Team Building

The Best Strategy to Engage Your Team and Save Money

One of the biggest questions that CEOs and other business leaders ask is, “What can I do to quickly engage my team around saving money now and do the same with profit?” It seems like a big, complicated question, but the answer is much easier than it seems. The best part is, it’ll take you 60 minutes or less! So how do you do it?

Give Them Post-Its

The first thing you want to do to engage your employees is to give them Post-It notes. Sounds odd, but it works and this is how:

Gather all of your employees in the boardroom and then give them each 10 Post-It notes. Ask them to write down specific ideas, one per Post-It, on what the company can do to save money, increase sales, and increase margin.

Good ideas take time, so be patient. Give your employees at least a full five minutes to come up with their ideas before you move on to the next step.

Share

Once all your employees have finished writing down their ideas, have each person stand up and read what they have written on their Post-It notes. Then, ask them to put them all up on the wall.

After all the notes are up on the wall, have your employees vote on them. You can vote by putting a tick mark at the bottom of the Post-It notes. The number of Post-It notes divided by the number of people equals the number of votes each person should get.

Eliminate and Implement

Once the voting is complete, count up the tick marks and eliminate the Post-It notes with zero or very low votes. Then, pick out the Post-It notes with the most votes and act on the ideas that are easy, fast to do, and cost little or nothing at all.

See? In less than an hour, ideas were found, voted on, and chosen to be used. Alone, you’d never have the variety of options you’d get this way and by allowing your employees to participate, they feel a lot more connected to the ideas.

“When employees are engaged, they are more likely to invest in the work they do which leads to a higher quality of work produced. Engaged organizations have double the rate of success compared to less engaged organizations” – Social Chorus

Your employees are going to be much more invested in the ideas this way because they feel as if their voices were heard. If they feel this way, they’ll work a lot harder to make the ideas come to life.

Do you have any other strategies that you use to gain ideas and/or engage your employees? Let us know in the comments below!

If you have questions or would like more information, I’d be happy to help. Please send an email, and my team will get in touch with you!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2016 and has been edited for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

How to Plan a Corporate Retreat: The Details

Corporate retreats are often intended for the purposes of general relaxation, team-building, and brainstorming of new ideas. Members can relax, share experiences encountered throughout the work period, and get to know each other personally, all in a relaxed, tension-free atmosphere. This is also the place where the junior employees can find a chance to interact freely with their superiors.

In most cases, when planning a corporate retreat, a small group is allocated the task of coming up with topics, methods, ideas, and activities that could potentially lead to a successful organizational retreat. The activities that see the light of day are ones that your group agrees on. However, outside of the new ideas, there are some activities that appear on nearly every corporate retreat. These are the details that you need to plan for every retreat. So what are they?

Dinner Presentations

You didn’t think you were just going to have a regular dinner every night, did you? Dinner is a healthy time when the day is just coming to an end, everyone has had a series of experiences throughout the day, and is all set to relax. This is the perfect opportunity for people to use this quality time to share and talk in the form of short presentations.

The casual, no-rush atmosphere created by a good dinner makes for the perfect time for general and self-disclosure. Get to know the people that don’t tend to talk about themselves in conversation by making it into a presentation!

Games

You can’t plan a corporate retreat without games! Games are the perfect team-building tool. There are a whole lot of them that can be played at all different times and all different places during a company retreat.

You could plan for four or five different games to be played by different groups. Sometimes, you see games that people have invented that are no men/women games or men vs. women games. Don’t play these! Your corporate retreat is about everyone getting to know each other. Let people play together without isolating their built connections by gender.

Some dice and cards are great as both indoor and outdoor games. If you bring the game along, it will naturally get played. No need to push people to play. They will have the most fun if they start and continue playing naturally.

Simulations

Corporate retreats are often used to prepare people for the coming year or work period. Other than to relax their minds and cement relations between them, at corporate retreats your employees are normally trained on certain relational and essential skills.

In simulations, you’ll typically give lessons and ask participants to act them out. That’s how adults learn!

These learned skills could involve training people to get better in their time management, the delegation of duties, problem-solving, and situational leadership. Retreats are one of the best times to offer training in such skills as there is more space and time free from distraction than any other time of year. Without work to distract them, people can learn way better.

There are many more details and activities you can plan for a corporate retreat, but these are the ones that are always going to appear. Plan this out and make your next corporate retreat the best it can be! What do you want to do next time? Where do you want to go?

If you have questions or would like more information, I’d be happy to help. Please send an email, and my team will get in touch with you!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in February 2016 and has been edited for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Stir the Kool-Aid

Years ago, my friend and brilliant speaker, Jack Daly, pushed me to ask myself, “What one thing did I do today to raise the energy level of my team?”

