Are you rolling out a change or new initiative in your company? Don’t even think about starting a change process without completing these steps.

Start with a plan

Any change you want to get rolling, whether it is a change in strategy, policy or when changing systems, must come with a well thought out plan.

If you don’t have a plan before beginning the change process, the expenses for your change effort will increase rapidly. Chances are, you will also find that your efforts will not be accepted among your staff and may ultimately fail.

Get everyone involved

The key ingredient to change effort success is your team. You want as much brainpower behind a new initiative as possible.

If you want people to accept a new initiative, you must make sure they are involved in the planning, decision making and implementation. By keeping your staff involved, you will ensure they support your efforts.

Why is getting your staff’s acceptance important for change to occur? If your staff does not support new methods, they will stick to old practices, rendering your change effort useless.

Continually reinforce why the change is important

Not only do you need to get your staff to embrace change through keeping them involved, you also need to communicate to them why the change is so important.

If your staff fails to understand this simple fact, they will never see the importance of your new strategy, and cling to old practices.

Implement change

Now comes the hard part. This is where behavior, practices or systems must actually be changed. You must stick to your plan, keep your staff involved and actively working so the implementation is a success.

Expect hiccups

Hope for the best but plan for the worst. Chances are, you will run into problems during the beginning stages after a new initiative has been rolled out.

A system may not work as expected, a new strategy is proving more costly, or employees might not be adhering to new policies. Whatever the issues are, you will be at a severe disadvantage if you don’t plan for these setbacks.

Brainstorm possible issues that could arise and plan for contingencies.

Any other best practices for change implementation? Comment below!

If you really want to get the most out of your staff, you need to be willing to challenge them.

Challenging work brings lots of benefits to workplace morale, improvements to culture as well as increased employee output.

Below are some reasons as to why challenge is so important in the workplace.

Your Staff Will Accomplish More

One reason why challenging work is important is because it pushes your staff to work harder. This demands more impressive results out of your staff that couldn’t have been achieved if they weren’t challenged.

Challenges Motivate Us to Work Harder

Challenge motivates people to try harder. We enjoy challenges and want to prove we can rise to them.

Because your staff will feel motivated and will be working harder, having challenging work will make their jobs feel that much more important.

The more valuable your staff feels, the harder they will work to continue to feel important. They will work harder to solve more challenging problems, and will feel better about their work once they complete an objective.

Lack of Challenge Will Bring Laziness

Work has a funny habit of expanding to fit any allotment of time given to it. Thus, if your staff is not challenged, work will take longer to complete and will be lower in quality.

Unchallenging work causes us to take work less seriously. If our work doesn’t challenge us at all, we’ll adapt the mentality: “I’ll do it later because it isn’t important now”.

Challenge Makes You Care More

Unchallenging work will not occupy your conscious mind for long. Because of this, you’ll procrastinate or do less than stellar work.

Challenging work, however, requires staff to remain deeply focused on their work. As a result, your staff will try harder to complete the tasks delegated to them because the work demands greater mental attention.

Challenge Makes Work More Interesting

Challenging work is far more interesting than easy work. Easy work can be completed quickly and with little brain power. It is nothing out of the ordinary and does not stretch your staff’s performance at all. Furthermore, completing easy work proves little about your staff’s abilities.

Challenging work, however, presents harder to accomplish tasks that your staff will want to try and tackle. They will be interested to test their abilities and prove that they can overcome the challenges presented to them.

This makes work more interesting, as it is more demanding and tests the outer limits of your staff’s abilities.

Are there any other reasons why challenge is important? How much challenge is too much?

Are your customers complaining about the level of service they are receiving?

Are you immediately jumping to the conclusion that the customer is being unreasonable?

While customer service interactions can often be frustrating, and client requests can frequently appear demanding, there may be barriers in your organization that might make reasonable consumer requests seem excessive.

Before concluding that your customers are being unreasonable, consider if your organization has any of these problems, and try to fix them.

