Is Your Business Model Careful?

Your Business Atmosphere

The atmosphere of your business leadership will govern how the attitude of your employees is constructed.  Your employees are the front line of defense to your customer relations.  Any weaknesses your business model carries will need to be protected from the potential damage those weaknesses generate in the experience your customer feels.  Your employees can go a long way into making those weaknesses become invisible.  If your business model is not a fun place to work, trust me, your employees are making that very clear to your customer base.  Quit expecting your employees to be perfect human beings with the wish that they would somehow save your butt.  You may not like the relationship you have with the sensitive responsibilities your business model requires and it may seem as if those requirements are like a steady balance of walking fast in a narrow canoe.  Whatever the case, the goodness in your business model atmosphere depends heavily upon your careful respect.  You need to learn how to walk more carefully.

Your business model sings well when it knows how to sing.  It also gets burned on the edges when it has material worth igniting.  When the leadership of your business model decides to be fun, respectful, consistent, exciting, challenging, rewarding, dynamic, unique, interesting, tender, honest, reliable and truthful; the minds of its employees will be fun, respectful, consistent, exciting, challenging, rewarding, dynamic, unique, interesting, tender, honest, reliable and truthful.  Your employees will reflect to your customers how their leader behaves.  Employees are like children, they mimic their leader like a mirror.  If the leader shows up late three times per week to scheduled meetings, the employees will follow suit.  They will show up late, also.  Employees do not care who is in charge.  They only care how equal they are being treated.  Employees want one standard of treatment.  They want to know what is safe for them to get away with when they perform their work.  It gives them the sense of freedom they feel they need to express.  By all means, provide it.

Be careful with your business model.  Allow your employees the right to exercise the need they have to express their freedoms.  Your business atmosphere relies upon the energy your employees bring to the model each day.  If your model is a boring place to go to work each day the atmosphere of your model is drab, unexciting and will not produce great volumes.  Your employees will see to it.  They will express exactly what the atmosphere is doing.  You cannot stop them.  The human senses are too sneaky to harness and control.  Quit pretending your employees are saying, doing and behaving good when you are not around.  They are not.  Unless of course, they like where they work, they like how they are treated at work and they do not want to lose how they feel at work.  Under those conditions, your employees are saying, doing and behaving good when you are not around.

You cannot disguise the atmosphere of your business model.  The atmosphere of your business model will generate the wind of its smell in its own honest way.  It will not need any push from your position.  If you generate a rotten atmosphere that no employee enjoys going to each day, the smell of that truth will drift right in front of everyone of your customers.  You can make behavioral rules for the employees to follow to try and eliminate that potential, but the smell will be recognized by the customers as a rotten stench blended with the mist of a manufactured air spray.  It will not smell real.  The human senses are too good to fool.  Your business atmosphere is truly a by-product of how you perform your leadership duties.  Your employees are an open report card on how well your leadership is doing.  Your customers are the administration who grades how well the students are being taught.  You are the one responsible for how all of this turns out.  Everyone else will easily escape responsibility.

Welcome to leadership.  Is your business model careful about how well it is perceived?  Does it care?

It should care.  Make no mistake about how much influence your atmosphere carries.  Your business model can struggle greatly if the atmosphere it produces is out of joint.  An out of joint business model will spill its unhappiness right over the top of your customers heads.  They will feel the negative energy and wonder why it seems to be there.  They may not be able to describe what is wrong, but hey feel it every time they attend your business when they trade their time with yours.  The experience will be felt.  You do not need that kind of reputation with the experience your customers feel.  It does hurt your volume.

If your business model does not care enough to 'fix' any type of damage to your business atmosphere, it means you do not care enough to 'fix' it.  Your leadership is the key to how well your business model develops a good atmosphere.  When your business model develops and operates its daily services with a healthy atmosphere, your customers will enjoy the experience.  Employees who feel good about the atmosphere they work in pass on that feeling to the customers they serve.  Growth will be the by-product of an atmosphere that is fun and healthy to attend.  Customers want to feel good about where they decide to trade.  If the employees who serve them feel good about doing what they do, the customers can feel it.

The leader of a business model is completely responsible for making that connection happen.

If a good atmosphere is not happening in your business model, go find a mirror.  Your employees and their customers are not at fault.  Those two groups only do what they feel like they need to do.  Those two groups are responsive and reaction driven.  They are not driven to lead the way.  They are the followers.  Your employees and customers follow the energy your model provides.  If the energy of your business model is sour, the relationships between your employees and customers will become sour.  How does that help your model produce great growth?  Get a grip on this challenge.  The leader sets this tone.

The sound of your business atmosphere is set by the actions the leader permits.  If the leader permits carelessness, the customers will eventually feel the pains of a careless string of interactions.  It is a certainty.  If the leader permits inappropriate respect, the customers will eventually feel the pains of an inappropriate level of interaction.  These truths are inevitable.  These truths govern how much growth your business model can handle.  Since your business model is governed by the atmosphere you develop, your leadership determines the level of growth your model is equipped to absorb.  Business growth rides heavily upon how well you develop a growing atmosphere.

What's worse, nobody will share this kind of stuff to you face to face.  They will actually hide these truthful feelings from you.  They only express them when it is safe to express them, when you are not around!

Welcome to leadership.  Your atmosphere is governing your potential for growth.  Your growth is waiting for your atmosphere to improve.  The treatment you give to your business model that has determined how its atmosphere will turn out is completely your fault.  One hundred percent.  Your business model is being exactly what you do not want it to be because you are being what you do not want to be.  You are unwilling to change how you treat your model.  There, I said it.  I said what your employees could not say.  I also know that you are quietly blaming something else for the lack of growth in your business model.  Today, we are all using the poor economy as our excuse, right?  That seems to be the one everyone is using. 

Now you see why your employees and customers could not say it to your face.  You rejected it.  Keep in mind, your employees are like anyone else.  They do not want to be wrong.  Nobody enjoys being wrong.  That is why they will not be honest with you.  You will make certain they are wrong by explaining away this truth they feel.  As a result, they will never risk being wrong by sharing the truth with you.

Leaders need to be more "care" "full" with their leadership design.  Your business is waiting to grow.


Until next time...