There is a difference between being comfortable and being in apathy.
It is very comfortable to have a smooth running organization when you have a team that knows what to do and does it. It is comfortable to have this group take care of your company and make it expand, and all you have to do is take care of the team. It is comfortable when the staff will actually handle the discipline problems of other staff members and not give it to you to handle. It is, of course, very comfortable to have a consistent flow of new customers into your office and not have to worry about it week to week.
What is apathy?
Perhaps apathy is excuses — thinking that things can’t change, considering that “this is pretty good” and “I just want everybody to be happy,” but recognizing that they are not. Apathy can be present when there are situations going on in the office that aren’t going well and you choose to ignore it and hope it will go away. Apathy can be mere excuses and explanations as to why a situation or problem exists.
Sometimes, as business owners, we can fall into such apathy that we don’t actually use any tools to evaluate whether the organization is expanding or not. We wait until the accountant reconciles the books and tells us whether we did well or poorly. That’s truly apathy.
Apathy can also be a lack of planning, the “just come to work and see what happens” attitude. Some business owners at one point in time used to keep a “to-do” list, now they don’t even bother. They just wait until they come into the office and one of the staff members gives them the first order of the day, in other words, they take orders from their staff. That’s truly apathy.
Some business owners are doing all right and they are making good money, but they are not taking care of their staff. They may have lack of emotion or caring or a general apathy towards their staff.
Whatever your financial goals are, you probably need to triple them, because it’s important to take care of the team that takes care of you. When you recognize what good staff members can do for your organization and you actually exchange with them for that good work, it tells those staff members how much you truly care about them.
When you accept excuses for low productivity, you as a business owner go more and more into apathy. And so does your team. But on the other hand, improving the employees’ ability to handle their jobs well, giving the staff real, obtainable production demands and getting them to achieve these targets regardless of the “excuses” is certainly not apathy. It is the ability to make things happen as an executive.
Many business owners are not satisfied in some way about the volume of new customers into their business, but most are not doing anything about it. Now that’s truly apathy! Sometimes we look around at other businesses that are doing well and blame them for our lack of success. That is slightly better than apathy – at least there is some emotion, but the practice owner still hasn’t done anything about it.
What we are talking about here, plain and simple, is how to shift from being the effect of your referral sources to being causative over that relationship. In other words, in regards to new customers, instead of “look at me and recognize how hard it is for me to get new customers,” you can shift to “I know how to drive new business in the door.” One is apathy and the other is causative. It is first and foremost a shift in viewpoint.
If you don’t have a plan to drive some business in the door, if you don’t have a solution for this problem and you haven’t had a solution for years, then most likely you are not very causative over this area. Most likely you’re in apathy about this area of your business.
Perhaps you consider it is comfortable if you are making good money and you’re not working a whole lot. But if you are doing well and your staff is not doing well, something should change.
A good executive cares enough about what’s going on and cares about his group. I am not implying that you don’t care about your staff, that you don’t feel that they are important. I am sure you recognize that they are. Unfortunately, you can feel alone sometimes in the running of your business because you make all the decisions in the organization. You may have a team that works with you that’s really not a team but a group of robots that take orders from you all day long. Well that type of management style would certainly make me or any other business owner feel like, “why should I take such good care of these guys when they can’t seem to fight their way out of a paper bag?”
One way in which you can take care of your group is to show them how they can take care of you. The way you do that is by managing with statistics and not with emotion. Set good, acceptable, agreed-upon targets and work with your staff through whatever barriers that may come up in order to achieve that end. You can move from being apathetic about certain areas of your business to being more causative over it.
Imagine the confidence that it will give you and your team when these key areas are handled in your business. Think of the reduction in the amount of worry that you may have if you know and can predict your expansion. But if you are in apathy about what you can do to increase you numbers, you still are worrying. It is not like you are off picking daisies, you are still worrying.
Make no mistake, this is not necessarily easy — it is a fair amount of work, you have to roll up your sleeves, you actually have to DO something.
But if you are frustrated, perhaps angry about the way things are and have gotten to a point where you say, “Look, I need to freshen up what we already do,” or “I need to do SOMETHING!” then that change in viewpoint alone can help you get started on your way.
To summarize:
1) Teach your staff how to take care of you. This is as simple as telling them what is needed and wanted. It is likely that it cannot be communicated all in one sitting, but if done well becomes an ongoing communication.
2) Figure out how take better care of your staff as they start taking better care of you.
3) Manage by statistics – not with emotion. Take the “office politics” out of your business. Reward on merit alone – the merit being “does that employee do their job?” The statistic will show it; it will either be up or down.
4) And last but not least, change your viewpoint. Quit deciding situations that are truly not the way you really want them to be are OK. Decide that they can be different and then go about working out how to make them so – for the better!
