Preserving Your History and Values Through Storytelling

July 29, 2011   /   by Collaboration   /   in Leadership, Relationships in Business, Team Building
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By Michael Gunther

As I prepare for my family’s 44th annual camping trip to Kings Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada’s, I recall the stories that are told and retold each year. The family history, the bear stories, the ‘Michael fell face down right into a pool of mud while attempting to cross the log’ story, etc. My parents started this annual tradition as an inexpensive way to provide a vacation for their large family, but it’s become an annual event that we all look forward to every summer.

I’ve begun to understand the value of these stories over time. They provide us with a sense of connection to the past and they deepen the bond of the family relationships. They allow us to reminisce and laugh together which creates a tight interwoven history of our experiences. I recognize that the importance of these stories and this tradition in developing solid relationships with my family members is no different than the stories and traditions within an organization that create a unique and strong culture.

According to Wikipedia, “Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instill moral values.”

In organizations, the leaders and employees can strengthen their culture and core values by effective storytelling. Stories can be powerful messages that can be repeated throughout the company to remind folks of where the organization has been and how to handle situations as they arise. In addition, they can be a huge source of camaraderie and humor which also helps bond the team.

I look at my own experiences… It was more than 20 years ago, but I still remember the leader of the company for which I worked telling me about when he and his wife sat across from each other at their coffee table, figuring out which bills to pay with limited funds when they first opened their business. I remember thinking about the risk and determination they had to eventually grow their company into a $100 million plus organization.

Within my company, we have many stories that are retold at our social events and meetings. For instance, the time I got locked in the bathroom corridor on a Sunday afternoon for more than four hours until I finally broke down the door. While this story may not reinforce any of our values, it provides us with a hearty laugh.

On a more serious side, there is the story of the former clients who hired us a few months after purchasing a company with the intention of growing the business. Within the first few weeks of our engagement, we realized that these clients purchased a company in an industry that had just gone through some major changes and was essentially collapsing. Our clients’ customers had previously received funding from the state to pay for the training services our clients provided, and now our clients were losing money. They couldn’t pay their bank loan, and they feared losing their home. Our team decided to refund these clients’ fees, and we helped them pro bono through the transition of closing their business as well as negotiating with their bank so that they would not lose their home to which the business loan was tied.

This story within our organization supports our core values about what really matters in the work we do – it’s about empowering others as well as doing the right thing and not just earning a fee.

Bottom Line

What stories are told within your organization? Are they setting the tone you want? Are they conveying the right message to your team?

If you’re not telling stories as a leader, make sure to incorporate them into your meetings and social events with your team. They provide a common thread of understanding and allow you to reinforce the core beliefs for which you and your organization stand.

This is another article in a series on Michael’s entrepreneurial story and how being raised in a large family has influenced his career. To read the previous articles in this series, visit his blog at www.Collaboration-llc.com.

Michael Gunther is Founder and President of Collaboration LLC, a team of highly skilled business professionals who are dedicated to assisting proactive business owners to build profitable, sustainable businesses through results-oriented education and consulting services. Learn more at www.Collaboration-llc.com.

From All-Star Baseball to All-Star Business

July 12, 2011   /   by Collaboration   /   in Business Best Practices, Creating a Business that Thrives!, Growing Your Business
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You’ve been given the opportunity to manage a baseball team in an upcoming exhibition game, and you get to choose your team: the 1986 American League All-Stars, or the 2011 American League All-Stars. After considering both rosters, you choose the 1986 team – Rickey Henderson, Roger Clemens and Cal Ripken Jr. – how could you not?

Just one problem…it’s now 2011, and Rickey Henderson is no longer the speed demon he used to be. On top of that, Cal Ripken Jr. doesn’t perform like the same “Iron Man” who earned that nickname. Granted, the talents of 2011 All-Stars Curtis Granderson and David Ortiz may not be equivalent to Rickey Henderson and Cal Ripken Jr. at their primes – but the simple fact that those players are currently the best is the reason behind their success.

