Do you demotivate your people?

Is this how your staff spend their days?

You are human and by definition you will make mistakes.

Your employees, suppliers and customers will understand this as they are human too.

If you want to get better productivity and loyalty out of people then there are a number of things you should do.

Make sure that the business you are in is easy for everyone to understand.  That is, have a simple statement of what you do, and that can be the guiding principle for everyone to follow. Keep this statement in plain English that you don’t need and MBA to understand.

Be open with everyone and communicate both the good and the bad news. Communicating the bad news can be difficult at times as if you appear despondent or emotional you can fracture your staff’s morale on the spot. 

You need to appear confident that you can get through it all and that you are presenting a problem to be solved mutually.

Communicating the good and the bad news also means giving performance appraisals. You need to provide boundaries to people, but not provide constant oversight. If you maintain the boundaries but otherwise leave people to get on with their job then you will come to a pretty good balance. Criticize your staff to often and not only will you destroy morale but you are also leading by example so your staff will criticize each other too.

Delegate and mean it. Don’t jump back in and finish things off. If something really is time and mission critical don’t delegate it in the first place. Also don’t delegate too much to a new start – you will overwhelm. Let them learn step by step the smaller pieces so they work up to taking on bigger tasks.

The hours you work as the company founder can create an issue too. Remember that most of your people will have come out of a conventional corporate culture. So if you are coming in late and going early they will resent it, especially if they know you were taking time out to play golf or go water skiing. If you do take time to yourself then keep the details to yourself.