Executives from consulting, sales, and finance discuss building collaborative communities and setting concrete goals. Key points: reframe struggling employees as people needing support, not problems; link startups with academia to drive innovation; replace vague goals with specific targets like increasing revenue by $500,000 by end of 2019.
I love coming to this because Matt does challenge us, all of us, to think a little bit outside the box and think about everybody else in the community and we're Rising tide lifts all boats, right? So this is not a zero-sum game. Your success does not take from someone else and vice versa.
So we—
but the ultimate goal for us is to help people transfer.
We are here to be able to help drive or foster, as well as drive the innovation economy, which largely for us is startup companies together with academia and industry.
Self-awareness is one key to recognizing, leveraging, and harnessing your team's energy. And that's what we do at Karen J. Consulting. We work with people to help them figure that out. What if your team was more aware? What if that problem employee that you have—
I promise you, the people that you think are problem employees are the Marys.
They just happen to be that Mary every day. So what if we could dig deeper into realizing behind the scenes, it's not really about us. It's about what that individual went through. And how could we meet them where they are and lift them up versus going down.
And what you know in sales is that you have to know who your customer is.
What about finance?
Finance and accounting as strategy beyond just paying bills and doing bookkeeping. So finance is that. It is paying bills and doing bookkeeping, but it can be and it should be more than that.
And so what's a fake goal look like?
In 2019, I'm going to make more money. Get in shape.
Brown's in shape.
I'm getting that shape. Grow my business. I hear these goals all of the time. The clients come in and I'll ask the question and they'll say, "Well, these are the things I want to do," and a laundry list of other things. In a similar fashion.
A SMART goal example to replace those would be increase revenue by $500,000 by December 31st, 2019.
That's a specific goal. It's measurable, right?
It's actionable. You know what you need to move toward. You know where you were at. You know what that gap was.
So you know what it's gonna take to get there.
