A few years ago, I read a book called The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly, and it blew me away.

The general premise that I took away from this four hour business-changing read is that if you care more about your employees’ personal goals than the company work they are doing, they’ll go through brick walls for you to build your company.

Sounds odd, but focusing on employees’ dreams will change them forever, and they’ll associate that positive feeling with your company.

How to Use Dreams

One easy, fun and impactful system you can put in place is called the “101 Dream Goals.”  Give each employee thirty minutes and have them write as many things they can think of that:

· They’d like to buy

· They’d like to do

· They want to learn

· They want to try for the first time

· Personal goals they want to achieve

· Sights they want to see

· Places they want to go

Then start spending time every day or every week helping them to make their dreams happen, one by one.  Many of them won’t involve any time or money either. Employees will begin to feel a huge connection with you as you help them to achieve their personal goals with nothing expected in return.  When employees see the company really caring about them as people with dreams, some pretty awesome cultural stuff starts to happen.

Three of my employees had student debt and they felt like they were being crushed by it.  They had no family support showing them how to get out of it and it never would have come up had they not written “get out of debt” on their list of goals.  I asked the three of them if they were OK with me getting them all together to help them out.  All expressed interest in meeting up.  We set up a dinner club – I was buying – and for a few months we met to review budgets that included debt repayment, investing and spending plans I’d put each of them on.  Within six months, all were either out of debt or substantially on their way to getting out of debt.  Two had started companies.  All three were investing, and two were actually using my stockbroker as an adviser.  All were thrilled.

Another one of my employees had on his list that he wanted to watch our national hockey league team, the Vancouver Canucks, have a pre-game practice and then sit behind the bench to watch the actual game.  For him it seemed like an unattainable goal. I made one call to Mike Johnson, the Assistant Coach from the Vancouver Canucks, who not only made it all happen, but a few of the players took Geoff out for drinks after the game.  And yeah, he’d go through brick walls for me now, too.

When you really care for your employees like the family you say that you are, that means caring for them personally and not just talking to them about what has to get done to build your company.

One of my favorite lines at the office used to be, “great day–take the rest of it off.’  I used to tease people with that and say it at 6pm.  I’d also say it to people at 10:30 am and blow them away.

Tell people to go home and relax once in a while.

We all know that as entrepreneurs we duck out of the office for our little stress breaks.  Let your team take some once in a while, too.

And if you really like your employees as much as you say you do, let them take the same amount of vacations, as you’d want.  Most employees feel that five weeks’ paid vacation (including their sick days) in addition to the statutory government holidays is about right.

Let them take it.

They won’t quit.  They won’t come into work sick.  And we all know the most productive time at the office is the day before vacation.

So give people time off.

To be sure they take this time off, force them to or they lose it.  The idea is to recharge your batteries regularly and not stockpile the time and have a meltdown.  Give them five weeks’ time, however, make them take all five weeks of time during the calendar year.

Coaching and developing people is core to any leader’s role, and it requires communication.

Not sure where I heard this, but the phrase; “the ability to get people promoted is the best sign of a great leader” couldn’t be more accurate.  I know I heard it back in the 1980’s during my College Pro Painters days when we spent a lot of time coaching & mentoring franchisees.

Coaching done well is an art, and it helps build communication skills. You take in the information from a coach and turn it into real-world action. By developing the ability to take in that kind of information and turn it into results is a precious skill, and one that should be developed in each of your employees.

The best athletes in the world have coaches and still learn from them. Employees in a growing organization need the same skill development. Learning how to adapt our coaching styles to different situations and give constructive guidance and feedback are important every day because it helps us process information and that turn that into action.

We spend time coaching someone in a business setting because we need the learner to increase their results so we can hit our goals. At the end of the day, coaching will assist us in hitting the results leaders are supposed to hit, too, because we’re communicating our vision for our organization.

There is no question that preparation is one of the most important areas of coaching. If not done properly, the coach is merely flying by the seat of their pants and the learner knows this.

This video of Daniel Pink’s is one of the most important ones that business people will watch. 10 minutes. Watch it. Comments ?

On Saturday I got part way to my dream of speaking at TED.  I was able to speak at TEDx Edmonton about something I’m super passionate about.

As a kid in school I was always told I wouldn’t do well because I didn’t fit the system.  In high school & university I figured the system out and beat it – graduating while being able to run little companies on the side.

The problem was the school system never say nor nurtured my entrepreneurial traits.  They also never showed starting & owning a company as equal to careers like law, medicine, dentistry etc.  Amazingly they actually felt working for government was a better career move that starting my own business.

Thankfully my father & grandfather nurtured – or perhaps forced is a better word – me into running my own business.  I grew up feeling sick thinking about having a ‘job’.  So an entrepreneur I’ve been.

My TEDx talk which I’ll post soon was about “Raising Kids to Be Entrepreneurs Instead of Lawyers Will Change the World”.  And my TED Wish if I’m giving the chance to speak at TED (nominations are welcome) is to see Entrepreneurs be viewed as equal to professions that schools push kids into currently: Law, Engineering, Medicine, Dentistry, Teaching, Finance, etc.

Were you raised as an entrepreneur?  What’s your story?  I’d love to read your comments…

The best potential employees aren’t looking for a job because they’ve already got one. That’s why you have to poach them.

In close to thirty years of my professional life, I’ve only had two job interviews. The rest of the time I was poached by one company while working for another.