When I think about it, it makes sense.  The speed of the leader is the speed of the group.

One of your jobs as a leader, no matter where in the company you are, is to raise the energy level of your team. On the flip side, also ask yourself what you did to destroy the energy of the team?

I distinctly remember the times I’ve taken an entire team and destroyed their energy and passion for days by saying the wrong thing or by publicly coming down on them.  I’d even feel myself doing it and didn’t stop.  I had to learn how to listen to my conscience and let it guide me.  Trying to slow down before I’d say something would help, but it was hard for me.

In the must read book, The One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard nailed it when he stated, “Two strokes for one poke.”  Others call it a “shit sandwich,” which basically means that if you give constructive criticism, try to sandwich it between things you are happy about and can praise the employee for doing.

By being a better communicator, you’ll produce employees that understand your goals and communicate well to others on the team.

As you walk into the office each day, think about the things you can do to raise the energy in your workplace.  Be yourself, but find ways to stir the Kool-Aid every day.

As my mentor said, if you want and awesome company culture “focus on building something slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion.”  To really build that cult (culture) you have to always be looking to raise the energy of the group.  Find a way.

I’d love to hear what you do in your company to raise the energy level of your team.

For more information on this topic, check out: Building a World Class Culture.

No, YOU Find THEM!

guy in gunsiteThe best potential employees aren’t looking for a job because they’ve already got one. That’s why you have to poach them.

In close to thirty years of my professional life, I’ve only had two job interviews. The rest of the time I was poached by one company while working for another.

I always advise the CEOs that I mentor that there are lots of reasons why finding the right people is hard, but if you want your business to be exceptional, your staff must be exceptional people. It takes work but it’s worth the investment of time.

I had to remind someone of this while on a multi-city speaking engagement. At a talk in Sydney, Australia, a member of the audience commented, “What you don’t realize is we have a really tight economy in Sydney right now, and there are just no employees out there. We have the lowest unemployment in forty years.” I replied that I felt her pain—in Vancouver, we were at the lowest in fifty years! But honestly, I asked, what difference does it make? Even in tight job markets the great employees still exist, they’re just working somewhere else.

Poach them!  Show them why working for you is WAY better!

Monkeys Looking Sideways

If Monkeys could be Business Mentors
If Monkeys could be Business Mentors

I threw out the corporate 360 Reviews years ago in favor of something I made up that I call ‘Monkeys Looking Sideways’.

Years ago at a seminar I heard a story about monkeys in a tree.  When the monkey at the top looked down all he saw was smiling monkeys looking up.  However, the monkeys below had an entirely different view.

It was at this seminar that I thought about doing 360 Reviews live and in front of the rest of the team.  I always try to build teams that embrace healthy conflict and that want to build more trust.  Well open communication like this takes trust up to an awesome level.  I built this exercise so everyone on a team would know what everyone else thought and they’d hear it in person so they could grow together.

The Monkeys Looking Sideways exercise works like this.

Essentially it is a verbal, in person, group 360 feedback. Ideally get everyone out of the office for a half to a full day.  It’s a great exercise to do on company or team retreats too.

1) Give everyone 1 pad of Post It Notes and a pen.
2) Do the review of the groups leader or CEO first.
3) Have each person write down the TOP 5 things that the person being reviewed:

a) Should continue
b) Should improve on

4) Then with the person being review staying in their seats, have one person at a time stand up and read out each post it note.  Start with all the positives first and then they read the stuff to work on second.
5) The person being reviewed can only say thank you or ask a clarifying question.  There is no debate.
6) Have all of the Post It Notes put up on a flip chart and give them to the person being reviewed so they can type them up and refer to them in their one-on-one coaching meetings with their supervisor over the year to keep working on improving.
7) Repeat the process for each person in the room.

This exercise done properly takes about 45 min per person but will be way more effective than the garbage that comes out of any online or 3rd party 360 Review Process.

In addition to using it in your company try it with an EO, YPO Forum or TEC/Vistage group on a retreat too.  It’d be awesome…

Who Should Be On Your Bus?

Further the bus
In Jim Collins book Good to Great, he describes the process of hiring as getting the right people ‘on the bus,’ the wrong people ‘off the bus,’ and ‘everybody in the right seats.’ He just never really explains how to make all of that happen.

Collins also talked about the ‘Merry Pranksters’ who drove around the United States back in the early sixties on their bus called ‘Further,’ tripping on acid. I’m not suggesting that you trip on acid to build your business–you’d get some weird press and some truly unexpected consequences if you did–but Collins talks about this group because when they were planning the trip around the United States that would last a year, they needed to make sure they only had people on the bus that they wanted to spend time with, and with whom they could have meaningful experiences.

