Growth through excellence should be the top priority of most businesses. Money that does not hit the top line never has an opportunity to hit the bottom line; consequently, if your business is not growing, it’s probably dying.

What’s the single most important thing you can do on a daily basis as a leader if you want to grow your business?  Invest in and impress your employees. Your people can be an inimitable engine of competitiveness, but only if you make their development a priority. Wishful thinking won’t grow your business.

Loyal customers delighted with your products and service drive sales. Impressive operations are never a matter of chance. Impressive operations occur through punctilious design and consistent execution.

Your employees are the key to both the execution and the continual improvement of the system. If your employees are not impressing your customers, then your customers aren’t being impressed – except maybe by your competitor’s employees. In addition to knowing your systems better than you, your employees are also increasingly socially networked boundary spanners, which makes them a rich source of learning and suggestions. Partner with them to improve the work you do and you will also strengthen their satisfaction and commitment.

The single most important thing you can do if you want to grow your employees is to grow yourself. Your own personal learning and development constrains the growth of your employees, which means it also constrains the growth of your business. Growth scales.

Taking care of yourself and your employees is taking care of business.

After you watch my short video, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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What’s the most urgent priority of your business? Many of you would say making a profit is your top priority. It’s hard to argue the fact that your business can’t survive if it can’t sustain a healthy bottom line.

OK, so you want to make a profit; then what’s the single most important thing your business needs to grow the bottom line? Revenue. Money that does not hit the top line never has an opportunity to hit the bottom line. Growth, more than anything else, constrains profit.Too many leaders focus their people on line item costs instead of focusing them on the single line that matters the most – the top line. This is not a law of the universe, but if your business is not growing, it’s probably dying.

If growth is the most urgent priority of your business, have you made it everyone’s responsibility? Everyone needs to understand how their daily performance and behavior either helps or hurts the growth of the business.

Please take a few minutes to watch this brief video, then please share your thoughts in the comment section below.  Stay tuned, because my next post will cover the single most important thing you need to focus on daily if you want to grow your business.

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Can you learn faster than your competitors? If you can, you can help define what it means to be competitive in your business or industry and force your competition to play catch-up. If not, then you will be forced to try to imitate what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it.

Give yourself permission to participate personally, learn continuously, and don’t quit. Do these things to gain social business advantage over your competitors that use time as an excuse to not participate or who tried a few social media tools but soon quit when they realized instant pudding was not on the menu.

Those that immerse themselves in an opportunity or challenge will always understand more than those that hire others to spoon feed them prescriptive solutions. The depth of your personal understanding of why social business works is the key to grabbing and sustaining competitive advantage because only understanding will allow you to create methods and capabilities unique to your business and employees. The knowledge of others is good, but if you use it as a crutch the best it will ever get you is competitive parity.

Please watch this short clip from my presentation on social business to the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Association. After you watch the clip, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Is it better for your business to pursue a competitive strategy where you copy your competitors, or where you force your competitors to copy you? Your customers and employees are embracing the ability to participate in many-to-many conversations via easily accessible tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp!, blogs, and now Google +. This is a paradigm shift in the way people communicate, and that means it’s a strategic opportunity for businesses willing to fundamentally rethink how they treat and communicate with their customers and employees.

Three years ago, if you gave someone terrible service, they might pick-up the phone and call a friend or two to vent. The damage would probably be limited to a few people and might even be soon forgotten. Today, they go online and vent on Yelp! or Facebook. Those comments you earned are now archived and shareable. When the things your customers and employees say about you online move through trusted networks, they have the power to impact the growth of your business.

Never forget that being good will always be more important for your business than getting found. If your products and services are impressive, or if they suck, the word about your business can spread faster and farther today than three years ago. Many of the customers, employees, and suppliers that touch your business today are increasingly connected and active in social networks. Make it a strategic priority to give every one of them something good to say about you. Hint: if employee and customer satisfaction are not part of your formal business metrics, then it’s not a priority.

