1. Teach Employees to Focus on Goals

Encourage your employees to have short- and long-term goals for both their personal business development and their departmental standing. Help them to ascertain whether their goals are realistic and attainable. When your employees have goals to strive for, they are more apt to exert extra effort. The results are more motivated employees and higher company profits. To ensure your company’s success, teach your employees to focus on the specific things that will help them attain the goals they have set for themselves. Perhaps they have to improve their communication skills, gain some specialized training or volunteer to work in another department. By helping your employees concentrate on the steps they need to take, they will have a better chance of reaching their goals.

2. Give Your Employees Permission to Fail

New employees are especially afraid of failing; however, it’s in failing that you learn to be successful. Rick Pitino, head basketball coach at the University of Kentucky said, “Failure is good. It’s fertilizer. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from making mistakes.” His words are so true. Don’t allow your team to be afraid of risks that might lead to initial failures. Encourage employees to come up with new ideas and to try out new things-not to be afraid of failure. When your employees realize they won’t be reprimanded for failing, they will be more creative and more willing to “think out of the box.” In fact, giving them permission to fail is the best way of giving them permission to win.

3. Treat Your Employees as You Want to be Treated

People do their best only for other people who they like and respect. This truth applies to you doing your best for your employees as well as to their doing their best for you. To meet the challenge of doing your best for your employees, choose people with attitudes and profiles you admire. From that point on, continually create thoughtful ways to show your employees how much you care about them, whether it be through quarterly bonuses, company picnics, extra paid time off or any other way to show your appreciation for them. In return, your employees will like you.

When your employees feel appreciated, they will be passionate about the company and motivated to succeed. They will know their mission and they will play to win. Because they like you, they will be empowered to do their very best-individually and as a team.

In too many companies, this mutual respect doesn’t generally happen. It’s often a low-key adversarial scenario in which management– employee communication is not all it should be and creates behind the scenes grumbling on both sides. This breeds uneasiness and job insecurity among employees, and can exact a huge cost in lost concentration, productivity, efficiency and teamwork. It’s amazing how responsive employees will be if they sense that management is doing its best to treat their employees well.

4. Coach Instead of Manage

In today’s business environment, successful companies know that management is dead. They know that to be successful in the future, they must be coaches. This means that the management team makes certain everybody knows the company’s mission and that everybody is there to help the company win. Each employee has his or her particular assignment, and the management team sees to it that employees know exactly where they fit in and how necessary they are to the company’s success.

A successful “coach” brings his or her team together, sometimes every day, to discuss challenges and share ideas on how to build a winning company. And while everybody in the company has a voice, employees are clear on who the leader is. Because of their proactive leadership style, successful coaches don’t have team members who just want to do a good job; rather, the team members want to exceed the coach’s expectations.

Never underestimate the power your employees have on your business’s success. When your employees feel empowered, respected, appreciated and well-informed, they’ll develop a positive attitude about their jobs, which will show when dealing with customers and clients. As a result, they’ll be more productive and close more sales, and your company will thrive.

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But in this week’s season finale, the show proved a little ahead of its time. Sterling Cooper, the fictional agency where the characters work, is set to be sold to a much larger corporate ad agency. Don Draper, the star employee at Sterling Cooper (and the show’s “hero”) doesn’t want to become a little fish in a much bigger pond, and he tries to convince his bosses, Mr. Sterling and Mr. Cooper, to start a new agency together. “I want to build something on my own!” he pleads. At first he meets with resistance, as Cooper says, “Young men love risks because they can’t imagine consequences.” But finally Draper is able to appeal to the dormant entrepreneurial spirit buried within the man, reminding him of the risk he took many years ago by starting his own agency to begin with.

And because things are much simpler in TV land, after cherry-picking some key employees and clients and setting up office space in a hotel room, corporate appendage Sterling Cooper morphs into the entrepreneurial new firm of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

How many of you can identify with Don Draper? I sure did, and while in Palm Springs, Calif. to attend Ernst & Young’s Strategic Growth Forum, an annual gathering of entrepreneurs, I was reminded of why I originally went into business for myself. This event opened with a speech from Steve Howe, E&Y’s Americas Managing Partner, in which he told us that half of all Fortune 500 companies were founded during an economic downturn. More important, he said, “Entrepreneurs are the best hope for the global economic recovery.”

This message was reinforced during a Charlie Rose-moderated panel where corporate leaders from SAP, 1-800-Flowers.com, Kohler, and Manpower encouraged us entrepreneurs with their tales from the trenches. All are cautiously optimistic about the economic recovery.

