Powills: To Be Great at Business, Embrace Change and Failure

If you are not meeting your sales goals, growth goals, or life goals then throw away your strategy. Literally, go ahead and throw that failing strategy away. Start over. Create a resolution. Take baby steps toward achieving that new you. The chances of that stream of events happening are slim to none. Why? People are afraid of change and failure. It’s not that people are afraid of change. It’s not that people are afraid of failure. They are afraid of change and failure together. They are afraid that if they change, then they will fail. This process of fear creates blockage from doing amazing, remarkable things. As the leader of a communications agency, I have to constantly eliminate change and failure from prohibiting our success. I know that if, we, as a business, can find ways to constantly adapt, we will have a fighting chance to become a remarkable agency. Thankfully, I was born without the fear of change and failure. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for everyone on my staff. This disconnect in feelings toward change and failure have not made it easy to perform change, without the fear of failure. I like to constantly change. I change the way I look. The way I eat. The way I manage. The way I lead. The way I conduct new business opportunities. The ideas in my head are changing a mile a minute. I guess that’s why I am in the role I am in. Here are five things I think about when implementing a change within our company: Predict Your Team’s Response to Your Change To become great in business, you must not be afraid of change and failure, however, you must be conscious of the way and how quickly your staff can adapt to those changes without them failing. I have learned this the hard way by losing some fantastic teammates due to the pressures of our agency constantly fighting to provide better service, relationships and results than any other agency in the world. Listen Closely When you are executing a change, to eliminate the fear of failure, absorb your surroundings. Listen to the people you work with. Take in all the data of concerns and adapt your change to better drive a crowd of support. Keep an open mind about the feelings of those going through the change. Create an Executable Plan While change solutions are not easy, nor are actions, placing a cohesive plan against change assisted with a well-educated process is critical to change not creating failure. Maintain Consistency Consistency of change with successful results end up helping drive better morale, culture and results – thus, better service, relationships and results back to the client. If You Build It and They Don’t Come, Then You Missed a Step Change is only as good as those who follow your idea. Creating a better process can help lead more people with your change. People leading your change will create great results.