The Single Most Valuable Thing You Can Do for Your Business NOW

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I am here with no one today. It’s just me and you. Caleb is still out on his sabbatical. Uh, we give a 30-day sabbatical for team members who have reached the 10-year mark at Frank and Maven. You should do that too. Uh, but he is about a third of the way through that, and we will see him in a couple of weeks. But today, um, I want to talk to you about a different way to grow your business, eliminate waste in advertising, and achieve the big dream. Those are the big three things we talk about in this podcast. And almost always it has something to do with a marketing tactic uh or a new piece of information from the space that we live in, which is advertising, marketing, strategy for um, you know, the sales and external factors of a business. Uh, but did you know that the most valuable thing you could actually do today and this week and next week has nothing to do with a dollar you can spend or a strategy you can leverage? This isn’t a strategy. In fact, if you look at this as a strategy, you will lose and you’ll miss the point altogether. This is about you and your people. And that the takeaway is this go build somebody up. Did you know that 65% of employees in America say that they do not receive recognition for the good work that they do in a week’s time? That’s according to a recent Gallup workplace study. Did you know that they also found that managers are twice as likely to give corrective action for feedback rather than positive reinforcement? Now, you have knuckleheads in your team, you have some people underperforming, and there is a time and a place where you can and should kick them in the shorts and tell them to get back in line. I’m not talking about throwing a pizza party, I’m not talking about participation trophies, I’m not talking about kumbaya and just making stuff up that doesn’t exist, but I am talking about the wonderful, extraordinary things that do exist that you have allowed to become ordinary and let them feel like it’s ordinary. William James once said that the deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. Think about that for just a second. If it is our deepest natural wiring to be appreciated, do you think something good could happen if we just tap into the most natural human craving? That is our tribal nature to be appreciated and to belong. We spend a lot of energy thinking about uh psychology and all of the communication tactics and conflict resolution and all of these, you know, very advanced, high-level ways to wire human nature the way we want it to be. But what if we just went straight to the source of where we are actually naturally wired to want to be loved and appreciated? We all know the quote from Maya Angelo uh when she said, uh, people will forget what you say, uh, and people will forget what you did for them, but they will never forget how you made them feel. That is also true that they will forget how much they were paid, uh, they will forget um all of the bonus plans, they will forget uh the accolades of their job, but they will never forget how they felt when they were in your presence and in the presence of your four walls of your company. Here’s what else is interesting. This is not just a good thing to do, this is not just a good person thing to do, this is not just a feel culture thing to do. Uh it turns out that the most high performing teams, according to a recent Harvard Business Review study, have a ratio of five to one praise versus criticism. Think about that. The highest performing industries that Harvard study, the highest performing companies have a five to one praise to criticism ratio. Is that true in your company? That’s what I want to know. Gallup also found that employees who are regularly recognized have four times more engagement. Think about that. If next week your team had four times more engagement, do you think they would at least have 20, 30% impact maybe on the bottom line? And what if you compounded that over a year? Can you imagine waking up with 20% more things done, 20% more of your goals achieved without really spending any extra money? This is not talking about monetary rewards and really complicated things we have to do on the back end and accounting end of our business. This is free, my friend. This is something you can pull out of thin air. This is something you could do one minute from now when this podcast is over. And so I have a question. Have you done that recently? And who do you need to do that for? There’s a team member by statistic reasoning that is not feeling appreciated right now, and you could change that, like literally right now, like today, you could walk into the next room and you could change that for them. You could change that for your company, you could change that for your customers, you could change that for their family, and you could change that for your entire community by just building this person up. So grab them aside. Uh, have a sincere conversation, um, name a specific thing they did, why it mattered, how it reinforced your values, how it made a difference to a customer. Even better, uh, rally your team around in uh in a stand-up meeting and recognize a person. Uh, even better than that, send an email out to the entire company and just say, hey, I just wanted to let everybody know I saw Nate do this last week and it was really awesome. Um we do a fun thing around here uh once in a while. Um out of the blue, we will have every person write uh some cool things about a person on a post-it note, and we will just pelt their car or their desk with it. We call that the truth bomb. Um and then just in your daily workings, what would happen if you introduced more gratitude into your email communications, your text communications, your review meetings, your performance times, your stressful times. What would happen if you started with more gratitude? What would happen if you started with a little bit more acknowledgement about the awesome things that are actually going on? Science says, I say, and the best leaders that I know say that will actually get you more than focusing on just about anything else in your business. So go make the good, keep happening. When you reward things, they tend to repeat themselves. That’s all I have for you today. We’ll be back here Monday and every other Monday talking about real life marketing questions because marketers who can’t teach you why are just a fancy lie. But until then, go build somebody up. Have a great week.