But this wasn’t just a pep talk; the panel shared some great advice. Here are some highlights:

On Surviving the Economy

Jeffrey Joerres, chairman and CEO, Manpower, Inc.:

“If you’ve been the leader of a business for the last 18 months, it’s been all about the tradeoffs. What can we do? What can’t we do?”

“It’s a great time to find good talent.”

Rob Enslin, president of SAP, North America:

“It’s a great time to grow. We gained market share [during the recession] by changing our business model. ”

“[Businesses] need to react quickly in the marketplace and be bold about it.”

On Customers
Enslin:

“Find out what your customers want and package it for them. Provide digestible solutions.”

“You have to solve customer problems or you won’t be in business.”

Jim McCann, founder and CEO, 1-800-Flowers.com: “Know your customer and serve them accordingly.”

On Management

Joerres: It’s all about “flexibility and agility.”

Herb Kohler, chairman of the board and CEO, Kohler Company: Kohler, who works with a lot of factories in China, advises you to always initially meet people “eyeball to eyeball.” Then you can teleconference, but you “should always have follow up, face-to-face meetings.”

McCann: “Invest in the future. Embrace new technology.” Taking advantage of that technology, McCann now has thousands of employees working out of their homes.

On the Entrepreneurial Culture

McCann: “It’s easy to create. No staff. No budget. [Thinking] we’ll change all the rules. But we can’t control the culture. We can influence it by whom we hire, whom we fire, how you reward your employees, and how you celebrate.”

Joerres: “Kill the organization chart mentality. There needs to be collaboration throughout your company. Of course, you still need a framework and guidelines. Without that, it’s a cowboy mentality.”

On Speaking the Truth

Over the years, Jim McCann has uttered some of my favorite quotes about entrepreneurship. He didn’t disappoint at the Strategic Growth Forum when he noted the shift in power over the last two years: “There’s been a ’sucking up’ reversal of fortune. Two years ago banks were sucking up to us. Now I am sucking up to them.”

It’s important for all of us to get out of the office and attend events and conferences like E&Y’s Strategic Growth Forum. They’re not only great places to meet other entrepreneurs and learn from the truly successful, but being at a conference is a great way (short of Don Draper yelling at you) to shift from worrying about surviving to worrying about thriving and to your entrepreneurial juices flowing again.

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In honor of the new year, we’ve compiled a quick list of 10 bits of wisdom that are as timeless and useful now as they were years ago.

1 — Push through your limitations
“The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn’t like to do.”
— Thomas Edison

Business is scary. It can be new, difficult, frustrating, and many other things — but if you push through those limitations and do the things that are hard you might see the best of what business can be: rewarding, lucrative, challenging, and fun.

Pushing yourself can be hard, but it’s worth it in the end.

2 — Never stop improving
“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”
— Jack Welch

The world changes, and things are always moving forward. In order to keep up, it’s critical to always learn and always improve.

In business, the companies who are most successful are the ones who keep learning, keep improving, and keep adapting.

3 — Action is more important than talk
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing”
— Walt Disney

We’ve all heard the cliche before, actions speak louder than words; but it has real truth in business. Action is what matters, not talk, or ideas, or even how much money you have. If business success is what you want, than you need to take action.

4 — Success takes hard work
“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.”
— Albert Einstein

Doing well in business requires effort. A lot of effort.

Those who achieve the most are often the ones who are the most passionate, and most determined to reach their goals — because they devote themselves to the cause and put in the effort that others cant. It takes time, but with focus and hard work you’ll almost always do well.

5 — Hard work brings happiness (and success)
“Satisfaction does not come with achievement, but with effort. Full effort is full victory.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

Even the best intentions and efforts don’t always lead to where you thought, but that’s okay, because it isn’t the goal that counts. The act of giving yourself to a cause, and working with your full ability, is what will bring real satisfaction.

And if you put in your whole effort, you’re still much more likely to get what you want, too.

6 — Don’t be afraid of failure
“Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe.”
— Sumner Redstone

Being afraid of doing something wrong is human nature, but it’s not in your best interest. Failing is one of the best ways to learn, and is often one of the only ways to become truly successful.

Fail early, fail often, and don’t be afraid to learn from your mistakes.

7 — Strive to provide something great
“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”
— Steve Jobs

Perhaps the most important piece of advice in business is to create something that is great and valuable. If you can provide your customers with a great product or a great service, chances are they’ll come back for more and tell their friends too.

Learn to understand your customers, learn what they really need, and then do your best to provide them with that. Even when all else fails, providing an awesome product will usually lead to success.

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