1. Bureaucracy

One important reason why customer service can suffer in organizations is due to bureaucracy. The more layers and red tape an employee has to go through to service a client, the more difficult it can be.

Since certain requests will require supervisor approval, while others are taken care of in another department, one single person never sees a case through to completion.

When a case is transferred to another employee, calls can be dropped, or the customer can be transferred to an employee who doesn’t care at all about them.

The end result reflects poorly on the entire organization, not just the employees who handled the case.

The solution? Flatten your organization or at least make the organization appear flatter. You can do this by assigning greater authority and responsibility to customer service reps when handling a case.

You can also assign one dedicated case worker to each specific case, so they can oversee the entire customer service interaction through to its completion.

2. Overworked Staff

Overworked staff can be the result of understaffing, layoffs, rapid growth or assigning too many tasks to too few people.

The result is that your staff will quickly lose their energy. Those that don’t will be stretched too thin and no single client will appear as a priority to them.

Since your reps will have many clients to service, steps will be skipped, staff and customers will become frustrated and clients will receive insufficient attention to their issues.

There is no easy way around solving this problem. You can either hire more people, outsource at least some of the customer service work, or automate whenever reasonably possible.

3. Underworked Staff

The exact opposite can have a similar effect on customer service. If your staff is underworked, they will feel less challenged, under-appreciated and unimportant.

Work has a habit of expanding to fit whatever timeframe is allotted. So if your staff is underworked, case handling turnaround time can drag on longer than reasonably expected, and customers will get frustrated.

The solution is to ensure your staff has an adequate amount of work. Challenge and stretch your staff, but don’t demand the absolute impossible out of them.

4. Having a Non-Caring Culture

The workplace culture can have a substantial effect on how customer service cases are handled. If the workplace climate is one where customers are not cared for, where staff doesn’t care about their work, or if the environment is not empowering, your staff will under-deliver whenever presented with a customer service case.

This culture prevents your staff from caring enough about your customers to make them happy. Customers are not a priority, and the repercussions of an unhappy client is not apparent to them.

To fix this, your culture needs to be more positive, challenging and empowering. Make the atmosphere more optimistic and start assigning greater responsibility and accountability. You should also take this opportunity to coach or implement training.

5. Poor Accountability

If your staff is not held accountable for customer service, there is no reason for your staff to try harder to make sure customers are happy.

Your staff can always place the blame elsewhere and know they can never get in trouble for letting a customer leave unhappy.

You must ensure your systems incorporate some kind of tracking mechanism that records which employees handle each customer, so you know whether or not an employee kept a customer happy, and why.

But that is only half the battle. Now you must address those employees who aren’t treating customers correctly and coach and train if necessary. You should also address customer service performers, and ensure their good work is recognized.

6. Insufficient Systems

If the systems your staff uses when working with clients perform poorly, are slow, contain insufficient data or doesn’t track your client data appropriately, you are going to run into a problem.

Customers are going to get frustrated very quickly if it takes too long to service them, or information they have provided to you is not accounted for. They will be upset that you don’t know their history and will feel under-appreciated.

The fix is quite simple: incorporate better systems and tracking mechanisms to make sure sufficient consumer data is recorded and stored. This ensures your staff has ALL the tools necessary to communicate with and service your clients.

7. Customer Value Hasn’t Been Communicated

If your staff has never been taught the value of customers to your organization, they will most likely not know how to treat them.

All staff members must be told how valuable customers are, so your staff knows to treat clients in the appropriate and valued manner.

8. Lack of Incentive

Your staff must be given the appropriate incentive to give clients outstanding service. If they are not incented, you have given them no reason to go that extra mile for your customers.

Provide rewards, both monetary and non-monetary to ensure your staff is motivated and empowered enough to WANT to service your clients to the best of their abilities.

Can you think of any other barriers to customer service? What are some other ways to overcome them?

We are confronted with obstacles every day. Sometimes they can be predicted, other times they cannot.

