Have you been feeling particularly stressed recently?

Some stress is necessary and healthy for you and your business. After all, nothing happens unless there is a driving force. However, when warm baths, breathing exercises and Benedictine chants no longer work it's time to step back and deal with the root causes of your stress.

What are the root causes of stress?

First is carrying the entire burden of your business on your shoulders. The strategy of "just work harder" whenever something new comes along eventually hits the hard limit of 24 hour days and seven day weeks. The greater the number and variety of things you take on yourself, the more likely you will miss the important (while being consumed handling the urgent). Second is the frustration of getting nothing finished. Employees don't finish what you ask them to start and what they do finish isn't what you wanted. You find yourself having to cancel projects before completion because they took too long and conditions changed. You live in constant fear that you're not doing the right thing and waste time looking over your shoulder. Finally you can't shake the sense that things are out of control. Your time and attention is spent fixing mistakes and playing catch-up, in part because of missed deadlines. Life has become one unpleasant surprise after another.

Every organization has two principal challenges, focus and communications.

You can never "solve" these problems, merely attend to them. The key to alleviating stress is dealing with these two challenges. You can't do everything yourself. You need a team. To leverage that team you have to help them internalize what needs to be done. In other words, there has to be clear communications and your team's efforts have to be focused on goals that create long term value. But, how do you do that?

Every organization has a current set of issues.

You need to get your team together and productively discuss the issues until each member has a common understanding. (Now is not the time to "solve" an issue, that comes after the team understands all the important issues and can balance solutions against the complete set.) Working through the issues will verbalize anxieties, both yours and the other team members. A key issue to discuss and reach consensus on are the expectations of your customers, employees and owner(s). Unless the team understands these stakeholder expectations they can't help the stakeholders meet them.

No business can be all things to all people.

The market place sets barriers you have to scale to be successful. You will go out of business if you don't focus your business sufficiently to learn how to deliver results (sales) higher than your costs. Breaking even isn't good enough for the long haul. You need to get a competitive advantage. This requires that you are number one in your market with more customers, more volume and lower costs than anyone else. As you narrow the mission of your business, you increase the volume of the remaining activities. (For example, instead of placing an occasional ad in several magazines you run an entire series in the key magazine.)

Mission alone can't get you to a competitive position. You have to prioritize your activities. It is a proven fact that 20% of your potential activities can produce 80% of the potential results. Since we can't do everything, selecting and finishing that 20% is better than trying to do everything and finishing a random 10%. While it may seem obvious, the only way to get results is to finish what you start. For this to happen you have to have chosen wisely and maintained stability over the life of each activity/project.

How do you get your team to move to a new plateau via dramatically improved communications and focus?

There is a proven, affordable process. You and your team (5 - 12 people) meet during an intensive two day planning retreat. During the two days you systematically look at where you are, where you want to be in 3-5 years and how you can focus your resources today in order to get there. Looking at where you are today creates understanding of the issues. This understanding is created by discussing and prioritizing stakeholder expectations, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, strengths and trends.

You and your team identify where you want to be by clarifying your mission (who you are, what you do, who you do it for & why you do it) as well as your product/market strategy. You finish by reaching consensus on a small set of strategic goals (typically 5 or less) that you and your team are committed to completing. To insure implementation you also create a simple action plan for each goal with key result measures and 6-12 milestones covering the next 18 months.

With a clear and understood mission and small set of goals & milestones…

… you can maintain your view of the forest even while consumed by the day-to-day "tree" activity. Better focus and communication makes it practical to delegate responsibility and authority. With everyone working on the most important goals you can stop looking over your shoulder. The net of all this is that you are back in control. You can see the forest, others are sharing the burden, and you are proactive rather than reactive. All and all, not a bad place to be. Who knows, maybe then you can take a vacation instead of chanting.