No Excuses

It takes a lot of discipline to reach your goals and it’s easy to find excuses in the form of circumstance, technology failures, team mistakes or in timing. If you’re ready to take a no excuses approach to getting results in your business here are four action steps to take in your business.

One of the things I hear from clients and colleagues with alarming frequency is how much guilt and anger they feel when employees slack off. While a traditional office environment may have extended smoke breaks, water cooler talk and useless meetings, in the online world this often manifests as missed deadlines, useless meetings, contractors who are MIA for days (or weeks!) at a time and a lack of proactive communication.

It brings up a lot of worry and fear that we’ve been discussing lately. But before you can address the fears from your employees around systems you’ve got to face your own about holding everyone accountable and creating a no excuses approach to business.

In Jim Collins’ book Good to Great he discusses cultures of great companies that are rigorous and disciplined:

“The good-to-great companies built a consistent system with clear constraints, but they also gave people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system. They hired self-disciplined people who didn’t need to be managed, and then managed the system, not the people.”

But how do you create that if you’re working with a team that does not value discipline?

The first step is to commit yourself to your business. Leadership has to come from the top and if you do not embody the standards that you want to see in your business then your words are meaningless.

What does that mean? It means treat your business like a business and your highest priority when you’re working. No more shuffling about between personal and professional projects or deciding not to follow through on that task you determined to complete just last week.

Creating systems or checklists or appointments is only half the battle. To become disciplined and create a culture within your team that values discipline you have to follow through. This does not mean you ignore everything that is not related to your business but please, set boundaries and respect them. Work when you have business hours and you can fully enjoy your time off.

The second step is to expect results. This begins with clear roles, responsibilities and expectations throughout the team (if you have fuzzy or ambiguous expectations then it’s time to evaluate and clear up your communication).

It may be scary to say “I want 12 new clients in March” or “Our goal is $10,000 in income over the next six weeks” but the only way you can effectively reach your goals is to set them in the first place. If you’re unclear about what results you expect then your team will be unclear.

Begin with clarity and commit to your goals and you’ll have the right mindset to accept no excuses along the way.

The third step is to actually have an action plan! You wouldn’t plan for a vacation and then the day of the trip turn to your family and say ‘so… how we gonna get to Hawaii?’ Once you make the decision to reach a goal you need to develop a plan.

If you’re selling a program, package of services or product, figure out how you’re going to market. Then you can go about executing the plan.

The fourth, and possibly most difficult, step is to evaluate the goals against reality. Remember that culture of discipline? It doesn’t work if you do not bring to account the results that were achieved.

If you needed 10 sales and got 2 what can you do better next time? If you wanted 100 attendees and had 50 where was your marketing weak? If you expected to blog twice a week and only did once a month where was the breakdown?

This step is so critical to the learning process and it reminds me of all those hours we spent in primary school. Remember when you’d get a test back and the teacher would take some time to go over the answers? That was ideal because you could understand where mistakes were made or misunderstandings exist. And the goal is that questions from a quiz or chapter test would be showing up again on the final and you had to learn or risk another bad grade.

The only time we would cheerfully bypass that learning time was after the final exam. After all, there’s no reason to learn this anymore because no more tests! Also, summer is calling.

In your business each challenge you must overcome and each goal you are trying to reach is another test along the way. And if you don’t stop to understand where you may have misunderstood or failed to execute, then you’re going to keep failing the test. You may not get an F but we all know there’s a nice gap between failing, doing okay, and exceptional results.

If you skip even one step in this process then you’re setting yourself up for failure and the benchmark of a “no excuses” culture is one that knows the necessary steps for success and executes with excellence every time.

You may have employees who are letting you down and not living up to their promise and who will need to be addressed directly, but the first step is to ensure that you have self-discipline and create a culture that honors discipline in others. Oftentimes the worst offenders will opt out (i.e. quit) when it becomes apparent that they can no longer get away with bad behavior and those who may be developing bad habits will come back to the good ones.