In addition to finding the right people, the Merry Pranksters needed to get the negative people, the low performing people, or the high performing people who had bad values, off their bus. Collins does a good job of using the Pranksters as a model for building your team.

It’s worth adding that business people do not obsess enough about the wrong people getting off the bus. This is crucial to completing Collins’ final step in the process, which is getting people into the right seats.

As a business coach and mentor, I help companies get the right people into their organization and the wrong people out of it, so they can begin to really drive the business faster and further.

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Meetings Suck: Turning One Of The Most Loathed Elements Of Business Into One Of The Most Valuable

We all know that meetings suck, right?

You hear it all the time. It’s the one thing that almost everyone in business can agree on.

Except it’s not actually true… 

Meetings don’t suck.

We just suck at running meetings.   

When done right, meetings not only work, they make people and companies better.

In Meetings Suck, world renowned business expert and growth guru Cameron Herold teaches you how to use focused, time effective meetings to help you and your company soar.

This book shows you immediately actionable, step-by-step systems that ensure that you and everyone in your organization improves your meetings, right away.

In the process, you’ll turn meetings that suck into meetings that work. 

In life, we always hear about people who’ve made huge decisions from their gut – without data.Today, I want you to make a decision, not only from your gut, but also from some data.  A decision that is only $12 per employee but will be priceless for your business.

Right now, your gut is telling you something is wrong with your company’s meetings.  You KNOW everyone complains about meetings.

People HATE going to them, they HATE running them, and they really have NO idea which meetings are truly necessary but they hold meetings simply because they think that is what they SHOULD do.

Even some of the smartest CEOs in the world complain about meetings – Elon Musk publicly told employees at Tesla & SpaceX to walk out of meetings if they weren’t being run properly.

I sent Elon a message saying that wasn’t going to fix anything – the key is to fix the root of the problem – NOT continue to ignore why meetings suck.

A Meeting is – Any phone call, video call or occasion where 2 or more people meet to discuss or work-through office topics.

Most employees on average spend 1-2 hours per day in meetings.

And likely, none of those employees – front-line staff or leaders – have had any training on how to attend meetings or participate in them, LET ALONE How to RUN THEM.

Consider this…

If the Average employee spends just 1 Hour per day in meetings – that’s 1/8th of their time.

If the Average employee earns $50,000 per year.

And they’re spending 1/8th of their time in meetings, that means you’re paying $6,250 dollars per year for just ONE employee to attend meetings.

The reality is, employees spend 1/8th of their time – and 1/8th of your company’s payroll – doing something they have literally NO idea how to do.

The Reality is…

95% of employees are booking & leading meetings – and they have NEVER been trained on how to run them.

95% of employees have had NO training on how to show up and participate in the meetings they attend daily.

And 95% of employees and companies have no idea what meetings are even necessary to hold.

Meetings CAN be hugely effective – IF you know how to run them

Meetings don’t SUCK, we just SUCK at running meetings. 

Investing $15 per employee – to help ensure the $50,000 a year you spend on them is an obvious and easy choice.

This could be the most impactful $15 you’ll ever spend and will save the company’s money, time and resources instantly.

Buying a copy of Meetings Suck for 100% of your employees and having them read it this month will have a huge impact on your company’s success.

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Free PR: How To Get Chased By The Press Without Hiring A PR Firm

Public relations has always been an essential part of doing business which is probably why you’re shelling out big money to an outside PR firm. But the truth is that you don’t need them. You already have all the necessary tools in-house to do as good a job as the so-called experts. 

Cameron Herold and Adrian Salamunovic have taught thousands of company execs how to exploit free media coverage and ditch these expensive, often ineffective outsiders. 

Cameron & Adrian have also built in-house PR teams, spent decades learning how to generate Free PR and how to leverage public relations to complement their sales and marketing strategy. 

In Free PR, you’ll learn how the media world operates while you gain invaluable insider knowledge and actionable advice on how to: 

  • Build your own in-house PR team
  • Provide effective interviews
  • Score great media coverage for free with just a few easy steps 

Landing public relations coverage for yourself and your company is a powerful tool to help elevate your personal brand. PR is easier to generate than marketing, PR is easier to leverage than marketing and PR is more cost effective than marketing. In other words, Public Relations is more critical than ever in growing your brand and your business. 

You’ve got more passion, commitment, a larger stake, and a deeper understanding of your business than any outside PR firm could ever have. So stop wasting money and take the reins yourself.  Learn the secrets to landing TONS of Free PR for your company.

What they’re saying:

“I think PR is the core for promoting any business. Public relations acquires customers! That’s what’s cool about this book.”