From All-Star Baseball to All-Star Business

To survive in business, a company must continually adapt to current and future trends. Just because what’s been done for the past 20 years has worked, doesn’t mean that it still works today as well as it did then – especially during this Web 2.0 period, where generational gaps between business owners and technology are widening. Even if your company was the Rickey Henderson of its day, unfortunately, that time has passed.

So How Can You Stay On Top?

Collaboration has initiated the Small Business Best Practices Ongoing Research Study. Hundreds of small business practices will be researched, outcomes measured, and ultimately those key practices which are present and critical to maintaining thriving organizations will be identified. As a business owner, you can ensure your business remains on top by understanding these best practices and implementing them within your organization.

The complete findings of the study will be shared with all participants in order to stimulate economic growth, profitability and sustainability across the Central Coast through a collective IQ of the proven best practices.

Just Take a Quick 15-Minute Survey & Get the Complete Results!

All information provided is confidential and non-proprietary. This study is about identifying key processes, not learning the secret to what makes your products or services unique.

Based on the cumulative results from this initial survey, “typical” practices will be identified, and those businesses that stand-out as “exceptional” will be studied further. After the final stage, data will be compiled into a comprehensive report and made available to all participants.

This Study is ongoing, which means the research will be consistently gathered and results updated annually. For 15 minutes of your time, you’ll get the inside track to lead your business forward and stay on top!

Click here to Take the Survey Now

Don’t forget to teach what you learn

July 8, 2011   /   by Collaboration   /   in Leadership, Management, Overcoming Challenges in Business
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By Michael Gunther, Founder & Managing Partner

Remember back to the 1st grade…Now imagine standing up in front of your 20 classmates, sharing something about your day or teaching something you learned from the encyclopedia. Even though it may be a friendly audience, it can still be nerve racking – especially if you have a speech impediment that makes you very self-conscious and you’re hoping no one will laugh at you because they can’t understand what you’re saying due to your speech impediment.

Now imagine you’ve completed this task, and your audience is clapping and the leaders of the group are acknowledging the fine job you’ve done. This experience could help boost the confidence of a young child, making him or her less likely to fear speaking in front of groups and improve his or her speaking abilities.

Well, this was a reality of my childhood. Every night, my parents had one of us kids speak in front of the rest of the family to share a part of ourselves, but also to create a learning environment. This experience provided me with a venue to practice my speaking skills, laugh at myself (and my speech impediment that required four years of speech therapy) and become comfortable speaking in front of groups.

These early lessons translated to my profession, where I speak in front of large audiences about business, the economy and professional development. In addition, this continuous improvement methodology that was ingrained in my mind from a young age has impacted my own professional growth, as well as the development of my team and my clients.

These early experiences came to mind just recently, as we’ve added numerous new employees to our team. My partners and I were talking and realized that our team needed to have experience and training on some things that we’ve taken for granted, like professionalism, customer service, business basics, etc. We began to identify a list of training topics and sharing when and where we learned some of these lessons in business. We came to the conclusion that we needed to create a stronger learning environment within our organization to not only improve the skill set and knowledge of our team members, but to also have a common methodology to approaching situations and problem solving. We all learned ‘business basics’ at one point, but because it’s now just part of who are or how we operate we forget it’s not common knowledge to everyone.

This reminded me of early in my career as a quality auditor for a nationwide self-storage operator, when my boss was training me in my new position. He allowed me to perform the audit of one of our facilities on my own while he also did his own audit. This was such an eye opening experience for me. He saw things that, based on his experience, were easy to identify, but that I had completely missed. He then walked me through each area and addressed his perspective verses mine. This was such a huge learning day for me that I still recall it easily almost 25 years later.

It taught me that with new employees you can’t assume they know how and what you want them to do. You have to create continuous learning opportunities for them to gain your insight and experience. You have to create a true learning environment.

Based on the conversation with my partners and reliving some of these earlier experiences, we have created an ongoing training program for our team. Twice a month for an hour, we are training them on various aspects of our business, our tools, our expectations and business basics.

