#329: How to keep your business from getting a flat tire

We've heard of work/life balance, but each of those is a separate wheel. Let's look at what makes up the wheels of your business life.

In last week’s blog, I wrote about dreaming of what we want to be, do, or have in our personal lives. The seven spokes in our wheel of life are; career, family, social, mental, spiritual, physical, and financial. Dreaming about each of those spokes is step one in setting and achieving goals while maintaining balance. I’ve written in the past that we need to set goals and monitor each one of those areas so we can avoid having a flat tire when one of those spokes takes a hit.

But how do we keep our business from getting a flat tire?

We only talk about careers in the big wheel of life. That is too broad of a category for your business, the department you run, or the team you are coaching. What factors do you need to keep in mind when you make decisions?

It doesn’t matter what your position is for this exercise. You can be the CEO or a Regional Sales Manager. There are both big-picture and detailed items that you should be thinking about.

Let’s look at leadership in general. What variables make up a great leader? As we have written before, 80% of leadership is about people. The factors I look at when it comes to leadership are; communication, team development, decision-making, change management, and strategic planning. With each of these, I have strengths and weaknesses. My goal may be a 10 in each area, but where are the gaps? We need to monitor where we are and objectively develop a gap analysis.

Once we visualize this, we can ask what we want to be, do, or have in each area. What will moving from a four in strategic planning to a ten take?

If you are a department head looking for the variables that make your part of the business tick, what are you looking at? Employee engagement, efficiency, profitability, or other factors? As an executive team, you may look at more functional spokes of the wheel, such as; sales, marketing, IT, finances, and profitability. Or you may be looking at all the stakeholders for your organization; community, customers, team members, shareholders, and board members.

There are four wheels on a car for a reason. They must be spinning in the correct direction and appropriately inflated for you to succeed. It sounds overwhelming at first when you start breaking it all down. But remember, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. These smaller, more detailed wheels are part of the overall balance. We control and affect what we can. As we make improvements, we see more extensive parts of the picture. Our responsibilities broaden as we grow, but we don’t want to lose sight of those details.

This blog’s purpose was to bring awareness to both the broad scope of your business and the details that make each of those tires spin. As you identify the spokes in your wheels of life, ask yourself what you want to be, do, or have. When you dream of where you want to be, you can plan how to get there.

This is hard work today but will lead to a better tomorrow. At the Kole Performance Group, we help you fulfill your dreams. Let’s schedule a free 30-minute call to see how many wheels we have to work with!