Human Resources and Business Growth

I’ve worked with many Human Resource professionals in my career.  I’ve developed a tremendous amount of respect for these hardworking people and I’m glad I don’t have to do their job.

Recruiting, hiring, training, adjusting attitudes, following regulations, generating the mountains of required documentation, and numerous other responsibilities to no end.  

But one of their most important tasks is to get a new employee “up and running” so the business can reap the rewards of a productive individual.

The importance of starting off right

One of the lost opportunities is to communicate the importance of helping the business grow.  So many employees just fall into a day to day routine that focuses only on job tasks, and lose site of the bigger picture, helping the business grow.  That is, everyone in the company is a salesperson.  Everyone is responsible for public relations.  

Whenever an employee promotes their company, they are actually improving their chances for job security.

In the article below from the folks at betterbusinessgrothfaster.com offers excellent tips to help give new employees the message, “HELP SELL THE COMPANY…”

The Top 8 Items You Must Add To Your Employee Handbook … – Better Business Growth Faster

www.betterbusinessgrowthfaster.com10/31/11

8-Must have tips for your employee hand book, to make your marketing work better.

When you communicate business expectations upfront, as part of an orientation, not only do you set the right frame of mind…you help the business grow without spending more money.

It’s become discouraging to a lot of prospective social media users because they have a hard time buying into a product that offers little in the way of traceable returns.

By applying a few simple measures to your business social media marketing plan, and watching a few traditional gauges, even in these web-based times, you do have the ability to measure your business growth.

Track with bit.ly Links for Social Media Efforts

Bit.ly is a link shortening site that is best suited for twitter or other social media content posts. The links can go to any site you want to drive traffic to and improve ranking, and can be tracked in real time based on the geographic location and specific content that drew attention.

Monthly reporting can be done to gauge how much more business is potentially being brought in by your social media marketing efforts.

Compare Numbers

Look at the pertinent numbers that show business growth on a quarterly basis to assess your success.

- Are you seeing more web traffic than last quarter?

- Has that traffic translated into higher conversion rates of customers?

- Are you making more money that last year and still maintaining the same, or similar, overhead costs?

See What the Word Is

Keeping tabs about what’s being said about you or your business online is a good way to gauge your business growth. Word of mouth is powerful marketing, and the more buzz going on about you or your products and services can ensure continued reputation building and future business growth.

This book cuts to the chase, and is very direct about its purpose and how it will improve your business: “Small Business Marketing is only about getting more customers-about generating leads that become the sort of clients you want many more of. Everything else like ‘raising your profile’ is just so much hot air. Or falls in the category of “nice to have, but way too expensive for my small business”.

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- Can you tell your employees what they want to hear, even though it is bad news?

- Do you know where you stand as a leader?

- Do you understand your own personal brand?

- Can you make a decision stick – and stick by your decision?

If you cannot answer all of these positively and with confidence then you need to work on your personal success skills. Success management will not help you manage success, but will help you to be successful. It might not make you a great manager or leader, but it can give you the right attitude towards achieving the success you desire.

Many people are unable to manage their personal lives, yet pretend to be able to manage others. Perhaps they can, but one measure of the success of a manager is how successful they lead their own life. Management is not leadership, of course, and it takes more than good management to make a good leader. However, success itself requires neither good management nor good leadership, although the latter is more of a measure than the former. Good leaders are respected, and true success management is difficult without gaining respect – the respect of your family, employees or colleagues, and even of those above you in the hierarchy.

There are 1001 websites offering you advice on success skills of one kind or another, and they might tell you that being a successful quarterback is different from being a successful husband, manager or TV producer. In saying that, they are making the mistake of equating success with knowledge and they are wrong. The attributes for success are the same whether you are a parent or a gymnast (or both): success is not knowledge but an attitude that can be learned.

Developing personal skills can be interesting and exciting, but most of all they will teach you success management. That term can refer to managing your success in business, in sport or as a person. Personal development techniques can be used to teach you many skills, such as how to be a good manager, they can teach the skills needed to become a leader that people will follow, or simply how to be a good parent and put yourself second, when you have to, to your child.

However, in saying that, personal development, particularly in respect of success management, is generally oriented towards the business world.

It involves enhancing your self confidence and self reliance: you do not have to rely on others for your success. That often results in failure. If you have sufficient confidence in your own abilities, then you have no need to rely on others – unless those others are your own team, built by yourself. Many potentially successful people make the mistake of not trusting their own judgment and fail because of the failure of others.

You can realize your inherent potential and be successful in your life if you are given the practical education to understand how to make the best of your own abilities without depending on anybody else. That is unless the ‘somebody else’ is your team that you have built and trained using the same ethos that enabled you to attain your own personal success skills.

Personal fulfillment comes from achieving your personal goals, and who better to do that than yourself. A personal development course can set you on the right road to your continual success and a belief in your abilities. Success management helps you to:

•    Improve your personal communication techniques
•    Build responsive interpersonal relationships and the respect of your team
•    Lead by example and show others how to do so also
•    Help others in their personal development and grow their own skills and abilities
•    Become a good leader as opposed to a good manager
•    Become successful

That last benefit goes without saying, and is a particular personal benefit, but the others also help other people to improve themselves and develop personal success skills of their own. That is a large part of success management and becoming a good leader – it is not all about just yourself, but also about helping others to attain their own true potential. By building such a team around you, you are paving your own way to success and training others to do so for themselves.