Being confronted with an obstacle is much more different than being confronted with a failure. While avoiding failure prevents action, avoiding obstacles may still bring success.

Since obstacles differ from failure, they require a totally different outlook.

1. The Only Real Obstacle to Accomplishing Anything is Yourself

The only real obstacle that prevents you from success is your own lack of belief in your ability to succeed. Every other obstacle that manifests itself can easily be hurdled if you believe in yourself, and is often an opportunity for growth.

If you don’t believe you can accomplish something, there is NO way you are going to do it.

Thus, having faith in yourself when confronting an obstacle is the single best way to deal with any hurdle.

2. Don’t Allow an Obstacle to Stop You

Like failure, it is inevitable that you will face obstacles during your entrepreneurial career.

Additionally, like fear of failure, fear of obstacles can be paralyzing. Don’t let difficulties stop your progress towards success. Work on a way to overcome roadblocks rather than feeling as if an obstruction is unpassable.

This might require you to be more creative or think more positively. However, remember that if you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way to make it happen.

3. An Obstacle is an Essential Hurdle to Reach Success

Instead of viewing an obstacle as a roadblock that prevents you from moving forward, view any difficulty as an essential hurdle you must overcome to reach success.

Try to view obstacles in a more positive light. While they may seem inconvenient, obstacles are present to ensure your company has the mettle to plow through and succeed against your competitors.

4. Expect Obstacles and Prepare for Them

Taking the initiative to prepare for obstacles is a great chance for your business to hone its predictive capabilities. This also ensures clients are served without a disruption of your service.

Expecting obstacles will allow you to reduce costs and maintain a high level of efficiency. You’ll adapt or react more quickly to a difficulty, and be able to confront it using significantly less resources.

Being able to successfully predict and preempt any obstacles that stand in your way will also make you a more competitive participant in your industry.

5. Confronting Obstacles Isn’t Easy

Never take an obstacle lightly. Underestimating the difficulty of clearing a roadblock can lead to a problem becoming that much more threatening.

When presented with an obstacle, always be completely ready to tackle it and anticipate additional complications.

6. Obstacles are Great Learning Experiences

Like failure, obstacles are great learning experiences. Facing different problems can teach you the best ways to solve them. You’ll also learn if the same difficulties will repeat themselves in the future.

Facing various difficulties will allow you to better understand the types of problems you will face in your business or industry. This will also better equip you to confront them in the future without overusing your resources.

7. Use Obstacles to Your Advantage

When resisting or confronting obstacles, you are using resources to clear roadblocks so they no longer pose a threat to you. While this strategy can be effective, sometimes using the obstacle to your advantage can be an even more powerful technique.

Consider using a difficulty to your advantage by developing systems that will make the presence of the obstacle profitable.

Consider the current economy. Business are struggling with a lack of customer spending, being unable to hire due to lower revenues, larger publicly held companies have to worry about falling stock prices and companies with financial portfolios have to worry about devaluing assets.

Instead of struggling to survive, certain companies produce products that naturally sell better during economic downturns. They can develop systems that complement recessionary periods and offer services that are more useful to consumers during a darker economic environment.

We see this already: car dealerships are resorting to selling more and more used cars and offering lower financing rates. We also see random businesses offering to buy gold.

These types of practices aren’t resisting the recession but using the climate as an opportunity to profit from it.

8. Avoiding Obstacles Can be a Good Thing

Failure is something that cannot be avoided.

Obstacles on the other hand, can be beneficial to experience, but can also be beneficial if avoided. Avoiding an obstacle does not mean you are stopping growth or avoiding pursuing a business.

Avoiding an obstacle means you are creating a system or strategy to avoid problems or obstructions that may stand in your way to success.

Thus, trying to avoid failure will paralyze you, while trying to avoid obstacles will most likely save you money.

What are some other useful ways to deal with obstacles?

Picture yourself logging into your analytics tracking software to find that you had a huge and unexpected surge in traffic over the past day.

