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In the neverending debate between head and heart, I declare, “No contest!” Well, to be fair…I declare there is no debate or fight. They can’t be separated.

Mostly we think of heart representing feelings and emotions. Those reside in your head. Your brain. They’re formed based on what you think and believe. Debate over!

To assume that logical and rational thought are disconnected from emotions and feelings is to assume you can have Spock-like qualities. You’re neither completely logical or emotional. You’re a confluence of them both. Sometimes one tips heavier on the scales than the other. It happens. 

As a small business owner, you serve your employees. First and foremost, they’re the “customers” you must effectively serve. They’ve got feelings, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and ambitions. Which is why you must lead with your heart.

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. First, it’s understanding. Second, it’s sharing (based on understanding).

Think about the last time you were angry, frustrated or annoyed. Maybe it was 5 seconds ago. Maybe 5 minutes ago. Doesn’t matter. Remember what happened? Think about it. Hold that thought. 

Did it impact your behavior in any way? Of course, it did. Maybe you snapped at somebody who hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Maybe you closed your door and threw papers. You reacted by doing or saying something. Or, you sat there stewing about it. It affected your performance. 

But feelings and emotions don’t matter, right? 

You own the place and thoughts, feelings and emotions drive your performance. Don’t you think they drive the performance of your employees? 

Question: What are the professional and personal goals of your top 3 employees?

Most business owners may say, “I have no idea. It doesn’t matter.” But it does matter. 

Convince yourself that the only thing that matters is what YOU need those employees to do, and you’re blowing it as a leader. Miserably. You’re making sure your people know you don’t really care about them. It’s not about them. It’s about you. Yet you expect them to perform at the highest levels possible. You’ve lost your mind. Now you’re working on losing your employees. 

Try leading with your heart. Let me give you a specific action you can take today. Yep, today’s Friday. It’ll be a great way to wind down the week. Don’t put it off. Don’t wait until next week. 

Got a conference room or someplace private where you can meet employees one-on-one? Unless you’ve got an office where you can sit by the employee without your desk being between you, then avoid your office. Sit side by side with the employee. Like two friends having a conversation. 

Got 20 employees? 50? 100? The more employees you’ve got the longer this is gonna take. Schedule accordingly. 

Map out a strategy that is least disruptive to the work. Carve out 10 minutes with each employee. Just you and the employee. 

They’ll panic if you’ve never done this before. That’s normal. Don’t sweat it. They’ll realize what’s going on within the first few seconds. 

Schedule as many as you can. Twenty employees will take you a little over 3 hours. Easily done in a day. Figure it out.

Greet them when they walk in as you would a friend. Stand up, shake their hand and welcome them. 

Tell them you’ve decided to periodically spend a few minutes with every employee to find out more about them. Don’t make this time about you. It’s about them. You’re their servant. You want what’s best for them. You must get that across if this is going to be impactful. 

Over the course of the next few minutes, you’re hoping to find out how they’re doing. What’s their goal? What do they want to achieve over the rest of the year? Are their things happening that frustrate them? Are these things you can remedy? You must make them know how much you care, and how dedicated you are to help them succeed.

Stay on time. As they leave, remind them they can contact you at will. Encourage them. Cheer them on. THANK them. 

Make leading with your heart a habit and you’ll improve quickly. You’ll also become quickly convinced that you should have done this a long time ago because you’ll notice a positive difference in performance.

If you called me up right now and shared your frustrations, aspirations and dreams…we’d have a productive conversation about it. I’d ask you some questions. You’d share more. I’d ask a few more questions. You’d be figuring some things out during our talk. I’d challenge you in the best ways to achieve what you want. Not what I want because it’s your life, not mine. You’d leave our conversation energized, uplifted and more firmly believing in yourself. I’d make sure of it. It’s what I do with CEOs, business owners and leaders. 

You need to start making sure you’re doing that for your employees.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:58 — 6.8MB)

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Don’t get your britches in a bunch because I use the word “crazy.” You get it. We all use it in a slang sense, not in a judgmental sense. And as business people, we’re driven crazy daily by something. Frustrated. Annoyed. Riddled with anxiety. Fretful. Worried. The emotions are all over the place when we’re going crazy. 

