Focus day

This process walks through a list of prompts in different categories, looking for things you're trying to remember and commitments you've made and gets them out onto paper.

It will help you clear your thoughts and get the distractions out of your head.

Take the time to review the coming week's schedule and organize it into large chunks of time, with tasks grouped by importance and urgency.

It will make it easier to manage your work.

Employee expectations to maintain:

• Displaying a positive and respectful attitude
• Working with honesty and integrity
• Performing their work to a reasonable standard 

Employees expectations;

• Proper training, support and leadership from management and access to resources
• Timely and accurate payment of wages
• Safe working environments
• Explanation of responsibilities, company policies and procedures
• Regular feedback from supervisors or managers.

Team expectations refer to the behaviors that occur while working together on tasks. 

• Respect and courtesy to everyone.
• Be accountable for your work.
• Be reasonably flexible about task assignments.
• Be willing to lend a helping hand.
• Ask for help when needed.
• Work safely together.
• Be open to constructive feedback.
• Be self-motivated and reliable.
• Share ideas for improvement.
• Be cheerful, positive and encouraging to other team members.

• Ask about passion projects. Learners tend to pursue something else outside work (training for a marathon, playing with a band, etc.)
• Focus on curiosity as much as hard skills. Bring up problems currently facing the team and see how the candidate responds.
• One of the most important things to a learning mindset is the ability to admit you don't know something. So be aware of how they approach the things they don't understand.

This means explicitly defining ongoing learning as a core company value.

Empowering employees can mean providing the time or money to enable learning - in other words, offering learning opportunities as a job benefit like health insurance. 

Intentionally design for the same interactions that would otherwise happen if people were in the office.

• Culture is what naturally happens when a group of people gets together for any period.
• A great culture happens with intentional design and influence. It's the reason you should make your company's mission, vision, values, operating principles, standards, and agreements visible. 
• Culture is experienced through emotions, including how your employees feel about the company, you, other leaders, and peers. That feeling is developed through human interaction at the water cooler, kitchen, or hallway conversations.

Your people need to feel your presence as a leader as they will have fewer opportunities to see you face to face when they work remotely.

• Regularly show up in a variety of forms that can include weekly video meetings, periodic company-wide emails, or presence in public channels.
• Err on the side of more communication rather than less.

• For new and inexperienced in the job staff -  use a directive delegation style (Tell exactly what you want them to do).
• For staff that has experience in the job (they know what they are doing) - use the effective, management by objectives delegation method (Tell people the end result that you want and then get out of their way).
• When the staff person is completely experienced and competent, your method of delegation in this case is simply, easy interaction.

• Who can do this job instead of you?
• Who can do this job better than me?
• Who can do this job at a lower cost than me?
• Can this activity be eliminated altogether?

• Have a plan that includes specific actions that will be taken in the event of a crisis.
• Identify a spokesperson and prepared them to deal with the public and the media.
• Be honest and open.
• Always inform your employees. This keeps the business flowing smoothly.
• Communicate with customers and suppliers.
• Over-communicate. A lack of updates will allow rumors to fill the void.
• Be sure to establish a social media team to monitor, post and react to social media activity throughout the crisis.

Probably the most influential step you can take toward creating a consistent practice of success is to invest in the systems that make your life run like a well-oiled machine.

Systems allow you to leverage your and other people’s time.

We all plateau. It’s frustrating but also a normal part of life. The key to bursting through ceilings, be they mental, physical or financial, is to hold yourself accountable. That doesn't mean accountable for doing it all, but accountable for getting help.

You’ll be surprised by how much further and faster a little help can take you.