That is what gains you the respect, dedication and faith that others have in you and your abilities, all essential in a good leader. Success management is a combination of leadership development, personal development and developing the personal success skills that enable you to stand out above the others. That, after all, is what success is, not winning a lottery or dominating others but gaining their respect and respecting yourself. It can be taught.

Even affiliate marketing which is often projected as the best candidate for passive income needs constant work.

Unless you’re in regular contact with your customers & provide useful service or deliver valuable products, you cannot expect your bank account to swell. Even the so-called automated income streams need your regular personal attention.

1. Set monthly targets for achievements

To achieve web marketing business growth, it is important that you’ve achievable targets & work towards accomplishing them. In the digital world, smart work is often the key  than hard work. Raising the bar at regular intervals & identifying the means to reach the new aim post are important.

2. Search more customers or more smart business

When the foundation has been laid, & you’re confident that it can take the load, that is the time to plan for growth in your online business. For every business, it is important that potential customers know about the product. Advertising online business fortunately is easy & your cost per ‘eye pair’ is nominal when you diligently use the available medium. You should continuously work towards adding customers or adding volumes from existing customers.

3. Focus on your strengths

Focusing on your strengths & allowing other experts to help your business is another key factor for web business growth. If you’re an expert in affiliate marketing & your web-site needs optimization, let an expert handle that. Some people take time off their business & go back to school trying to learn fresh lessons for their business. With expert help, you’re bound to make more profits than make any loss.

More tips and ideas for online business and Start Now! need make money fast and online.

We are aware of the animal studies than show the differences in behavior between males and females that have characterized females as being more nurturing and of males classically exhibiting aggressive, dominant “A”€ type behavior -€“ but how far do these results transfer across to management roles in organizations?

We also know that there are differences in some physical performance aspects of men and women which have to be taken account – especially in occupations where physical strength and stamina is important e g The Army, The Fire Brigade

When we look at some of the more sophisticated Psychometric tests measuring personality characteristics such as 16pf, we do know that there are some gender differences which are significant enough for us to use different norm tables for men or women in order to normalize any comparative results.

So if we accept that there are some gender based differences in managerial style and approach should we then provide different forms of management development training for man and women?

I think that the answer is probably no – because there are other factors that are even more important to consider when we look at the role of a manager, their styles, approaches and when we consider the people that they are managing or dealing with as customers and clients.

The sorts of factors that are more important to consider are these:-

- What are the gender types and likely responses of the customer set for your product or service?

- How good at your managers at understanding personality differences and gender styles in this customer set? Can they deal effectively with diverse types?

- What makes a successful manager in your business from a competency point of view?

- What are the different learning styles of your participants on any training program and how well are you delivering your program to reach and appeal to these different styles of activist, pragmatist, reflector etc?

- What is the culture and style of your organization that you are looking to reinforce and encourage – whether it is adopted my male or female managers is less relevant.

In conclusion whilst accepting that differences do exist in the styles of individual managers, there is a broad spectrum of styles and approaches produced by individual differences rather than by simple gender stereotyping and that there are other factors outlined above which are more significant.

The peer-to-peer coaching approach is a highly effective method of management & leadership skills development used in wide range of organizations around the world.

Short piece on new emerging business paradigm. Interview with Jeff Dunn, Richard Hawkes, Dawna Markova and Richard Barrett, in Costa Rica at the CEO Leadership Summit. Looking at business as a platform for solving global issues. Produced by Growth River.

Product Description

The coauthor of the international bestseller Execution has created the how-to guide for solving today’s toughest business challenge: creating profitable growth that is organic, differentiated, and sustainable.

For many, growth is about “home runs”—the big bold idea, the next new thing, the product that will revolutionize the marketplace. While obviously attractive and lucrative, home runs don’t happen every day and frequently come in cycles. … More >>

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The manager is responsible for the performance, or non-performance of all staff – despite the fact that, as often as not, the manager has had promotion thrust upon them, pulled, like Macbeth, into a web of forces beyond their control.  This, then, is where management development comes in.  Management development allows companies to train their (often reluctant) managers – giving them the tools to make their lives a lot easier and company productivity a lot better.

Management development, like most work-related training programs, can be undertaken with minimal disruption to the daily running of an office or store.  Good management development courses are tailored to the needs of the company in question – so one management development model might be on-site training for store managers, while another might involve single-day seminars for mid-level office management.  In all cases, management development training focuses on a Sun Tzu-esque single-minded issue – teaching normal people to lead.

Leadership is the holy grail of good management and the cornerstone of all management development training.  If a person can be taught the art, or secrets, of good leadership, he or she will be well fitted to manage any team, in any situation.  So we find that all stripes, variations and lengths of management development course revel in titles like “fundamentals of leadership”, “right track to leadership” – and so on.  The problems outlined in the first paragraph of this article – uneven performance, employee behavior – are all controllable, and resolvable, by recourse to strong leadership.  Management development makes this happen – which makes management development as indispensable for every business as having managers in the first place.

Think about it this way.  At some point, every manager was a non-manager, just like every king or queen was once a little boy or girl.  Kings and queens have the luxury of being slowly trained into their position – taught bearing; manners; morals; and conduct.  Managers have their greatness thrust upon them, often with no preliminary warning or coaching – and businesses, by definition, are too busy to help them.  Management development courses, run by companies who know what they are doing, give new management all that preliminary coaching in a scientifically-developed, easy to swallow form.  Transforming them, in days or a few weeks, into the leaders every business needs to pull its trade forward.