After our first training just two weeks ago, our team was so excited to be learning. They are already performing at a different level. For a small investment of time, we believe our monthly training programs are going to accelerate our teams’ growth which in turn will accelerate our growth as a company.

Bottom Line

If your team is not performing at your desired level of expectations, create a simple ongoing training program to share your insight and knowledge. Everyone has to learn what you know if you expect them to perform at the level you want. Reinforce the ‘business basics’ and stretch your team to new heights through learning.

Are interns worth the hassle in your business?

July 7, 2011   /   by Collaboration   /   in Creating a Business that Thrives!
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By Michael Gunther, Founder & Managing Partner

It’s that time of year again – our interns are graduating from college and leaving to start the next stage of their lives and careers. This year is especially hard because I think we’ve finally figured out how to make a successful intern program work for our business and thus, the individuals leaving – Gracie, Sam and Megan – have been huge assets to our team and will be missed as they pursue opportunities outside the area.

I’ve heard many stories about companies hiring interns and feeling that it’s not worth the effort or energy and that the interns didn’t really contribute anything to their organization. I remember the first time we brought on an intern a few years ago. We were actually approached by a student to join us so that he could fulfill his requirements in order to obtain his degree from San Francisco State. He was known then, and is still known in our firm, as “Kyle The Intern.” We weren’t really prepared to have an intern, but other businesses used them often within their establishments so we thought it was a great idea.

We learned through this experience (thank you Kyle for being our ‘beta test’ intern) that he was willing to learn and do anything we asked of him. We tried to make sure that he had the opportunity to see all aspects of the business, but we didn’t have a well thought out plan for his time with us. Thus, we didn’t maximize the value we could have from him.

We have since developed a solid process for screening and hiring strong interns. Interesting enough, this process has proved so effective that we’ve hired three of the interns part time after their 10 week internship.

A few of the things we learned:

1. Have a clear purpose or project for the interns. Legally you’re not supposed to use interns for administrative tasks – unfortunately, many people do this and the interns don’t gain the learning experience they seek. We actually outline specific projects we have coming up or internal programs we want to develop. We then define the skills and background we might need so that we can recruit the right individuals.

2. Recruit as if you are hiring an employee. Our interns come in for multiple interviews, take our WorkTraits Behavior Assessment and have to complete some homework before we decide if they are the right fit. In addition, based on our needs, we will actually go to the dean of a particular department at our university to see who they might recommend.

3. Treat them as team members. We put them through our new employee orientation program, have them read our employee handbook, etc. We want them to understand who we are and what we do so that they understand how each project they work is connected to what we do. We also provide specific outcomes to be achieved over their 10-week internship period. And we always include them in our team building social activities.

4. Meet with them on a regular basis. We meet one-on-one with them weekly to see how their projects are going, what they’re learning, and give them an opportunity to take on new responsibilities. We truly strive to make this a learning environment for them, and at the same time they’re assisting us in moving projects forward at a quicker pace.

We’ve been able to find great part time help through this process. It’s exciting to see their careers just starting off and know that we were a part of their initial journey into the corporate workforce.

Bottom Line

I would recommend that if you’re going to hire interns you prepare for them as if they are new employees. You can’t just leave them alone to do a project without some mentoring and management.

If implemented properly, internships can produce incredible results for your company and also provide a phenomenal experience for the students who are just in the infancy of their careers. And who knows, maybe these interns may come back one day to work with you once they’ve explored the rest of the world.

As a side note: Thank you to our graduating interns – Gracie, Sam & Megan – for all that you have contributed to our team! And good luck on your next adventure…

This is another article in a series on Michael’s entrepreneurial story and how being raised in a large family has influenced his career. To read the previous articles in this series, visit his blog at www.Collaboration-llc.com.

Michael Gunther is Founder and President of Collaboration LLC, a team of highly skilled business professionals who are dedicated to assisting proactive business owners to build profitable, sustainable businesses through results-oriented education and consulting services. Learn more at www.Collaboration-llc.com.