What do you do? Do you celebrate? Hope another surge in traffic comes tomorrow?

Hopefully, you quickly grab a pen and pad of paper and begin scribbling ideas down. Not only do you want to think about why you have attracted this huge amount of traffic, but you want to think about how you will capitalize on this publicity before it goes away.

Your First Taste of Publicity

Your first taste of publicity may equate to only a twinge of visibility, or it could be a huge surge in popularity. Your first experience in the limelight can take many forms and manifest itself in a range of magnitudes.

Websites, blog posts or internet apps might go viral, you might get listed in your local newspaper or you might be featured on a national news channel.

While this surge in visibility is difficult to prepare for, it is much more important to keep yourself in the spotlight. This initial glimpse of popularity isn’t your 15 seconds of fame or the culmination of your success, but an opportunity for you to work hard to remain visible.

Promote Yourself So You Remain Visible

You have gotten your first encounter with publicity, now it is your job to keep it. You can do this by:

• Continuing to aggressively promote yourself
• Hiring a PR firm
• Drastically improving your product or service
• Offering new products or services

You want to make sure you continually work to maintain a positive image while also growing your visibility.

Your first encounter with popularity has allowed you to enter into the conscious minds of your customers and prospects. Now you must fight to stay there and not be forgotten.

Allowing this moment of visibility to slip away without capitalizing on it will make it very difficult for you to get this opportunity again.

Success has compounding effects, so by remaining in the minds of your customers and prospects, your message will continue to spread and will spread more and more quickly every day.

Enjoy the Perks

Enjoy the resulting publicity from your continued hard work. Make certain you deliver exceptional customer service and outstanding products or services to your customers so they will continually return to you.

This ensures your existing customer base will return for repeat buys, and will hopefully recommend you to others.

Take this opportunity to adjust to any growth, so growing does not become too difficult. Make any structural and incentive changes as necessary and issue training to your staff when applicable.

Remain Persistent

You should absolutely enjoy the growth you have earned and take time to make adjustments. However, you should never stop and rest during a time of increased popularity and visibility.

Visibility can die off very quickly, so it is crucial that you are persistent in maintaining good public relations and continuing to work towards greater visibility after EVERY single success you encounter.

This guarantees that your message and brand will spread exponentially, and that your initial spike in traffic will turn into an upward trend.

What are some other techniques to garner publicity? What are some reasons you may have initially attracted this spike in traffic?

You have just passed a huge milestone in your business. What do you do next?

Don’t rest yet! There is still plenty for you to do. However, remember that there are also plenty of things NOT to do.

1. DON’T Try to Avoid Future Failure

Failure is an essential preamble to success. Chances are, you probably have experienced many failures before attaining this most recent success.

If you want to enjoy future success, don’t start avoiding failure. Continue to embrace it and seek to learn from setbacks whenever possible.

Failure is an important step in the process of trial and error. Thus, don’t avoid failure as it will only bring about more inaction.

2. DON’T Think You are Immune to Failure or Making Mistakes

On the flip side, don’t allow yourself to think that you are immune to failure, either.

Experiencing success does not equal continuing success. You are still vulnerable to failure, so while you shouldn’t avoid failure, you also shouldn’t take unnecessary risks or continue pursuing a project that is clearly unprofitable.

3. DON’T Stop Making Future Goals

Just because you have accomplished this goal doesn’t mean you can start to take it easy.

If you want to continue to enjoy success, you need to keep setting ambitious goals and consistently stretch yourself even further.

Allowing too much time between goal setting will bring about complacency. You’ll also overestimate your strengths, underestimate your weaknesses and forsake continued growth.

Your newest success should motivate you to reach even higher. You have found a technique that works–this is a great indicator for you to keep moving forward, not stopping.

4. DON’T Let a Success go by Unrewarded

Just because you shouldn’t stop setting goals doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your recent achievements.

Giving yourself and your staff a reward for an achievement will tie success with a good experience. This is important because it will allow you to look forward to the next success, since you know a reward is coming.