Leverage the social connections of your customers and employees and you will create a strategic opportunity for your business that will force your competitors to pursue competitive parity. Ignore or even worse disgust your social customers and employees and you might just be sowing the seeds of demise for your business.

Please take the time to watch this brief video from my recent presentation on social business to the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Association. In it, I discuss a few more recommendations I have for businesses that see the opportunity provided by running a social business. After you watch the video, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I was recently in the market for a photographer to take my daughter’s senior pictures. She wants her pictures taken by someone her friends have not used so that she can get a unique look for herself. She did a Google search for photographers in Reno and picked five she thought had potential. I picked up the phone and called three of the five photographers we found via Google.

Not a single one of them returned my call.

The basic fundamentals of good business are more critical today than ever.  The sale for most businesses is still always closed in real time, either in person or over the phone. Social media is simply a tool that can expose you to more people to show how impressive you and your employees are.  But if you are not impressive, it will expose you to more people that will talk about it in their increasingly connected social networks. Whatever they say about you – good or bad – you earned it.

The Google search did not help me find a good photographer, so I went to Facebook and asked my friends to recommend one. I got 14 recommendations by the end of the day, many with links to social objects for me to examine. Johnstone Studios responded promptly to my e-mails and set up a face-to-face meeting where they spent an hour describing to my daughter and I how we could make the photo shoot special for her. I was sold.

This process of asking trusted friends in social networks for recommendations is something I call social business sourcing. I’m finding that sourcing is almost as fast and much more effective than searching.

Is your business spending as much time and effort on mastering social business sourcing as you are on getting found via search? You need to be good at both, but the real prize – word-of-mouth marketing in increasingly connected social networks – is earned when you beat your competition at the social sourcing game.

Please watch this short video clip where I describe my experience social sourcing a photographer. It was part of my presentation on social business to the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Association. After you watch the video, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Social objects are most trusted when they are shared by friends. If you write a blog post with relevant content, I can pick up that blog post and share it in my social networks. When my friends see that I have put my brand on your brand, they are much more likely to trust your content than if they had found it via one of your outbound marketing techniques.

Conversation around your social object can occur either on your site where the object was created, or on my site where the social object was shared. My friends and I can talk with you and with each other about it’s content. When you and your employees listen and respond to the conversation, your engagement influences the way we think about and are motivated to behave toward you, your employees, and your business.

You can’t recommend yourself to my friends, only I can do that. Unless you create the social object, you don’t create the opportunity for me to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. You are not entitled to my recommendation, you have to earn it with remarkable content that consistently demonstrates that you understand issues that matter to us and you care more about helping and engaging than selling.

When a friend shares your social object with me, it’s a signal; when you blast out a sales message, it’s often just noise. My purchasing decisions are increasingly based on signals that I’ve sourced from friends in my online networks, and I’m getting better at filtering out your outbound marketing noise.

Please take the time to watch this very brief clip from my recent presentation on social business to the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Association. After you’ve viewed it, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I discuss inbound marketing in this short clip from my presentation on social business to the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Association. If your business is using the new tools of social media as just another channel to broadcast sales messages, you are missing the boat. The new tools of social media are creating a paradigm shift in the way people communicate, but you are going to need new marketing methods to capitalize on the word-of-mouth potential that these new tools present.

Inbound marketing requires relational capacity. If you can’t convene a conversation around relevant content on your website, then you can’t build a community of people that trust you because first cared about problems and opportunities that matter to them. If your website has no relational capacity, then all you can do is broadcast and hope people find your message.

The tools of inbound marketing are the easy part. Install a blog as a hub for your factory of relevant content, and then make it easy for people to connect with you and share your helpful content via your spokes (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter).

The operating principles are the key to inbound marketing. The engine of inbound marketing is a new way of thinking about how you communicate with your increasingly connected communities of customers and employees. Change the way you think, and you’ll change your behavior. Change your behavior toward your customers and employees, and you’ll change their behavior toward you.