– Kevin O’Leary,  Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank

“The ultimate guidebook for those looking to get press, grow their brand, and get in front of the masses. Free PR is the roadmap you’ve been looking for.”

– Peter Shankman, Founder, Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

“Adrian and Cameron will show you the secrets of getting massive exposure for your business. This book is packed with actionable insights from two guys that actually know how to to do it.”

– Dan Martell,  Serial Entrepreneur & Investor (Intercom.io, Unbounce)

“I told Cameron to write the book on generating free PR. I’m excited to see that he’s finally sharing his secrets with the world. This is a must read for any entrepreneurial company and marketing team.”

– Verne Harnish, Founder of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and author of Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)

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Vivid Vision: A Remarkable Tool For Aligning Your Business Around a Shared Vision of the Future

Many corporations have slick, flashy mission statements that ultimately do little to motivate employees and less to impress customers, investors, and partners. 

But there is a way to share your excitement for the future of your company in a clear, compelling, and powerful way and entrepreneur and business growth expert Cameron Herold can show you how. 

Vivid Vision is a revolutionary tool that will help owners, CEOs, and senior managers create inspirational, detailed, and actionable three-year mission statements for their companies. In this easy-to-follow guide, Herold walks organization leaders through the simple steps to creating their own Vivid Vision, from brainstorming to sharing the ideas to using the document to drive progress in the years to come. 

By focusing on mapping out how you see your company looking and feeling in every category of business, without getting bogged down by data and numbers or how it will happen, Vivid Vision creates a holistic road map to success that will get all of your teammates passionate about the big picture. 

Your company is your dream, one that you want to share with your staff, clients, and stakeholders. Vivid Vision is the tool you need to make that dream a reality.

miracle-morning

The Miracle Morning for
Entrepreneurs: Elevate Your SELF to
Elevate Your BUSINESS

READY FOR EXPLOSIVE GROWTH AS AN ENTREPRENEUR AND ACCELERATED SUCCESS IN THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?

A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth — while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth. Each topic the author covers — from creating a vision for the company’s future to learning how to generate free PR for a developing company — is squarely focused on the end goal: doubling the size of the entrepreneur’s company in three years or less. A down-to-earth action plan: Herold’s experienced-based advice never gets bogged down in generalities or theory. Instead, he offers a wealth of practical tips, including: How to design meetings for maximum efficiency; How to hire top-quality talent; How to grow in particularly tough markets; How to put together a board of advisors — even for a smaller company; How even the busy entrepreneur can achieve a work/life balance.

READY FOR EXPLOSIVE GROWTH AS AN ENTREPRENEUR AND ACCELERATED SUCCESS IN THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?

Hal Elrod’sThe Miracle Morning has helped redefine the mornings and the lives of millions of readers since 2012. Since then, careers have been launched, goals have been met, and dreams have been realized, all through the power of the Miracle Morning’s six Life S.A.V.E.R.S.

THESE SIX DAILY PRACTICES WILL FUEL YOUR EFFORTS TO CREATE AND SUSTAIN POSITIVE CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE.

Now The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs brings you these principles in a whole new light—alongside the Entrepreneurial Elevation Principles and the Entrepreneur’s Elevation Skills. These are essential skills that you need to create a successful business and personal life. Cameron Herold— Bestselling Author and a widely-respected expert on entrepreneurial mindset—brings his wisdom and insight to you using Hal Elrod’s powerful Miracle Morning framework.

DEVELOP A VISION FOR YOUR BUSINESS, AND BECOME THE INFLUENTIAL AND INSPIRING LEADER YOU WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO BE.

The principles and skills you’ll find in this book will help you to channel your passion and achieve balance in a remarkable new way. – Learn why mornings matter more than you think – Learn how to master your own self-leadership and accelerate your personal development – Learn how to manage your energy—physical, mental, and emotional – Learn how to implement Hal Elrod’s invaluable Life S.A.V.E.R.S. in your daily routine – And much more… You’re already an entrepreneur. Now discover how to take your success to the next level by first taking yourself to the next level. The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs is your roadmap to masterfully building an empire with a powerful vision, utilizing your areas of personal genius, with the right team at your side.

Start giving your business and your life the very best opportunities for success, right now.

A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth — while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth. Each topic the author covers — from creating a vision for the company’s future to learning how to generate free PR for a developing company — is squarely focused on the end goal: doubling the size of the entrepreneur’s company in three years or less. A down-to-earth action plan: Herold’s experienced-based advice never gets bogged down in generalities or theory. Instead, he offers a wealth of practical tips, including: How to design meetings for maximum efficiency; How to hire top-quality talent; How to grow in particularly tough markets; How to put together a board of advisors — even for a smaller company; How even the busy entrepreneur can achieve a work/life balance.