5. DON’T Ignore the Failures You’ve Made

Remember, failures are excellent opportunities to learn. Make sure that after experiencing a success, you reflect on the failures you have made so you know what mistakes can be avoided in the future.

Neglecting previous failures will make your next success that much more difficult to accomplish and will make you dramatically less competitive.

6. DON’T Ignore Successes

While you should identify what you have done wrong during your road to success, you should also identify what you have done correctly. This is extremely important since you will want to know what steps you took that helped contribute to your success in a positive way.

Being able to identify these steps will allow you to emulate these best practices again, so future success comes quicker.

Are there any other things you absolutely SHOULDN’T do after experiencing success?

Pretend you have an important position you have to fill. Do you hire from the outside or do you promote from within?

This is a very important question you have to answer, and it is imperative that you weight the costs and benefits of each strategy.

Why You Should Promote from Within

Increased Employee Motivation

Promoting from within is a great way to motivate your employees. It lets them know that their goals for career growth can be attained within your company with just a little bit of hard work.

Promoting from within ensures your staff won’t feel as if their job status will remain static while under your employ. Instead, your staff is given an opportunity to grow and further their career.

Not only will this make your employees want to stay and work for you, but will also make them want to work harder to receive a promotion.

Retain Top Talent

If you don’t promote from within, your staff will be under the impression that they will have to leave your company in order to grow.

Losing talented staff members is expensive and potentially damaging to your business. By promoting from within, you increase your chances of retaining talented employees and ensuring they wind up in a position that suits them and your company well.

You Provide a Culture that Values Hard Work

Having a promote from within policy reinforces the value of hard work. Your staff will understand that they have a chance to succeed in a new position if they work harder and prove themselves worthy for that position.

This will not only motivate people to work harder for a desired position, but your employees will also appreciate the hard work of others. This is great for productivity.

Your Staff Will Know They are Favored

You don’t want your staff to feel as if they are less favored than an outsider with experience at another company. You want your staff to feel as if experience within your company is preferred above experience elsewhere.

You also want your staff to know that their history with your company has not gone unnoticed and that you’d prefer to hire someone who has already provided you with something of great value.

It will be Easier to Identify Qualified Candidates

It is much easier to identify a qualified candidate who you have already worked with. You know their credentials, qualifications, areas of improvement and if they are capable of handing a new position.

This makes it very easy to select a candidate. You have firsthand knowledge of ones experience and expertise, rather than just a resume. It is a much safer bet to hire based on what you have already observed in ones job performance and it will also save you a lot of money in hiring costs.

Less Training of Candidates

For new hires, there is always an seasoning period where new staff members must get used to the new culture, company and social environment.

This is not so with existing employees. Promote-from-within employees need not take company-level training or get acclimated with the social environment. All they need is training for their new position.

This makes for less expensive training and less loss of productivity.

The Benefits of Outside Hiring

You’ll Bring in a New Perspective

This is probably the most important reason to hire someone from the outside.

Having a certain way of doing things in a company is great. But over time, employees may get a little too used to doing things a certain way, and problems will begin to go by unnoticed.

Also, better ways of doing something can go by undiscovered.

An outside hire has experience in other companies, possibly even with competitors, who may know of some industry best practices you can benefit from.

An outside hire can also bring a fresh perspective during brainstorming sessions. Vetted staff members may be slowly getting uniform in their idea generation and may have developed a closed mind to new ideas.

Bringing in a new outside hire is a great chance to introduce new ideas and give your existing staff a quick burst in new ways of thinking.

Replenish Your Labor Supply

If you only maintain a promote from within policy, your are eventually going to run out of employees in certain positions.

Hiring candidates from the outside not only allows you to bring in new perspectives, but also gives you more staff members to develop. You’ll have more flexibility with promotions, and not have to worry about running out of staff members in certain positions.

