Steer Your Business into a Successful Future with These Values By Josh Yudell Whether you run a small business or manage a multi-million dollar corporation with hundreds of staff, there are certain management and business values that will drive your business into a solid and successful future. Without incorporating these values into your daily management practices, you may find your team is unproductive, or your small business fails. These values or principles act as ballast for steering your business through the stormy seas of recession by helping you to avoid poor management decisions. Do not run your business aground by ignoring the core values of your business. Instead, keep your business afloat and steering towards the island of success by incorporating these values into every management decision. 1. Customer Satisfaction - Customer satisfaction as a primal value for decision making means you go beyond having a customer focus and strive for every customer to be entirely satisfied with both the product and the customer service your business provides. Keeping customer satisfaction as a key value for your business will ensure you make decisions that make your customers happy; keeping the goodwill of customers and gaining return business, shares Josh Yudell. Without loyal customers, your business will certainly sink. 2. Personal Responsibility - Making personal responsibility value for the business is not only about taking personal responsibility when a customer is unsatisfied with your product or service, but also about encouraging a work culture where staff can also take personal responsibility for mistakes, learn from mistakes, and move forward, without fear of judgement. You cannot have a captain who continually steers into the treacherous shallow waters, without learning from his mistakes, or his ship will sink. Instilling a work culture of personal responsibility means that managers have to make some tough decisions in some performance reviews of individual staff members who refuse to take personal responsibility for actions. However, a culture of personal responsibility also gives managers a chance to build on the skills and experiences of the staff, as individuals learn to take on personal responsibility and therefore pride in their own work, explains Josh Yudell. 3. Team Achievement - Encouraging a strong unity and cohesiveness of a business team by celebrating all achievements as a team effort will certainly steer your business safely past the shoals of personal conflicts that can destroy a business. As a manager or a small business owner, you need to give credit to your team when it is due.
If you win a new contract, or an existing customer places a larger order for the future, congratulate your team on the outstanding customer service that made the win for the business possible. This will not only encourage teamwork, unity, and cohesive pride in the business, but will mean your business is able to retain loyal staff members for many years. 4. Innovation and Creative Thinking - Do not steer your business into a stagnant pool with nowhere to go. Businesses that allow creative thinking, encourage innovations, and move beyond the ebb and flow of daily business activities to develop an exciting future with innovative new products, processes, or even ways of thinking, will survive the storm of the recession. Beyond the recession, creative thinking and innovation will build a secure future for the business in a world that is constantly changing. Innovation means you are not paddling furiously just to keep up with your competitors: it means you will be leading the way. 5. Integrity Without integrity any business will eventually sink. Integrity means being truthful, valuing fairness, and making ethical business decisions. Integrity means you can steer past corporate treachery and sail a straight line without fear of the consequences, explains Josh Yudell. Cheaters never prosper in the end, so build integrity as a key value into all your business decisions as a wise captain of your business. 6. Excellence Valuing excellence means your business is continually looking for improvements and building a better, stronger, quality business. Customer satisfaction stems from the excellence of the product and excellent customer service. Putting excellence as a key value for your crew to live up to means you have high expectations and standards. Pursuing excellence may be a never-ending journey, but all the improvements along the way will strengthen and prepare your business for the next part of the journey. Incorporating these six business values: customer satisfaction, personal responsibility, team achievement, innovation and creative thinking, integrity, and excellence into every business management decision you make will ensure you steer your business ship past the treacherous seas and the storm of recession into a successful future.