Rising To A Challenge

This morning I made one of my too infrequent visits to Alex Bellinger’s excellent Smallbizpod, and had a listen to his interview with Doug Richards, serial entrepreneur and one of the Dragons.

Alex asked Doug what the one thing a small business should do in the current business environment. He said constantly look at cash and costs. This already had my attention and then he said something that really made me listen.

When looking at cost cutting, reducing headcount is not the place to start. In fact, getting people onside in the search for effective cost cutting is the best thing to do. He said:

“We underestimate the capacity of people to rise to an occasion. We frequently set them metrics and targets and say ‘this is what we want’ and thus limit opportunity to rise up. People are almost always better than we give them credit for and we rarely let them have the freedom to prove it to us.”

Hurrah!!

This is exactly what The Smart Work Company is about. I have seen this sort of creativity and problem-solving in action so many times. It is astonishing how much brain potential many businesses are wasting. Fortunately for me, Doug Richards thinks that:

“There is no better time to start paying attention to all the people with all the ideas you should have been paying attention to for the past couple of years”.

Now would be a great time to begin to transform lack of trust and limiting attitudes into the sort of high-performance cultures that will see business through this sticky patch and ready to take on the world when the upturn comes. It will come, won’t it?