You Can Hire Someone with Existing Experience in the Position

Hiring someone from the outside gives you the opportunity to leverage existing experience for the position you are looking to fill.

While a new hire may need some training to get acclimated with the company, they may require less training to effectively manage or lead a department.

Some productivity might be lost during a period of acclimation, but an experienced new hire will require less time to get comfortable with the duties of this new position.

Less Risk of Potentially Harmful Cliques

Existing employees might have established friendships or cliques with other staff members.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but can cause trouble if one gets promoted ahead of the others. It can create tension among friends, or it can invite collusion or fraud.

Bringing in someone new ensures this isn’t the case. A new person might also be able to identify potentially dangerous cliques you might have overlooked.

Training Flaws will be More Apparent

Existing employees already know what your training is like and will know which material to pick and choose from.

New hires, on the other hand, will more easily make a training flaw visible, since they won’t be able to distinguish between useful and not useful practices.

This may sound like a bad thing, but being able to identify training flaws in your programs is a great opportunity to improve, so you can better train future employees and ensure these mistakes will not be made again.

Gives a Greater Sense of Competition to Existing Employees

If employees know they have to compete with outside hires, they may work extra hard to try to get an open position.

Having a feeling of entitlement to a position is not good for morale or productivity. So by establishing that selecting an outside hire is an option, you ensure your staff won’t try to slip anything past you.

. . .

Ultimately, you want a balance between promoting from within and outside hiring. Since there are very good reasons to promote from within and hire from the outside, doing both will allow you to mitigate the drawbacks of each and enjoy the benefits of both.

Are there any other benefits or drawbacks to the promote from within or outside hire strategies?

While change is an issue we face more than any other, it is is also something we have the most difficulty dealing with.

Between identifying the actions needed to handle change, to getting your entire staff to embrace new ways of doing things, change management is a daunting practice that many managers dread.

If you are undergoing a period of transition in your company or industry, here are some things to keep in mind to help streamline the change process.

Identify the Problem

In order to start the change process, you must first identify a problem that needs to be addressed. Due to new technologies, trends and changes in consumer demand, this may require you to be proactive in identifying targets for change before your competitors do, which can be difficult.

You can identify existing problems by:

• Conducting surveys
• Interviewing staff
• Conducting a Root Cause Analysis

Spotting emerging trends can be a lot more difficult. This may require you to monitor:

• Consumer blog posts
• Discussion boards
• Google trends for search patterns

This can help you see what customers are beginning to ask for, but are not getting.

Make the Problem Known

Your staff will never take any change initiative seriously if they see nothing wrong with the current way of doing things.

This is why it is very important the identified problem is communicated with the staff so they understand the need for change. If they understand that there is a problem, they will be more than willing to assist in the change process.

Involve Staff in Change Process

It can prove to be very difficult to get your staff to embrace change initiatives. The best way to motivate your staff to accept these changes is to involve them in the entire change process.

Your staff is a huge resource of information. Use their knowledge to your advantage. Ask them their opinions and advice on how to solve identified problems. You can also conduct surveys, interview them or even observe their daily work.

You should also involve them in the decision making process. Inform your staff that their opinions are very important and will be factored into the decision.

Once your staff has has helped to decide on the solution, they should also be involved in implementing the change. This is just as important because you want your staff to have ownership over the entire change process.

Watch for Competitor’s Successful Reactions

If your competitors have identified a change or trend before you, use your their actions as a guide for what initiatives you should take.

If this is the case, your competitors have likely already experienced failure with certain actions and success with others. Watch for this and plan accordingly.

Hire Change Consultants

It may be difficult to do a lot of this yourself, as getting an entire company to change in an organized way can be hard to do.

Consider hiring a change consultant if the change is especially far-reaching. This will help your company to adjust more quickly, and the consultant will be able to advise you on what specific actions to take, especially with structure and incentives.

Institute Training

You can’t expect your staff to take change seriously or implement the change successfully if they aren’t trained in the new way of doing things.

