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How can defining your business values and success more clearly lead to a calmer operation?
This episode kicks off our miniseries on deconstructing the common elements that all calm businesses share. We're starting with the most foundational element: clarity. Clarity in business is often summarized by a simple yet powerful term: "freedom from ambiguity." In today’s discussion, Susan Boles explores how achieving clarity in your business's values, goals, and communications can lead to more engaged employees, less turnover, and ultimately, a calmer business environment.
Understanding what success looks like and making sure everyone in your organization is on the same page can transform your business operations. Clarity reduces confusion and aligns your team's efforts towards common goals.
Listen to the Full Episode to Hear:
- Why clarity is crucial in defining business success and aligning actions with values.
- The impact of clear communication on employee engagement and satisfaction.
- Practical tips for enhancing clarity within your team, from onboarding materials to daily communications.
- How clarity in roles, expectations, and the bigger company vision can lead to more effective and autonomous decision-making.
- Steps you can take today to start improving clarity in your business, including sharing your vision of success and refining internal documentation.
Creators & Guests
What is Beyond Margins: Build a calmer business with comfortable margins?
Can you build a business based on… “calm?” On Beyond Margins, host Susan Boles looks beyond the usual metrics of success to help you build a business where calm is the new KPI. With over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur, CFO, and COO, Susan shares the business strategies that lead to a business with comfortable margins—financial, emotional, energetic, and scheduling margins. Join her and her guests as they counter the prevailing “wisdom” about business growth, productivity, and success to provide a framework for making choices that align with your values and true goals. Episode by episode, you’ll get a look at the team management, operations, financials, product development, and marketing of a calmer business.
When you get clear on what your values are, what success really looks like, and then align your actions accordingly, that's when you can really start creating a calmer business. Because calm businesses are engineered. They're constructed. They don't just happen. They take forethought.
Susan Boles:They take planning. They take design. And that's what we're diving into in this miniseries. What are the common elements that all calm businesses have built into their foundations? The first and arguably most important foundational element of a calm business is clarity.
Susan Boles:But what does that mean? One of my favorite dictionary definitions is freedom from ambiguity, which I think is actually kind of great, but I think this could be simplified a little bit. For me, clarity means both explicit and unambiguous. And when it comes to business, that means that everyone knows what's important and what to work on. In a business that's clear, success is transparently and explicitly defined, Whether that's in the form of value statements, goal metrics, written handbooks everyone knows what you're aiming for.
Susan Boles:Likewise, values are also equally explicit Everyone knows what's important and what to prioritize when it comes to making hard choices. Are we prioritizing profit or are we prioritizing people? Are we emphasizing growth Or are we focusing on building systems so we can aim for maintenance mode? These are critical pieces of information and it's important that everyone in your business understand them. That's the benefit clarity gives you.
Susan Boles:But how does clarity make things calmer? Well let's start with the benefits of clear communication. Now research shows that when organizations have clear communication, employees are generally more engaged and they're more satisfied with their jobs. That means there's less turnover, there's less time spent training, and there's more institutional knowledge generally. And that equates to calmer business operations because you can consistently be building and improving instead of training and basically starting over from the beginning, which is pretty much what happens when you have a bunch of team members turn over again and again.
Susan Boles:Also, happier team members, they are more committed, they do better work, and are generally more productive. Not to mention that when team members are really clear on what they're supposed to do, they can do a better job of effectively allocating their time and their resources so the most important priorities get the most attention. Now all of that means that work generally is more effective, and that can make it feel a lot calmer. Clarity equals calm. Now I will say that clarity, that is not the default.
Susan Boles:Most businesses, most business communications are full of jargon, their secret subtext, and cultural rules that you wouldn't know about if you just walked in the door. The corporate business world seems to pride itself on buzzwords that don't mean anything. They go on visioning retreats to come up with mission and vision statements that are really just there for marketing materials. They don't actually mean anything. And that, well, that's not good.
Susan Boles:That lack of clarity, that lack of meaning is really the reason that so many people accidentally build default businesses. Those ones that emphasize and prioritize growth while sacrificing everything else. Because it honestly never really occurs to business owners, especially those who come out of corporate culture, to just stop and take a minute and figure out what is important. What are their priorities? What do they wanna build their business towards?
Susan Boles:And stopping to think about that, stopping to get that clarity is a critical step. Now there are a few different aspects of clarity that all help build towards a calmer business. The first we've talked about, that idea that everyone in the business knows what's important, knows where you're going, and they know how you want to get there. The second part is a little bit more tactical. Everyone in the business has to know what their role is and what the expectations are for that role.
Susan Boles:They also need to understand the big picture of the company and how that impacts their role. That information allows them to make informed decisions for their area because they understand the implications of their choices company wide. So you might be asking, how do you actually go about building clarity into your business? Well, there are really a lot of different places you can start moving towards more clarity for your team. For example, you can share what your version of success looks like, talk about what's important to you, share why it's important, and help them understand what role each one of them plays in moving towards your definition of success.
Susan Boles:You don't have to get as tactical or as transparent as sharing financials. Although if you want to and feel comfortable doing that, great. But it doesn't really have to be that direct. It could just be a conversation at your next team meeting about where you're headed. If you do wanna get a little bit more explicit than that, a great place to start building is in your team onboarding materials or in your employee handbook if you have one.
Susan Boles:These are great places to talk about priorities. You can explain inside jokes that you might have or even have a how we work section talking about how you approach work at your company. How does work get done? Are you a meeting first kind of place, or do you communicate primarily written or asynchronously? Writing down those kinds of things can help you define and explicitly communicate how work happens at your company, even small projects like writing down how a specific task happens.
Susan Boles:So who does it? What tools are you using? What are the steps in this task? That can help improve clarity around tasks and how specific work happens and also make it easier to hand off work between team members. Now this doesn't have to be something that happens all at once.
Susan Boles:In fact, it probably won't happen like that. Starting to improve the clarity in your business, it's a gradual process that happens a little bit at a time. But making being clear a priority ultimately benefits everyone in and around your business. Being very clear about what's important, how work happens, and what everyone's role is, that is a critical component in building a calmer business. And that clarity is something that absolutely has to be in place for our second foundational element to exist: autonomy.
Susan Boles:Now, you cannot build an autonomous work culture without everyone being clear first or else they won't actually have the information they need to be able to make autonomous decisions or to own their area of the business. So that's the element we'll be deconstructing next time, autonomy. So make sure you hit subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you don't miss it. Big thanks to everyone who supports Beyond Margins. If you are a listener, a sponsor, or a partner of any kind, I absolutely couldn't do this show without you.
Susan Boles:For more ideas, tools, and resources about how to build a calmer business with comfortable margins, head to beyondmargins.com. While you're there, you can sign up for my free newsletter. I send it every week, and it's all about exploring and deconstructing what it takes to build a calmer business. Thanks so much for listening.