Keys to Success

Print this Article | Send to Colleague

A group of enthusiastic, positive, motivated, happy people,
working together, with a positive, can-do attitude,
on behalf of a future they have all committed themselves to.

By Scott Hunter

How nice would it be if your company could experience this type of harmony each and every day? Unfortunately, it has been my experience that almost every organization I have encountered does not satisfy the definition of a successful enterprise. There are a number of reasons why they do not.

Working Together
It is rare, if ever the case, that the people in a company are working together. It is a fact of human nature that everybody has their own ideas, their own opinions, their own points of view and their own agendas.What creates the problem is that human beings, by their very nature, want to be right. So rather than recognizing that their points of view, their ideas, their commitments, their agendas are simply theirs, they need to respect that other people have their own points of view and agendas. Realizing that nobody is right and that the objective is always to come up with an agenda, which works for everybody leaving no one out. They try to convince everyone that their point of view is the right point of view and that everybody else’s point of view is the wrong point of view. Sound familiar?

If companies are to be as successful as they can be, the players are going to have to put their egos aside and consider what the best interests of the team are. A professional athlete knows that they have to sacrifice what they think is best for them for what everybody else considers to be what is best for the team. People in business are going to have to learn the same lesson and start working together if they want to reap the benefits that are available to a company that works as a team.

A Positive, Can-do Attitude
The importance of a positive, can-do attitude cannot be emphasized enough. When a company is not achieving the success that it would like, the second thing to examine is the attitude of the management and staff. You will almost always find the predominant way people in the company think is based on fear and a sense of lack. Because people come from a position of fear and lack, the name of the game is to work hard, accompanied with a lot of effort and struggle, to overcome the sense of lack. But here is the irony: The purpose of all that hard work is, seemingly, to create abundance. We truly live in a world of cause and effect. You can’t get any place other than where you start from. If you start from a place of fear and lack, you will simply continue to produce fear and lack. We become like the proverbial hamster on a treadmill, working harder and harder and not ever getting closer to the desired end. Does this too sound familiar?

The Only Way To Go
Being optimistic, having faith and maintaining a can-do attitude is the only way to go. It is the secret of every truly successful enterprise. You cannot produce abundance with scarcity thinking. You can be truly abundant only if you are willing to come from abundance, and coming from abundance means trusting that there will always be enough and learning to expect the best. Learning to expect the best will dramatically increase the number of times that the best occurs.

Where Are We Going?
The third reason that companies do not meet the criteria for a successful enterprise is that the individual members of the company do not align on a vision for the future that they are committed to. This is really another part of the first problem. Because everyone has their own agenda, which they are committed to being right about, the group almost never gets to the point of aligning on a vision for the future. The point to be made here is that successful organizations typically have the following in place:

1. A purpose or mission statement. A purpose statement defines the organization, states its values and literally defines the organization, what it stands for and where it is going.

2. A strategic vision. This is a clear and detailed picture of where everyone would like the company to be at sometime in the future. I usually pick five years since it is far enough in the future to allow people to speculate as to what is possible, but near enough to have them have it be real.

3. A set of specific commitments, objectives and goals for the next 12 months. After we get a company to be clear about its mission and its strategic vision, the next steps are to set forth a specific set of commitments, objectives and goals for the next year, turn the commitments objectives and goals into projects, identify project leaders and project teams and get everybody working on behalf of the projects. This step alone goes a long way in forging the partners as well as everybody else into a group of people that satisfy the definition of a successful enterprise.

Almost always, the company was trying to solve the problems they were experiencing by coming up with marketing plans. It just doesn’t work. It usually took a bit of time, perhaps a few months, to forge the management team members into a team of people working together with a positive, can-do attitude on behalf of a future that they all committed themselves to. In every case, when that was accomplished, the company literally took off like a rocket. Work started pouring in the door, money started to flow and the problems people were experiencing quickly dissipated.

Scott Hunter has been transforming organizations for over two decades, through his innovative programs that enable people in leadership positions to master the "being" of leadership rather than the "doing" of it. For more information please visit www.ScottHunter.com