Your mental health is important. You’ve got to take it more seriously. Business stress coupled with personal stress can overtake us. Wreck us. Send us down a rabbit hole of despair. Even if we’ve had no history or sign of genuine mental health challenges. 

Some of my best friends suffer a variety of real issues. Serious issues. From clinical depression (as opposed to the generic kind we all get, and call “being depressed” when we just mean we’re sad, etc.) to bipolar disorder to high anxiety and a variety of other things that require medication. Most of them know the seriousness of their situation and they take care of themselves. That is, they continue to take their medication as prescribed. They seek help from qualified therapists and other mental health professionals. 

A few of them don’t. They start feeling better and stop taking their meds. They stop seeing a professional. “I’m all better now” thinking creeps in and they fall into delusions of thinking they no longer need to do the very things that helped them. They’re wrong. Those of us who care about them urge them to go back to doing the things that benefited them. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. As we learned with Kate Spade’s recent suicide and what her sister revealed, Spade suffered for years. Sadly, her sister and others were unable to get her to seek and accept the help she most needed. 

Entrepreneurship and business ownership is hard. Very hard. Even when it’s easy, it’s hard. 

That doesn’t mean it’s not rewarding. Or not worth doing. 

It just means it’s hectic, exciting, demanding, time-consuming, life-consuming, and a host of other things that can disrupt other areas of our life. Which is why many years ago as I formed what I called “hitting the trifecta of successful business building” I purposefully included that last one, which has grown to be THE most important one – not going crazy in the process.

Business owners consume themselves with the first two legs of the trifecta – getting new customers and serving existing customers better. Often to the complete neglect of the third leg of maintaining their best mental and emotional well being. 

You own the business. So much rests on you. Everybody is expecting something from you. People pressure you constantly for a decision, an opinion, a thought, some help, some action. Your confidence and tenacity help build your business. You think you’re immune from the pains mere mortals suffer. Well, deep down you know better, but you’ve been so immersed in the “never let ’em see you sweat” mindset that you don’t know any other way to perform (or behave). And it’s taking a toll. On your business’ most valuable resource. YOU.

You maintain your company assets. Got trucks? I’m betting you wash them and have them regularly serviced. You probably also stress taking care of them to the people who use them daily. Trucks aren’t cheap. You want them to last as long as possible so you take care of them. When one goes down, it disrupts your business. Plenty of reasons to take care of them. So it goes with other assets you’ve got. 

Then why don’t you take care of YOU? Physically, mentally and emotionally. 

Your doctor will urge you to lose weight, eat better and exercise. Your physical shape is more easily seen than what’s going on in your head. Which is why “not going crazy in the process” is so critical and urgent! You can be dying inside, ignore it and find yourself going down a path of self-destruction. Business leaders misbehave constantly in attempts to fill voids of connection. Drugs, alcohol, extramarital affairs…even worse. And these are the most apparent destructive things we tend to consider.

But there are other things we avoid thinking about, things we may not consider — like how well we perform as business owners. You want your employees, trucks, machinery and everything else inside your business to operate like that proverbial “well-oiled machine.” Then why don’t you want to perform up to that standard yourself? What makes you think you can continue to erode your mental and emotional fortitude and operate at your peak? You’re fooling yourself. Stop it.

