One of the most common questions we get wherever we keynote is, “What kept you going when times got tough?” We usually answer with the unending support of our customers, our unbeatable staff, and one more thing – we “owned it” literally and figuratively.

Sure, we owned the enterprise insofar as we paid the bills, owed the bank, and ran the company. But beyond that, we also “owned” the responsibility for the success of the business. No excuses! We couldn’t blame others for our mistakes, circumstances, or inability to deliver. It was always ultimately our responsibility, no matter what happened. In other words, we owned it. That realization also kept us going. It gave use the tenacity to keep trying different ways to make it better until it became a roaring success.

We were fortunate to have attracted a team of like-minded coworkers. It took us years to learn how to hire, orient and train effectively, but we finally got it right. We have even written about what we learned in our book The Barefoot Spirit. When we finally hired the right people they all had one quality in common. They owned their jobs!

We as owners did not have to worry about whether they knew their job, their mission, or their skill set. We did not hear excuses blaming others for poor performance. They took control over their jobs and progress, looked for ways around road blocks, sought help, listened to advice, stayed on top of the latest technologies, improved their checklists, and never blamed others for unsuccessful outcomes.

They took full responsibility. And why? Because they saw adversity, learning curves, and being outside their comfort zones as a personal challenge they took great pride in overcoming. It was like beating your personal best.

A big part of your success is feeling empowered to overcome obstacles and taking personal responsibility for getting your job done. Here’s six tips that you can use to overcome obstacles:

1. Start and Improve Checklists. Any time a mistake is made, the procedure to avoid it in the future goes on your checklist to prevent a reoccurrence.

2. Cleanup Your Own Backyard. Do all you can with the help of your colleagues and counterparts to solve any operational, communication, or procedural problems on your end so progress is more likely to be made.

3. Ask, “What Did I Do Wrong?” Even when it was “their fault,” ask yourself, “What can I do better next time?”

4. Anticipate Misunderstandings. Proactively look for ways you could be misunderstood, your packages mis-delivered, your outsourced work done wrong, or a deadline missed. Improve your policies, notices, reports, and communications to better achieve your milestones and goals.

5. Use Calendars. Anticipate not only the approach of important dates, periods, holidays, and seasons, but also the leads times, deadlines, and current progress of the folks on whom you depend.

6. Notify Customers and Superiors of Your Progress. Don’t make others have to ask if you completed your project or not. Give them the sense of security that only comes from your timely, accurate and regular progress reports.

You want your business to be successful, your department to meet its goals, and your boss to find you indispensable, right? So take responsibility for your own job, your own progress, and your own difficulties.

If you want to become indispensable, JUST OWN IT!

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Become Indispensable by Taking Responsibility for Your Performance appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

For the most part, great employees are not found, they’re made. In order to delegate and allow your company to grow, you really have no choice.

All this takes time, energy, preparation and lots of patience, but by working together in concert, you can see wonders.

1. Good Seed. Start with people who demonstrate a high degree of integrity, take responsibility for their own behavior and have a history of long-term commitment. They should be willing to learn and extrapolate conceptual ideas and apply them to new situations. A good way to test this is to give the applicant a verbal run down of the job, the company’s challenges and your expectations for the position. Then, have them send you a one-page summary on a deadline. This will tell you volumes.

2. Good Ground. Make sure their job is clearly defined in writing and explains how your products and services produce the income to pay their salary, bonus and benefits. We used to give our people a “Money Map”. It started with the consumer and worked its way back through distribution, production, and all the payables to finally get to their check. This gave them respect for how and where the money came from – the customer, of course.

3. Care. You must inspect what you expect, especially in the first year. Once you are convinced you have “good seed” it’s worth your while to regularly spend time with them answering questions and mentoring. Listen to what’s behind their questions to discover what they really need to excel in their new position.

4. Light and Space. Give them permission to make mistakes. That’s what allows them to develop into the independent decision makers you need to confidently delegate. To “make those mistakes right,” have them write down what needs to be done to prevent those mistakes in the future. Have them make new polices, procedures, checklists, sign-offs, or whatever, but they have to document everything. Consider rewriting their job description to fit their real skill set.

5. Nutrients. Give them the training they need, in person and in writing. If a document doesn’t exist, have them write it. Create a mini manual for every job with the growing list of frequently asked questions and as many charts and graphs as are necessary to depict processes, relationships and decisions. Provide outside training with conferences, or field time with sales or production staff. The more they understand your total operation, the faster they will become invaluable.

6. Time. How much time you give them before they “get it” really depends on the position, their ability to learn, and how much faith you have in them personally. Some folks take longer but “get it” at a core level. Others may learn a specific process quickly, but miss the big picture. So it’s a judgment call based on your assessment of their progress and conceptual understandings, and the preparation, time and energy you have put in.

Even if you do these essentials, there’s no guarantee of success, but you will be much more likely to succeed. To grow those new hires into fruitful producers it takes preparation, permission and patience.

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Successful Hiring takes Preparation, Permission and Patience appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

First, foster a company culture based on aim and gain instead of blame and complain. Keep in mind what you want and focus on how to get it. Don’t be distracted from your goals when the other guys make mistakes. Point a finger at yourself instead and ask how you can improve your approach to reduce the possibility of a recurrence.

Make the discovery of solutions a fun game for your people . The winner discovers and closes the loopholes that you would never have guessed someone would jump through. It starts with “You wouldn’t believe what they did this time” and goes to “Wow, here’s 5 things we discovered we can do right now to reduce or prevent it in the future.”

Don’t allow misunderstandings to get suppressed or covered up. They’re gold. Celebrate them. Tell your people to view them as precious opportunities to improve your business, reduce frustration, and achieve your goals. Be sure to publicly praise the person who improves your processes.

Second, become Miami CSI. Start with a forensic investigation. Look objectively at what happened. Ask lots of questions. How was the request made? How was it delivered? Was it written or verbal? How many layers did it have to go through in the other organization? What were the assumptions of both sides? Were there any time limits established? What were the documents involved? Email? Contracts? Procedures? Policies? Checklists? Sign off sheets? Signs? Tags? Labels? Job descriptions? Scripts? Notes, etc?

There is pretty much always a document or lack of one at the bottom of  every unexpected and counterproductive behavior. Identifying those documents is job number one when it comes to tightening up your own act and reducing the possibility of a recurrence. Sometimes it takes a rewrite, sometimes a whole new document.

Aim at your own documents and gain improved performance from those other organizations you depend on. Being apparently redundant or remedial can put some folks off, but ultimately it may be just the ticket to make your requests and expectations understood. See the event as an opportunity to improve your business processes, add to your checklists, and tighten up the clauses in your contracts.

There’s a good reason why your pilot has a check list to take off and land safely. Your own checklist will get longer with every misunderstanding, false assumption or mistake. So get smart about “stupid”, clean up your own backyard, and do what you can do to make your company more “idiot resistant.”

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Achieve Your Goals by Taking Responsibility for the Other Guy’s “Mistakes” appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.