The Three Big Issues in Business
Are these three issues making your business sick?
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When you’re sick, motivation drops, productivity drops, morale drops, and no one really wants to be around you. You can make your business sick to the point that it simply functions below its capability for these three reasons.
1. Ignoring symptoms: Keeping the closet shut because you don’t want to know what’s in there. Not shedding light on the problems in your business for whatever reason (you’re too busy, you can’t afford to fix them, you just don’t want to deal with them) won’t make them go away. When they do find their way out of the closet, they may be too large to tackle.
2. Not integrating the systems: The business systems are not aligned.
3. Wearing rose-colored glasses: The issue most closely intertwined with your ego is rocking the rose-colored glasses. You’re probably familiar with this term. Basically, it means that you’re viewing the world, or your business, through a filter. In this case, the filter turns everything a lovely shade of rose and makes you blind to problems. It turns your attitude into “It’s not us, it’s them. We’re perfect, it’s everyone else who’s wrong.” This is firstly a very unflattering behavior to have, and secondly, it gives you a very convenient excuse to ignore problems that are staring you right in the face. Take the rose-colored glasses off and have a true look around and believe what your datasets are telling you.
All problems in a business relate back to the leaders and to whoever the top dog is. This may be hard for some CEOs to swallow, but it all comes down to accountability. As individual people, yes, we are accountable for our actions. In the workplace, however, there are other people accountable for our actions. They are every person up the chain until ultimately you reach the person in charge. Don’t let these three things keep you from admitting your accountability or acknowledging problems even exist.