The Latest from Kristy-Lee

Don’t you just love those weeks where you have a Public Holiday (especially on either the Monday or the Friday), but any day, and you only need to run your operations, lead your team and be present in your business for 4 days of the week? As a bonus, how much do your team love those weeks?

Interestingly, I’m going to ask you to reflect on something – how much less productivity happens in those weeks? Does 80% of the work get done, or is it much closer to 100% productivity squeezed into less time? I am willing to guess that the vast majority of you are going to say closer to 100%.

Isn’t that interesting … 80% of the time ‘at work’, 100% of the tasks and objectives achieved.

So, should you make all of your team part time, as they’re obviously dilly dallying for around 7-8 hours per week right? The short answer I am going to give you is no, I don’t think you should cut their hours along with their salary and make them part time.

However, I do want to invite you to consider...

No doubt you have heard of the term ‘imposter syndrome’ before, but have you ever heard of it when it comes to our teams, our employees, amongst our staff? Most commonly as business owners, entrepreneurs and leaders we might talk amongst ourselves about this feeling which we refer to as imposter syndrome, but I don’t hear business owners discussing this as something which might be impacting their staff.

Before we consider how this might play out within our teams, let’s first understand what specifically it is we’re referring to here.

The term Imposter Syndrome was coined in 1978 by Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes who explored the idea that people with this feel like they have only succeeded due to luck, not because of their talent or qualifications. The Oxford Dictionary succinctly defines it as “the persistent inability to believe that one's success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one's own efforts or skills.”

If you’ve exper...

As I have shared in recent weeks, I have spent some time over the last month about the fact that I recently celebrated 15 years of being in the world of entrepreneurship and business. And WOW what a ride it has been!

The things I thought I knew but didn’t, the things I had learnt that I never thought I’d need to use that came in handy, the wins, challenges, fun and hard stuff. There is no doubt that being in business is not dissimilar riding a roller coaster most of the time – except you’ve got the controls in your hands.

In recent weeks I have shared the key lessons that I have really taken on about leaderships and teams – because hey, that’s what I’m all about, but today is a little different. Today is about the real lessons, the life lessons, the things most people don’t talk about, but I’m going to.

Learning to juggle has been imperative, and I’m a pretty good multitasker naturally. But the juggle of business, entrepreneurship and the unrelenting nature of loving what y...

As I shared last week, recently I was reflecting on the fact that it has been 15 years since I threw in the towel on a stable, well paid, leadership position with a multi national organisation to set up my own business, and so the Footprint brand was born.

Whilst I may have been anything but the text book approach, I knew what I wanted to do and just went head first in. Whilst I had some skills, plenty of grit and a no nonsense approach to success being inevitable, I can’t say that there hasn’t been hurdles to overcome along the way.

One of the key lessons I’ve learnt in these 15 years is the importance of your team – your employees, the contractors and suppliers you work with, the mentors and advisors you seek support from and everyone else that is part of this journey.

Now I’d been building high performing, successful teams since I was a teenager, so this wasn’t news to me, but there are certainly some lessons that I have needed to take on to truly understand the recipe t...

Recently I was reflecting on the fact that it has been 15 years since I quit my stable, well paid, leadership position with a multi national organisation to, within 7 days, set up my own business, and the journey of The Footprint Group took it’s first step into the world.

Whilst I certainly don’t think the way I decided to go about this entrepreneurial journey is a text book example of solid business planning, it was the only way for me. I was youngish, impulsive, stubborn and had been dreaming of doing this for the longest time. Why hadn’t I done it before? The usual story – the people around me thought it was risky, uncertain, crazy, against the grain.

But in a period of 3 days where the timing was like a perfect storm to make this decision a no brainer.

So I resign, spend the week of my notice period setting up business names, company structures, getting logo’s designed, preparing a full policies and procedures document, finding and leasing offices – and 7 days later I w...

Like most leaders and managers of teams, you have probably found yourself in a place where you had had success in building your team, you have found great people, you have kept great people.

Yet, at a certain point, things weren’t all working as well as you liked with your employees.

Perhaps you realised your latest hire wasn’t ideal, or you were getting attitude from one of the team, they just didn’t seem to be doing what you expected, or you needed to exit someone but the thought of having to do that was less than comfortable.

The first thing you need to know is that it is totally normal, and there are always going to be points as you grow your business where things get a little wobbly in certain parts, despite the fact that you have other elements of your team running along seamlessly.

I don’t need to tell you what you already know, and that is that you can’t build a business that delivers you success and results (whatever they look like for you), without having a te...

Let me ask you a question…. As the business owner, leader, manager, the head honcho, how important is ‘self-care’ to you? In fact, what does self-care even mean to you?

Why am I asking you this? And what on earth does this have to do with your team and your business success?

Well I wanted to let you in on a little background and share my experience in realising just how important this is to our success as business owners. I wanted to share this with you because I was there, I was doing all of the things, all of the time and thought I was smashing it! I had it totally under control and was moving forward and building my empire (yes literally that was my mantra, I’m not even joking).

But do you know what, I was on the fast train towards burnout and I couldn’t see it, and in fact it took one of my team to not so subtly let me know that I wasn’t being the best leader, manager or business owner I could be.

Was my business successful at the time? Absolutely! By all of the typical measure...

Ever been in a situation where you felt completely blindsided by an employee resigning?

Perhaps you’ve been frustrated because they had ample opportunity to talk to you about whatever was going on and they didn’t.

Maybe despite not seeing it coming you’re quietly relieved because, let’s face it, they haven’t been a stellar team member for the last little while.

There is even a chance that you are not so quietly relieved because this employee has been keeping you up at night, you’ve been avoiding having one of those conversations with them and their resignation has just got you out of it….

Whatever the case we have all been there, where a resignation landed on our desk that we didn’t see coming. But could we have? Could we have seen the signs, and known that this was inevitable? Or could we have seen the signs and put in place strategies to reverse what was going on so we could retain this once high performing and well liked member of our team.

The truth is, in almost every circums...

This is one of the topics I most often get asked about.

I see business owners, leaders and managers struggling with this one all the time: tackling difficult conversations with staff. Usually this comes after a period of avoiding that difficult conversation which is what we’re going to spend a bit of time today looking at in depth.

If you’re anything like me, conflict is not something you run headfirst toward with arms wide open to embrace - that’s exactly why tough conversations are hard. That dreaded feeling in the pit of your stomach, sleepless nights, anxiety, avoiding the staff member and putting off THAT conversation, if not avoiding it entirely.

You are absolutely not alone.

Even with my experience, I don’t like having these conversations either. I never have, and while I’m definitely better at tackling these tough conversations, it doesn’t mean I like it any more than I did before - I just developed the skills to get better at having them. 

These skills are essential fo...

"If it can not be measured it can not be managed" - Peter Drucker

When was the last time you contemplated creating KPIs for your team?

KPI's, Key Performance Indicators, Key Success Criteria or any other term you would like to use are essential to drive employee performance, productivity and engagement.

Too often this task lands firmly in the 'too hard basket' because let's be honest it's not the easiest task to do.

Done poorly, creating KPIs are an utter waste of time. For many of you who have been in the position where you have been allocated or managed staff with ineffective KPI's, this will have undoubtedly influenced your desire to develop better targets for your future teams.

If this sounds like you, I am going to challenge you to rethink your approach today. I am challenging you to set just 1 KPI for each role over the next week, and 3 big ones for your business or team.

Why?

Our team members fundamentally want to know 3 key things from their leaders:
1) What do we expect ...