By Chelsea Stebner
When the boss comes back from a conference and is ready to change the world.
Wait…I am that person these days…
However, I do remember being the employee and that happening. Everyone joked about it. Let’s be honest, we all still joke about it. Because that is what often happens.
You have taken the time out of the busyness of your day to day to finally fill your cup and look at your business from 25,000 feet instead of 1000, and you discover a million things that are ‘wrong’ or need fixing or opportunities to improve upon. You take notes like crazy, you circle and dog-ear certain pages or highlight the heck out of your notes. You take screenshots of the slides. While you’re in it, your brain is firing on all cylinders and it’s so exciting to imagine all the changes you’re going to make happen!
Then reality hits. You get back home. You open your email. You get to work and—bam! You are sidelined by the day to day fire-fighting of running your business.
So, what’s a girl or guy to do? What are your go-to’s for ensuring that all of the amazing learning you’ve taken does not gather dust on your desk? Or that the cool idea you implement doesn’t fizzle out after two weeks?
One of my intentions for 2020 is to carve out time for specific projects. To hit ‘do not disturb’ on my phone and to block out my schedule and ask for uninterrupted time to focus. It’s pretty easy to set the intention but we all know the road to hell is paved with them. I guess saying it out loud, setting that intention to you, today, that I am going to invest in the time to make progress and positive change.
My first order of business is to review my notes. Better yet, if you have another team member that joined you at the meeting – review and recap together. From there I’ll be picking my top two or three that hit closest to home. In my experience—and I have lots of learning left ahead of me—it’s definitely good to find one that’s a low hanging grape; you know, the one that you know can be implemented quickly, easily and is a prompt win for you and your team. Get your core team on board and sell it to them. Once they’ve bought in and set up a plan, delegate it, set up a timeline for implementation and success and get it into your calendar for follow up and trust your team for that success and move on.
Sounds simple right? How often does it fail at this point? If I’m being honest with myself, and you, it’s often here. It’s this buy-in, this encouragement and the plan and check in to succeed that falls off the rails.
Accountability, check-ins, timelines and sometimes a hard stop and redo are needed along the way. What are you going to do to hold yourself and your team to the task?
As a youngish leader without formal education in HR and leadership, I am most certainly learning leadership and implementation in a ‘trial by fire’ method. I’m often second-guessing myself and asking mentors for feedback and advice. But as I grow, I think that one of the most important things as leaders that we can do is to simply listen to our gut. To move forward, in business ownership and leadership, you’re often taking a leap of faith to get stuff done. But planning for it, planning the steps, planning the execution and the buy-in from your team can and will help get all of us there with greater success.
So, check back with me in a few months to see how successful I’ve been in implementing a positive change or three for our team in 2020 and, if you want an accountability partner, drop me a line…I’d love to hear how you’re coming along with your goals and intentions for your business in 2020.
Chelsea Stebner is the co-owner and operator of Saskatoon, Sask.’s Parr Auto Body and a member of the CCIF Steering Committee. She can be reached at chelsea@parrautobody.com.
