Issue of the Week

Many of the folks you ask to join your company will think like entrepreneurs from the get-go. But not all. People hired for their must-have knowledge and skills may be clueless about working at a small business or for an independent cuss like you. Think computer geeks and shipping mavens, for example, or even marketing types lured to your freewheeling enterprise from the Strange Rich Land of Big Business!

What I Think

While folks like that won’t necessarily have the proper small-business/entrepreneurial mindset right off the bat, it’s something they’ll need, and you can help instill it.

People coming in from other disciplines–new joins–may be hanging on to the (now-false) notion that the most important thing in the world is their massive computer networks, world-wide shipping hook-ups, or high-end marketing support and ready-made customer base they’ve come to depend on.

Your job is teaching them that what’s important to your business will be a sharp, flexible mind combined with a decisive and creative mind-set for adapting what they’ve needed to know and do before to what they need to know and do now.

Small businesses are often chaotic. Inexperienced new joins need to accept that and prepare themselves to think creatively and independently, because more often than not the situation on the ground will change so rapidly that original instructions and well-thought-out Plan A’s will be out the window.

To function effectively in that kind of environment, your employees may not have the luxury of sticking around for new instructions from you, but must be able to separate the important from the irrelevant, assess the result and use it to create and execute Plan B.

If your new people understand that intuitively and demonstrate that kind of leadership, fine and dandy: you’re all lucky! But new joins may freeze under those conditions, terrified of taking independent action unless you or someone else in authority is at hand to hold theirs.

What Do You Think? Have you been in situations like that-as an SBO or new join? How’d it go? And these days? How do you train the SBO Mentality or spot leadership potential in new hires?  Let’s hear from you!  Have you registered?

With thanks to Donovan Campbell, Joker One

Bill Willard is a freelance writer in Clearwater FL. He has been a high-impact writer and editor for over 30 years. In addition to his byline pieces, Bill’s beat includes ghostwriting and editing for businesses of all types and sizes, professional practitioners and individuals, and is a www.thefreestyleentrepreneur.com Contributing Author.

Visit his Website: www.writergazette.com/WillardAssociates.shtml. Or contact him at billw15@tampabay.rr.com for additional information or to sign up for his popular eblog, Daily Grin.

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