We all need deeper connections with people we feel safe with. People who will listen to us without judgment. People with whom we can confide things, knowing they don’t expect anything from us – and they won’t use what we confide in them against us. It’s perfectly natural and right to crave these connections. We all do. Some of us just work harder to suppress them than to find them. Foolish. Today’s the day to start exercising greater wisdom. Give yourself the attention you and your business deserve. The upside is that it won’t just benefit you. Your family, employees, customers, suppliers and everybody else whose life is impacted by your business – they’ll all benefit, too. It’s the most positive ROI thing you can do because it has NO downside.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:28 — 5.4MB)

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I first remember uttering this phrase as a teenager working for an autocratic, micromanager of a stereo shop who loved to preach, “Everything is important.” He would traipse around picking nits. Quite often we’d find ourselves doing things to appease him while other things that are far more critical went undone. For example, I remember working to connect some equipment in a sound room so we could avoid embarrassment when a shopper wanted to hear a certain setup. When you work in a retail environment that requires you to demonstrate something to a shopper, you want things to work as they should. I’d endured the ongoing embarrassment of a foiled demo because a co-worker would move or disconnect a piece of gear without letting the rest of us know (and without fixing what he broke). Almost daily the rest of us were frustrated, and we all knew the main culprit.

As I’m taking care of that, the manager did an “all hands to the back” rampage session. We would file the owner’s manuals to the showroom gear in a file cabinet, alphabetically. Somebody had pulled one and left it laying on a box in the warehouse instead of filing it back where it belonged. This was almost never a problem. Mostly because shoppers rarely wanted to see one. 

This Tuesday news broke and the Internet is losing its mind over the White House rescinding an invitation to greet the President because a handful of players don’t want to go. I’m apolitical. That means I don’t care. You can judge me if you’d like. I’m a capitalist willing to assume responsibility for my own life. I’m thankful for our freedoms, but I don’t get wrapped around the axle about what goes on in D.C. (well, that’s not entirely true – Tuesday night I was disturbed that Vegas lost, again in the Stanley Cup Finals). Nearly everywhere I look online people are writing, judging, slamming or supporting what’s going on with an NFL team visiting the White House. 

And this impacts my life, or my business HOW?

My life is made worse by this HOW?

My life is improved by this HOW?

It’s not. It doesn’t affect me one little bit. Unless I allow it. By being distracted from what really matters. Sorta like that manager who felt it more urgent for all hands to be lambasted instead of making sure our showroom was shopper ready!

If everything is important, then nothing is important!

Many managers, leaders and business owners love to preach their perceived truth that every detail matters. Perhaps. If you’re manufacturing aerospace parts it matters more than if you’re manufacturing beanies. I get it. 

When you tell your employees that everything is important then you’re telling them there are no priorities. How can there be if everything is equally important? But you don’t stop to realize that’s what you’re saying. And you’re not likely understanding how demoralizing it is to your people as they do their work. They know some things matter more than others. They understand some things are more critical than others. The more you beat them down with messages contrary to that truth – the worse it gets. Customer service and all other performance standards will erode. As you strain to emphasize everything being important, you’ll notice everything begins to fail. 

Set your own standards. Do you really care about your employees and customers? You should. If you do, then make the things that are important those things that most impact employees and customers. It’s not about refusing to look at lesser things (like an unfiled owner’s manual). It just means you can weigh if that’s a problem or not. A problem that requires some corrective action other than asking people to make sure they do it correctly next time. 

Stop trying to fix every problem with an immediate whack of a sledgehammer. If your employees can’t recite to you what’s most important in your business, then you’ve got serious work to do.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:38 — 3.7MB)

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At the beginning, we may be actually doing much of the work. But as our business grows things change. Necessarily. Our role changes, too.

We hire people. The business grows and expansion requires additional help. Perhaps even new skills. Over time we realize that our role, as the owner, transitions away from doing the actual work (selling the thing, or making the thing, or delivering the thing)…to helping others do the work better!

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:58 — 4.1MB)

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Speed kills…the competition. It dazzles customers and clients. It’s remarkable. 

Curiosity fuels it. Don’t keep wondering if it’ll work. Find out. 

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:57 — 4.0MB)

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The Small Business Leadership Daily Brief is a short, under 5-minute podcast produced Monday through Saturday. Subscribe to the Grow Great podcast and you’ll get every podcast episode, including the daily briefs. 

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

Subscribe to the podcast

To subscribe, please use the links below:

• Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes
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If you have a chance, please leave me an honest rating and review on iTunes by clicking Review on iTunes. It’ll help the show rank better in iTunes.

Thank you!