The following is a guest post by Doug Sundheim.

When I talk to clients about effective goal setting someone invariably mentions that good goals are SMART goals – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. I agree these are critically important to strengthening goals. But they’re not the whole story. They don’t tell you how an individual or team arrived at the goal. And that’s more than half the battle.

Anyone can slap a specific, measurable, and achievable number on things and give you a due date. “We’ll have 6 new clients by the end of the quarter!” Great, but how did you arrive at that goal? Did you really think through it or does it just sound good? More often than not I find it’s the latter.

And more often than not I find people lose steam in pursuing their goals if they don’t go through a thoughtful goal setting process to arrive at them and keep them alive.

I’ll share an example of what I mean… Click here to continue reading »”There’s More To Goal Setting Than Making Them SMART”

The following is a guest piece by Megan Totka.

Great leadership is a necessity for any business that is striving for great success, especially during trying times. Without leadership that is effective, it’s nearly impossible for businesses to grow and expand, as is necessary in an ever-changing market.

While large corporations may be able to survive for short periods of time without great leadership in place, the opposite is often true for small businesses. Small businesses are often comprised of just a few employees, and could potentially fall apart if their leadership structure is in jeopardy.

So why exactly is it that great leadership is a must for small businesses? Here are a few reasons:

• To give direction – this can be taken in more than one way. A business needs direction in the sense of a goal, a bigger picture. This helps everyone who is involved with the company to feel like they are striving towards a goal, and likely will make Click here to continue reading »”Why Small Businesses Need Great Leadership”

The following is a guest piece by The Huffington Post columnist and author Bill McBean.

When you run a business, there are always some certainties as you look into the future. You know your best competitors will work to become better. You know your customers will demand more. You know you’ll have to work smarter and harder every day to improve your bottom line.

You should also know that this year brings with it new taxation and new regulations that may add expenses and affect the way you operate your business. And of course, you face the usual headaches and worries that come with the day-to-day business of “running a business”.

However, if you take a long hard look at a few critical pieces and put a plan in place right now, you can have a much more prosperous year.

A suggestion would be to break down your planning into what you need to do internally — with processes, employees, yourself, etc. — and what you need to do externally — with customers, marketing campaigns, and so on. Below are 9 steps that can help you to increase your odds for success this year: Click here to continue reading »”9 Steps For Creating The Best Odds For Success”

In my previous piece, I wrote about how we can ascertain what success really looks like beyond simply attempting to duplicate the efforts or accomplishments of those we admire. Given how much this piece resonated with my readers, I’d like to follow this up by addressing the other side of this equation.

Namely, that if we are to be truthful about the nature of success and the journey we take to achieve it, then we must address its travelling companion – that of failure.

The notion of an interdependence between success and failure – beyond simply being opposing outcomes that arise from our collective efforts – is perhaps best seen when we consider the nature of stories that revolve around a hero-type figure facing a seemingly unstoppable adversary.

As much as we cheer when the story’s protagonist achieves their goal, we feel that sense of elation most when they dust themselves off after they fall and use their failure to not only fuel their resolve, but to improve their understanding of what they need to do to ultimately succeed.

After all, their moments of epiphanies surface not during those heady moments of success, but as a result of what they discover and learn during those dark periods as they struggle with the failure they’ve endured.

When seen from this context, the question then becomes how can we ourselves learn to value failure? How can we move beyond seeing failure as painful and difficult to an opportunity to learn what will help us to move forward and prevail?

As with the nature of success, we first need to understand that Click here to continue reading »”How Can We Learn To Value Failure?”