this information made me panic. It had a huge impact on other people, organizations dependent on me. For a decent period of time I couldn’t do anything other than just brooding over what had just happened. But as time passed by I realized I cannot be just panicking any more and started working on correcting the situation. I communicated this information to my manager and my customer so that they are fully aware of the situation and work on the alternatives. Later on I contacted my IT Help to get a loaner laptop and the possible ways to retrieve the data from the old hard disk. It took me around 2 week’s time to come back to normal mode of activities.

I learned an important lesson from the above experience. Being proactive in unexpected and adversarial situations is very important in a person’s personal as well as professional life. Don’t panic when the unexpected happens.

kris Inapurapu

I recently came across this quote - “Concern should lead in to action, not in to depression” - and could not stop thinking how useful it is. Depression is twenty first century’s most common problem. Each one of us come across this problem frequently and if you are working in knowledge industry risk is higher. People rush to doctors or anti depressants but get only temporary relief. While pondering over above quote I realized it is the remedy of the said problem.

Before asking why, stop and reread the quote and think over it . On giving serious thought we realize we get depressed when we are stressed and we get stressed when we feel deeply about something, in other words when we are concerned about something. Its good to be concerned about things because it motivates us to action and when we act we resolve the problem. While on the other hand if we are concerned about things but we are lazy enough to act on it things, accumulate and leads to tension and then depression. Since laziness is such an incorrigible disease or habit we do not realize what the problem is and then we blame world for stealing our happiness when the problem is created by our own dear habit!

But now you would say “I am not lazy, I act the moment I have some concern which is why I get depressed. Why?” well to this we have other quote from “Gita” which complements the above quote, its, continue doing your duty without thinking about fruit. This clarifies why even when we act on time sometimes we get depressed. When we are acting on something the thought of result continues to plague us.

In short I appeal to all you leaders and potential leaders to remain on track and be motivated. The moment you are concerned about something, get in to action without wishing for the expected result and result will follow the suit !!

Ruby Jha, Pune

I was watching a Hindi movie yesterday when a strange thought stuck me. After debating with myself for quite some time, I decided the article is good enough to be shared with you all.

The question is this: How does the story end in most movies if there is a love triangle?

In many movies that I have seen, one of the concerned individual dies. The same happened with this movie I was watching, which took my thinking on a different plane & filled my head with numerous questions.

Why does the third person need to get shot so that girl/guy is left with no choice? Why can’t we make a decision on our own? Why is it that we don’t like choices & expect someone else to decide for us, whoever that someone else is, fate, peers or family?

I have heard this from several of my friends in matters very trivial, like buying a shirt. In fact, they don’t want more than 5 options to choose from. Though an insignificant issue, can you see the link here?

We want someone to tell us what to do at every point in our lives. In fact, we feel a great sense of relief if the issue gets sorted out without us making a decision. Haven’t you felt it? Have you ever probed deeper into why you felt relieved?

I have felt relieved because I am at least better off than some of the options I had. I tend to justify the fact in my head that what has happened has happened for the best. That if I would choose the other option, I would face problems A, B & C & make people D & E angry. Based on all this, I land up with suboptimal decisions, or ‘safe’ decisions. When others decide for us, they use their own lens, beliefs & boundaries for us. But is that the right approach?

Who knows my risk appetite better than me? Who knows my capabilities, ambitions, goals & dreams better than me? None! Then who should decide for me?

Me of course!!

But what about that uneasy feeling before making a decision? Try it once.

The sense of achievement that you get in deciding more than compensates for the sense of relief that would accompany following an externally decided path.

A post by Kinshuk Mishra