There are lots of reasons why finding the right people is hard, but if you want your business to be exceptional, your staff must be exceptional people. It takes work but it’s worth the investment of time.

I had to remind someone of this while on a multi-city speaking engagement. At a talk in Sydney, Australia, a member of the audience commented, “What you don’t realize is we have a really tight economy in Sydney right now, and there are just no employees out there. We have the lowest unemployment in forty years.” I replied that I felt her pain—in Vancouver, we were at the lowest in fifty years! But honestly, I asked, what difference does it make? Even in tight job markets the great employees still exist, they’re just working somewhere else.

Poach them!  Show them why working for you is WAY better!

Open spaces create transparent and energized work environments.

This leads to the development and transmission of office culture across people, departments, and finally, the entire organization.

Years ago, at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? we had all our employees on two wide open floors in an office. There were no walls.

Then we moved into a downtown office tower and had to use the 14^th floor of the building for the better part of a year while our real office space was constructed.

For the first time ever people had private offices, and it was interesting to see what happened.  For the first week or so, people loved having their own space.  They felt more focused, appeared to get more done and had the quiet they needed to think.  Then, after a week, the chatter started. People said, “I miss everyone,” and, “Where is Greg? I haven’t seen him in ages,” or, “Is so-and-so sick today?” It went on and on.  After about three weeks, it was unanimous: private offices killed the buzz and employees wanted their open workspace back.

Everyone knows you’re hiding out in your private office playing on FaceBook, Twitter or surfing porn.  So go join the rest of your team – open up your entire office space.  When I mentor CEOs I push them all to get rid of private offices.  Including their own.

Some of you will balk at the suggestion to make it easier to socialize at your office, but it will quickly help you develop culture. Provide your people with a BBQ that is always kept clean and ready to use with propane so people can cook casually for lunch or dinner. This kind of interaction builds culture in an authentic and relatable way. With even less effort, have your kitchen stocked with free fruit, cereal, various coffees, teas and more. You can even have the food delivered weekly by the grocery store. Whatever you do, make people feel at home and they’ll work longer and harder for you.

I have a client in Toronto that I mentor called I Love Rewards. Two years in a row they’ve been ranked as one of the top companies to work for in Canada.  They actually create rewards programs to help employers create great cultures – so they get it.

One of the things I love most about I Love Rewards is that they have an employee area called the Red Point Lounge. Every Friday at 3pm, you can go have a drink there.  Their company drink is called the Red Point.  They have these little crystal glasses with Red Point etched into it, and all the employees – I’ve got one too – carry a little card that has the recipe for a Red Point drink on it.  A Red Point is one and a half shots of Crown Royal, one and half shots of Sour Puss Red Raspberry, and 3 shots of Red Bull. You have a couple of those and you’re cranking out some extra work at the end of the day.

In addition, the folks at I Love Rewards don’t take themselves so seriously that they can’t have a little fun. They have white leather sofas in their office. They have a casual dress code that they call “First Date Dress Code.” If you wouldn’t wear it on a first date – don’t wear it to work.  They get culture.  No-one quits I Love Rewards.

Building a magnetic and infectious culture isn’t accidental; a company has to make a conscious decision to foster and grow it.  Once a company decides to actively cultivate culture, the process required to grow it is sort of like chasing the horizon: you never quite ‘get there‘ since it’s always moving, but the journey is wonderful.

In every industry, there are companies with fantastic cultures and others with terrible ones: Google gets it, Microsoft never has—but both are tech companies.  Both have about the same amount of money and both do roughly the same thing.  However, Google decided that they wanted their culture to differentiate them from the Microsofts out there, and they succeeded.

When you walk through Microsoft’s main campus, you can actually feel a cultural void.  Everyone at Microsoft sits in the dark in their private offices cranking out code without anyone around them to engage them in simple human interaction.  Google, on the other hand, has open space and whiteboards everywhere so people can put up ideas when the spirit moves them, and have unstructured discussion time.

As one of my first mentors, Greig Clark, the founder of College Pro Painters said, “Building a great company means creating something that is slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion.” What Greig was saying was that culture has to be more than a passing trend or some ideal to which you pay lip service—like any aspect of culture outside of the workplace, it has to be lived, experienced, and grown in order to be sustainable. It has to be a cult.  Cult-ure.

Your Painted Picture should include ALL aspects of the type of culture you want so that you attract people who fit your culture and repel those who don’t.

Pic: Tommy Panetta

Every company has them.  Most CEOs don’t know who they are.  In fact most companies miss the diamonds sitting right in front of them.

Instead of going outside your company and recruiting people, companies need to really get to know their own people first.  Every company has diamonds in the rough.

The other day I met with an employee from a well known Vancouver company.  The employee is fantastic.  Yet due to some internal politics they are being kept in ‘their box’ and aren’t getting any visibility with the CEO and leadership.  Shame.  Because if the leaders don’t quickly see what this person has to offer a) they’ll leave and b) someone else will ‘hire a superstar’ from outside.

CEOs should be spending time each week getting to know the talent they have 2-3 levels beneath them on the Org Chart.  CEOs should be figuring out who they have on their bench that are not being challenged yet by their VPs & Directors.

Years ago I found numerous employees who were diamond in the rough but worked in completely different business areas than they do now.  By spending time with them on the floor, going for coffee with them, getting to know their personal dreams, and as Tom Peters challenged us to do in his book In Search of Excellence with MBWA (Management By Walking Around), I uncovered the diamonds.

Who are your company’s diamonds?  Who will find them first?  You or the competition?