If you don’t offer training for your staff, it won’t seem like a priority. Ensure that the training is relevant to your staff’s daily tasks and will be useful right away.

Ensure Your Structure is Aligned With Your New Strategy

If you really want these changes to stick, you need to ensure that you restructure your organization as necessary to complement the new changes that are made. This may even include new management positions, new departments or departmental restructuring.

You also want to ensure your incentive system reflects the changes that were made. Your changes won’t stick very long if your employees are being rewarded for doing things the old way. Reward them for doing things the new way and the changes will be embraced with ease.

New Changes Must First be Embraced by the Top

If you want your staff to embrace any changes, your top management (including yourself) must embrace these changes first. This is because your staff won’t take any change seriously enough if the management isn’t practicing it.

Not only must the top management embrace these changes first, they must also be the ones who espouse these new changes the most. Your management must be the very embodiment of these new changes so your staff sees how important it really is.

Layoffs Don’t Help

In the face of new trends, economic troubles, loss or any difficulty, companies deal with change through layoffs.

What these companies don’t realize is that WORK doesn’t disappear. So if you layoff staff, the work remains and must now be the responsibility of your remaining staff members.

The remaining staff members are already feeling guilty as being the “survivors”…thus they won’t be that motivated to take on the extra work. This will result in a loss of productivity, worker morale and your once bright and vibrant culture will begin to erode.

In short, don’t layoff. If you need to cut expenses, involve your staff and ask them for advice. Inform your staff that you need to cut costs in order to prevent layoffs. You’d be surprised at how much they’d participate. They’ll be grateful that they aren’t being forced out of a job, and will look for every way to save money for the business.

Are there any other useful tips for leading change? Anything to watch out for?

We’re taught at an early age that failure is a bad thing. When we do poorly on tests, we receive a failing grade.

When a business goes bankrupt or dies, it is said to fail.

We are constantly reminded every day that failure is something negative. But what about the positives of failure? There are so many benefits to failing, I find it difficult to argue that failure is anything close to negative.

Failure is a Learning Experience

Above all else, failure is an opportunity to learn; and there is a lesson to be learned in every loss we encounter.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
-Thomas A. Edison

This quote is great at stripping failure of its negative connotation. Failure is simply a way something “won’t work”. Instead of being a “lack of success”, it becomes part of the process of trial and error.

Thus, each idea we try that doesn’t work brings us that much closer to an idea that does. To that end, experiencing failure is a necessary step in arriving at success.

Keep in mind, it is very important you learn from every failure and that the same failure isn’t experienced twice. This could lead to unnecessary wastes of time and money and even possibly fatal mistakes.

Failure is Something You Have to Get Used To

Failure, like marketing or accounting is a normal business process. Because of this, failure is something you must get used to in order to survive.

Failure is such a common occurrence it should come to be expected. Thus, ensure you develop thicker skin if setbacks seem to bother you.

Get used to the fact that you will experience more failures than successes. This doesn’t make you a failure, but an even more savvy business owner.

Identifying opportunities and trying to capitalize on them are valuable skills that will inevitably cause failure. You aren’t a prophet, so it is impossible for you to know which ideas will be profitable. The only way to know for sure is to try.

Probably the most important thing to remember about failure is that it can’t be avoided. Trying to avoid failure will only prevent you from acting–and there is more danger in not acting than in failure itself.

Failure Shouldn’t be Taken Lightly

Failures must be taken seriously. Because mistakes are expensive, they should be studied to ensure a lesson is identified.

Even more important is to make sure you are able to identify a failure when it occurs. If you can’t spot a failure when it happens, mistakes will continue until you learn to fix them. This can be extremely costly and potentially fatal for your business.

Thus, you must handle failures with care by ensuring you can identify them when they occur. Then, be sure to pinpoint the lesson to be learned.

Are there any other reasons why failure isn’t bad? Does the downside of failure outweigh the benefits?

Does your product need to be innovative in order to succeed, or does it just have to be unique?