Earn their trust and you’ll earn their word-of-mouth marketing. When a customer or employee introduces you and your helpful content to their social networks via many-to-many public conversations, they will do for you what you can’t do for yourself.

Give people a reason and an opportunity to put their brand on yours. Make being good more important than being found, and become a factory of relevant social objects that your raving fans can share with their friends.

I hope you watch my short video! After you do so, please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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This video clip is from my presentation on Social Business to the Reno American Marketing Association. I give two examples of businesses listening and responding on sites like Yelp! and Trip Advisor, both from a recent trip I took to Las Vegas.

The example of social business done right is Fresh Grill and Bar. When I posted my review of his restaurant on Yelp!, the manager responded quickly with questions focused on learning more about why I was not completely satisfied. He researched the information I gave him, got back to me with a specific response to my complaint, and closed the loop by mailing me gift certificates to compensate for my experience. That’s impressive. The next time I am in Las Vegas, I will make an effort to return to the Fresh Grill and Bar. If the manager had not taken those actions, I would have no reason to ever return. There are just too many other good choices in Las Vegas.

The only thing the manager could have done better was to respond in public to my comment on Yelp! If a customer posts a review of your business on a social site – good or bad – you need to respond on that same social site with either a “thank you,” or an “I’m sincerely sorry.” That way, customers that find the reviews will know you are listening and responding, which is impressive.

The example of social business done poorly is The Signature at MGM. The review of my stay that I posted on Trip Advisor basically said it was an impressive property with awful service. I took my time to fill out a detailed review of my stay, and once again gave them specific comments about the service failures I encountered. A few weeks after I took the survey, they sent me an e-mail thanking me for my comments and apologizing for my bad experience, but it lacked any specific details to ensure me they had actually listened to what I had to say, and the e-mail was signed “The management team.” I won’t be back.

I hope you take the time to watch the short clip! After you do, please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Two of my former students, Ashley Cray and Marisela Fernandez, recorded this interview with me for a project in another one of their MBA classes. We pretty much just cover the evidence I wrote about in my previous blog entitled “Leadership traits and behavior: Four evidence-based suggestions.” There are two questions at the end of the interview where I give my opinion about how the evidence influences what I look for in an MBA student and what I tell practicing managers. The video is about 8 minutes long. Thanks Ashley and Marisela!

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Accountability is the binding strength of interdependence. The two primary principles of real accountability are that it always starts with you and that it always seeks productive solutions rather than blame when challenges occur at work.

We are accountable for keeping our promise to assume full responsibility for performing our jobs with distinction, trying to continuously improve our jobs as we master them, and caring about what we do. We are accountable for performing as autonomously as possible, but knowing when and how to ask for help when we need it.

We are accountable for knowing what’s expected of us and understanding how we need to behave in order to meet and exceed those expectations. We are also accountable for understanding that our expectations of others, even our leaders, are legitimate, and we must have the courage to share our expectations with others. We can’t expect people to help us excel until we ensure they know what we need.

We are accountable for helping others keep their promises by being enabling and encouraging, rather than disabling and discouraging. As we master our jobs, we try our best to help those around us master and improve their jobs. As purposeful performers, we are driven to find ways we can inspire others to enact their best selves at work.

We are accountable for not looking the other way when things go wrong or when people behave in unexpected or inappropriate ways. We are accountable for seeking solutions rather than laying blame; however, we understand that sometimes solutions require tough choices.

A team or organization that is void of real accountability is one that is incapable of delivering remarkable performance. Interdependence is the walk of excellence, a walk that requires intention, foresight, effort, introspection, discipline, patience, persistence, openness, integrity, respect, trust, compassion, courage, commitment, growth, gratitude, and grace.

That’s what we are accountable for.

Did I miss anything? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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