The Coaching Process: Coaching Your Team

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The Coaching Process: Coaching Your Team

If you’ve worked with a good coach, you know how transformational the process can be. Your employees need that experience as well. They’ll grow, be more engaged employees, and become happier. Your business will be all the better for it.

If you’ve just seen yourself as their manager, you’re missing out on a big opportunity. Actually, a big requirement. Now more than ever — when people are changing jobs at an alarming rate and everyone’s reeling from all the uncertainty in our world — you need to keep your employees engaged.

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When to Hire Your First Employee (and the One After That)

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When to Hire Your First Employee (and the One After That)

Cost is the biggest reservation we hear from founders and entrepreneurs who are contemplating their first hire. Affordability is obviously a critical part of the hiring analysis — and there’s a lot more to it. Whether you’re ready to hire and (perhaps the bigger question) who you should hire depends on multiple factors.

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When Was the Last Time You Did a SWOT Analysis?

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When Was the Last Time You Did a SWOT Analysis?

If you’re in business, you’ve heard of a SWOT analysis. You’ve probably done one — maybe more than one. When did you last do a SWOT analysis for your organization? Unless you’ve just been doing some strategic planning, it’s likely been awhile. We see businesses wait too long between SWOT analysis sessions. They trudge along under old conceptions of their strengths or weaknesses and fail to effectively respond to the changes around them.

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How to Develop Your Core Values (And Implement Them) in Six Steps

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How to Develop Your Core Values (And Implement Them) in Six Steps

Every organization has a culture, whether it was created intentionally or not. Developing and implementing your values puts you in control of that culture. Most importantly, it helps you identify who’s aligned with it and who’s not. Here’s how to create your core values — not just some words that you put on a wall or a website — but the actual tenets that underpin your organization’s culture.

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What Does a Good Business Coaching Relationship Look Like?

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What Does a Good Business Coaching Relationship Look Like?

The concept of a coach used to be reserved for athletes. Now you can hire a coach to help you with everything from weight loss or parenting to public speaking and career transitions. So with all these coaches running around, how do you know what’s a worthwhile investment of your time and money?

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What Is An Organizational Assessment?

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What Is An Organizational Assessment?

For many young or small companies, managing processes and meeting goals is pretty straightforward. They have a team of three or four people committed to the mission. They’ve defined roles and responsibilities. There are few barriers to communication. Then they start to grow. Now they’re a team of 15 or 20, and they’re not sure why exactly, but things aren’t going so well. That’s where an organizational assessment can help.

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Results Aren’t Achieved When Values Don’t Align (Lesson #6 of 8 Lessons Growing 8 Companies)

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Results Aren’t Achieved When Values Don’t Align (Lesson #6 of 8 Lessons Growing 8 Companies)

In 2005, I was working as a consultant, doing some due diligence on software for a startup. The company, founded by two patent attorneys, was attempting to create an online marketplace for swapping books, music, movies, and video games—back when those were all physical objects that needed to be physically traded. The founders had patented their ideas and written hundreds of pages of specs. They’d already hired, fired, and had sued one software development firm. When the second firm they’d hired went past budget on a fixed price contract before completing the software, the founders reached out to me.

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How You Can Harness Workplace Conflict to Help Your Organization Thrive

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How You Can Harness Workplace Conflict to Help Your Organization Thrive

Conflict is inevitable. Everyone is different—different backgrounds, different scripts, different personalities, and different goals. Difference creates conflict. If we’ve learned anything from the last few months of civil unrest, it’s that embracing differences in our lives and in our organizations is critical. Workplace conflict will happen. By treating it as an opportunity for growth, we’ll help ourselves, our organizations, and our employees.

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Is It Time to Hire a Leadership Coach?

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Is It Time to Hire a Leadership Coach?

If it were up to me, everyone in a leadership position, or starting or building a business, would have a coach — not because I want to (or could) coach them all, but because leaders who have coaches are better leaders. At the same time, I recognize that every business leader is balancing dozens of competing priorities, now more than ever. Is it time for you to hire a leadership coach? A better question might be Are you fine staying right where you are?

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Does Your Organization Have a Warning System in Place?

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Does Your Organization Have a Warning System in Place?

Over a family dinner recently, my brother-in-law explained that my mother-in-law’s car has some high-tech alerts on it. I asked my mother-in-law if it had a collision avoidance system, and she responded, “All I know is that if I hear three beeps I need to stop so I don’t bang up the car.”

What if we had a similar alert system for leaders of businesses – when something goes wrong, you hear three beeps and you know you need to stop so you don’t damage your business?

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Three Pillars of Effective Leadership: Insights From Experienced CEOs

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Three Pillars of Effective Leadership: Insights From Experienced CEOs

Being a leader means always having your fingers on the pulse of your business. It means juggling responsibilities, putting out fires, and claiming responsibility. You are responsible for the vision, agenda, and strategy of your entire team. While sitting in the driver's seat can be exhilarating, it can also be exhausting and lonely. But what if it doesn’t have to be? Learn some of the basic pillars of leadership: strategic planning, building a healthy you and a healthy team, and getting outside-in perspectives.

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What If You’re the Problem with Your Team?

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What If You’re the Problem with Your Team?

“Sometimes I’m trying to finish the project you gave me earlier in the week, and I’m nearly done. But you tell me to drop it, that it’s not as important as some new thing you want the team to start on. I like your ideas – and you have a lot of them – but I wish you would let us finish what we start before you tell us to do the new thing. It gets kind of frustrating because I feel like you don’t appreciate that we’re trying to do the things you want, but it’s always changing.” Have you been there before with a team like this? No matter what you might put in your strategic business plan, you will not succeed unless people can learn to work together effectively.

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All the Videos from Trajectify’s Business Growth Conference

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All the Videos from Trajectify’s Business Growth Conference

2018 brought Trajectify’s inaugural live business growth conference which brought together dozens of leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals. We held Trajectify Live on September 13, 2018 at the Science History Institute in Old City, Philadelphia, featuring four Trajectify coaches plus a line-up of guest speakers and presenters while filled the day with insights, lessons and experiences

If you missed the opportunity to join us in September, we’ve got you covered. Here are videos we took of ten presentations from the conference. If you’re interested to attend the next Trajectify Live, please sign up here to be notified about the next Trajectify Live.

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