David Greer has a mission: to take his 35 years of entrepreneurial experience and share it with others to accelerate their success. Of all the things an entrepreneur can focus on, getting clear on the strategy and purpose of your business drives progress the fastest.
Whether it’s strategic focus on your markets and products, the customers you serve, or the culture you build to allow your employees to grow in their careers, as a hard driven entrepreneur, David shares both the theory and the practices that deliver success.
A life-long sailor, David relates his personal experiences to the challenges of growing a business. While you can beat your way against the wind, successful entrepreneurs learn to harness their efforts to seamlessly blow them in the direction they want to go.
This week I am excited to help spread the word about Wind In Your Sails by David Greer. The following is a guest post from David.
Chantal writes in Back To Basics: Treating People As People of her challenges as a new employee in getting answers to basic questions about her deductions. She was given a generic email address that no one responded to. It left her feeling neglected and disconnected from the new organization she had just joined.
Woven through my book, Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Success are story after story about people, connection, and culture. I believe that entrepreneurs build high growth businesses by challenging themselves, and those that work for them, to connect and create synergy by working together. The culture you live defines whether you are connected to your people or not.
One whole chapter of my book is specifically dedicated to People Strategy. I open that chapter with a reference to Gwyn Teatro and her blog post Guiding Rookies ~ Three Steps To Doing It Well. Gwyn’s post reflects on her experience in bringing new people into an organization. She has three guidelines for new employees to “Help Them Connect to …”
- Organizational purpose
- Values on which the organization is built
- Internal and external networks
If you are an entrepreneur who wants to accelerate your growth, you have to focus on your culture, values, and people. To lead individuals and companies to top performance, culture has to be actively defined, communicated, and developed. This is not something you want to leave to chance.
For example, wanting, seeking, and acting on customer feedback is not natural for many people. It takes courage, persistence, and ownership of things that inevitably will go wrong. If you seek out customer feedback, good and bad, acknowledging your mistakes when things do not go right, customers will forgive you for just about anything. Building a culture that craves this sort of feedback and response starts with great leadership.
Lead your company culture by:
- Documenting your key culture and values.
- Seeking feedback on your own performance from employees, customers, and partners about how you represent your culture.
- Hiring for culture first and skills second.
- Get out of your office daily, walk among your employees, listen to them, and encourage them, making sure that your culture is apparent in your actions.
Commitment to culture at this level forces the entrepreneur to connect individually to the people in the company and to help facilitate connections between people, which Chantal found so wanting in her new job.
In Wind and Your Sails and in my blog post Creating Success Through Culture, I feature the work of Chris Edmonds and his book The Culture Engine. If you want proven processes, templates, and actions to put culture at the center of your organization I recommend that you read and implement the ideas from Chris and his book. Chris demonstrates how our behaviors define the culture of our organization. If we want different results, we need to change behaviors. If we want to change behaviors, we need to change the culture.
Culture is all about people. People are what make businesses successful. What are you doing to ensure your new and existing employees are connected to each other and the culture of your company today?
Written with refreshing clarity and profound insight, Wind In Your Sails is a must-read for entrepreneurs interested in gaining focus for their business and accelerating now. Read a sample chapter or order a copy of Wind in Your Sails here.
About David Greer
David is the catalyst who gets you to fully live your dreams now. After time with him you feel equally scared and hopeful. Scared at the audacity of your dreams and hopeful because you have someone in your corner with the experience and desire to see your dreams become real.
Spend one hour reading his book, attend a one hour talk with him, or get one hour of 1-to-1 coaching and you will have 3 concrete action items that will shift and accelerate your business within 90 days.
David and his wife Karalee are committed to each other and their three children, spending time supporting them in the many and varied activities they are involved with. They live in Vancouver, Canada.