Can you be innovative in other ways rather than offering an innovative product?

Sure you can! While innovation can help with marketing and lead generation, it can also make you leaner, more flexible and more creative.

While innovation might not be a necessity under normal circumstances, this economic environment requires you to innovate in order to stand out.

Below are different ways you can innovate in order to be as competitive as possible.

Product or service innovation

Innovative products are those that might:

• Have distinct features and benefits
• Perform a task in a new or inventive way
• Utilize new or experimental technology

These products normally carry a larger markup because they attract consumers who are willing to pay steep premiums for newer technology.

The benefits of offering innovative products include enjoying large margins and high-paying customers. Also, you may often be regarded as an industry leader.

The down side to innovation is that you always have to innovate in order to continually enjoy these benefits. This can be very costly.

You don’t HAVE to innovate. Instead, you can have another Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Innovation is only one type of USP, but there are also many others. Creating a different USP is a great way to differentiate yourself from your competition while also attracting many targeted customers without the expense of innovation.

Innovative management

Your business can have innovative management through:

• Management training
• Finding new ways to motivate employees
• Granting autonomy and empowerment
• Allowing your employees to self-manage

You want to come up with unique and creative ways to lead, control and organize your staff. Being innovative through management can save you money, improve the workplace culture, encourage openness and even raise productivity. In turn, this can make you more competitive, adaptive to change and have cheaper operations.

Innovative marketing

Your marketing strategies could be innovative with:

• Unique marketing messages (ie: Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads)
• New channels of marketing (ie: ads in Video Games)
• Who you advertise to
• Creative ways to retain customers

The benefit to innovative marketing is that you’ll find new and effective methods to attract customers in ways that your competition has never even though of.

Innovative processes and manufacturing

If you can find a new way to create a product, run a department, or even measure the output of a process, you are innovating. This process innovation should usually result in less resource usage without sacrificing output quality.

This innovation may result in simplified production, higher quality products and/or lower production and overhead costs. This can often give you the option to either reduce your price, or enjoy a higher profit margin.

Innovative culture

Google is considered extremely innovative in its workplace culture. Between the Wi-Fi enabled buses they send to pick up their staff, granting their employees time to work on any project they choose or even the casual work environment they provide, Google’s reputation for being a great place to work has quickly become legendary, all thanks to their culture.

Because of their well renowned culture, they attract top talent and always have a large pool of applicants. This allows them to hire quality employees who can keep the company humming at and incredibly efficient level.

By having your own innovative culture, you too can attract superstars. These kinds of superstars can do wonders for your company’s success, and can help it to grow even faster than if you were running it by yourself.

Innovative office environment

Having a green work environment, aesthetically pleasing interior decorating, ergonomically friendly offices and desks or even something as simple as providing a means to work from home are all examples of ways you can innovate.

Providing an innovative physical work environment can be a great way to increase productivity and boost worker morale. This can ultimately improve the quality of your output while decreasing your level of input.

Innovative use of technology

Twitter has gained an enormous amount of popularity in the past month. It has proven to be a great communication channel, marketing channel, blogging channel and in my opinion, the best social network medium out there.

This is just an example of ONE innovation that individuals and companies are all taking advantage of. Innovative uses of technology can save you time and money when communicating, marketing, managing, motivating, manufacturing or in pretty much any business process.

I think a great example of innovative uses of technology was in President Obama’s election campaign. He utilized Twitter, Facebook, Text Messaging, all of which allowed him to more intimately target and market to the demographic of students, twenty somethings and the technologically inclined. No other presidential candidate has ever used technology to the extent that Obama had in a campaign.

While I can’t say if this was the deciding factor in his campaign, it certainly helped and it certainly was successful in getting him a lot of support from this demographic.

Thus, finding innovative ways to use technology will allow you to better communicate with and relate to your demographic. Also, it can reduce any business expense or improve product or service quality.

Are there any other ways businesses can innovate in order to become more competitive?