By Justin T. Peterson © 2018 All rights reserved.
You may have heard the phrase, “What you don’t know, won’t hurt you.” However, In this case, what you don’t know about your employees is definitely hurting your business.
You would like to think that you do a pretty good job of hiring personnel. You would never hire a convicted thief to work for you, yet you have people working for you that are limiting your profitability right now!
In sales we know that before someone will buy from us, they have to know, like, and trust us. In order for people to know us, we have to develop a relationship with them. This takes time. Over time, people get to know our true character. Sincerity and genuineness can’t be faked.
Customers know if we have their best interest at heart. They know if we are maintaining integrity in our dealings with them. Once they get to know us, they can begin to like us, trust us, and buy from us.
In other words, the success of your business hinges upon the level of influence that your employees have with your clientele.
In his book, “Start With Why”, Simon Sinek details how the decision making process takes place in a part of our brain that has no capacity for language. We make decisions primarily on a gut feeling. Our brains synthesize and weigh all the signals of influence that it’s receiving (words, tone, motivations, sincerity, actions, past history etc.) and turns them into a reaction, yes or no.
How effective are your employees with your customers?
The level of effectiveness that your employees have with your customers is determined by the level of influence that they have with the customers. The level of influence that employees have with customers is limited by the level of personal growth in the employee’s life.
Why is personal growth so important? Personal growth changes who we are. Who we are, is the foundation for what we do.
Consider these questions in regards to your employees.
· Are your employees giving all they can? Are they using 100% of their body, mind, heart, and spirit in the performance of their duties?
· Are they working up to their potential? Have they fully developed all of their talents and abilities?
· Does each employee have a daily plan in place to strengthen any weaknesses of character that they have?
If the answer is no to any of those questions, your employees are limiting the profit potential of your business. Their level of influence is being limited by the lack of personal growth in their lives.
We tend to hire people for what they can do but if we end up firing them it’s usually because of who they are. We spend money on skills training for employees, increasing what they can do, but focus much less on personal growth, improving who they are.
We are not born with character traits that are at full strength. At birth we are selfish, only thinking of our own needs and desires. We have a scarcity mentality and lots of negativity. Selflessness, adding value to others, positive attitudes, and an abundance mentality only develop through the process of personal growth.
How high a priority does your company place on discovering what the level of personal growth is of an applicant before hiring them? Once an applicant is hired, how do you keep focus on improving who they are or increasing their level of personal growth?
Between a weakness born with, and the corresponding strength developed, is a whole spectrum of growth. Your employees are all at different points along that spectrum on their personal growth journey.
Unless you have a plan in place to help your employees increase their level of personal growth, we can safely assume that most of them will not pursue personal growth on their own.
Today’s workplace requires a management team that inspires and encourages employees. The employer now has to engage the employee’s body, mind, heart, and spirit. That kind of relationship requires supervisors that have real influence with their direct reports. Not the sort of influence that comes from a title or a position, but influence that is earned, where the employee knows, likes, and trusts their boss. The boss is able to bring out the best in the employee.
It really comes down to a matter of capacity.
If we take a car that was built to travel at a maximum speed of 65 MPH and try to make it go 80 MPH, without changing its power train and a few other components, it’s just not going to happen and we will only get frustrated.
Companies in many ways are attempting to do the same thing with employees. Then the company mistakenly identifies the employee’s deficiency as an unwillingness to perform and assigns books to read or classes to take to improve their attitude, but it doesn’t help. Sometimes a business puts so much pressure on the employee to perform that the employee finds ways to hit the sales goals, but through dishonest behavior.
The only legitimate way to get the car to go 80 MPH is to increase its capacity by making the kinds of changes necessary to deliver the extra speed required. When we change what the car is, we change what the car is able to do.