Would you rather be liked or respected? Why can’t you be both? You can, however, it’s a rarity when you find someone who is able to do both successfully. Only being liked puts you at risk for being taken advantage of and only being respected can lead to employees who are scared to connect with you. Once you’ve fallen too far on either end of the spectrum, it’s hard to return.

Culture is derived from the style of leadership, then is transferred down into the relationships between employees. When employees feel respected by their boss, they are more likely to pass that respect to other employees. For most aspects of life, especially in business, I believe that what you put in is what you get back. If you feed the people around you positivity, they usually will reciprocate. The same goes for negativity, if you put negativity into the environment, it will spread like wildfire.

During my time as a business leader, I’ve noticed some commonalities between most businesses. They want to retain employees and empower them to produce good work. If they know what they want, why is determining the steps to get there so hard? There’s no cookie-cutter answer. What works for one business may not work for yours. That’s why it’s important to not just set a plan in motion and forget about it but to listen to feedback and tailor the plan to fit your team. Some industries, age groups, and type of employee respond to different things. For example, start-ups tend to provide a fun, fast-paced environment because they normally can’t provide other amenities that larger corporations can.

While culture may not be every business’s top priority, it still can be a top contributing factor that helps to retain good employees, thus valuable to invest in. If you’re not trying to balance your business on that fine line between too fun and too strict, maybe it’s time to start.

Fun in the office doesn’t necessarily mean ping pong tournaments, pizza parties, and group outings—although those things are all great ways to encourage community. Fun elements alone will not make the culture strong. There has to be a level of respect, hard work, and excellence in your tasks established before fun elements can take place. By concentrating on communication, you can cultivate a bond with your employees that allows them to trust you and value your opinion.

Rather than thinking you want a fun environment, aim for a culture that makes your employees proud to be a part of your company. Set an example for your team with these three leadership strategies to encourage a strong culture. 

1. Everything is a Gift.

I believe that every single thing you encounter is a gift. Whether most people would view it as positive or negative, it’s a gift.

When your client decides they no longer are in need of your services, it’s a gift. How? Perhaps, that client was about to enter into a scandal that would have left your legal team with a huge mess.

If you’ve ever seen a movie about time travel, you know that future outcomes are changed because of life events, so unless you’re able to travel back, change events, and see how things would have unfolded, just accept the event as a gift. After all, I would say avoiding an expensive and time-consuming lawsuit is definitely a gift.

2. Simplify the Challenge.

There’s nothing worth doing in life that doesn’t come with challenges. Every challenge big or small can feel overwhelming if it occurs at the wrong time. When people are counting on you, you have to keep calm and think strategically. In these situations, you have to remove yourself from the fire and dissect the problem until it is broken into simple, easy-to-manage pieces. Here’s an example: your goal is to launch a new product line in your business. Now that’s a massive goal that would make any sane person pull their hair out. If you break this task down into pieces that can be completed in steps or delegated to others, it will feel much more accomplishable.

3. Invest Yourself.

The most important aspect of your business is your people. If you have a kick-ass product but a team not fit to sell, promote, and build it. The product becomes useless. Invest your time into getting to know your people, what makes them tick, what makes them feel valued, then use that information to inspire and encourage them to produce better, more valuable work.

As a leader, your day is packed. It may feel like you have no spare time to chit-chat about your employee’s love for golf, their dog, or whatever else. Make time. People are more loyal to companies that they feel valued at and listening is one of the easiest, most effective way to make people feel valued.

There are many ways to build the culture you’ve always wanted, and it doesn’t start with pool tables and snacks—it starts with you. Lead and develop your team so that it is based on mutual respect. After you’ve established the tone of your culture, sprinkle in the fun elements to help your employees have an extra element to look forward to when coming into the office.

It’s hunting season and it’s your goal to catch the perfect duck. To catch a prize-winner, you have to be smart, strategic, and stealthy. The same goes for recruiting your perfect candidate. To make sure you have the right people on your team be thoughtful as to when and where would be the best time and place to locate them. Just being in the right place at the right time isn’t going to help you catch them, but it’s a start.

Is it Time to Migrate?

Timing is the first step to success in any hunt. Ducks, like most birds, are known to migrate seasonally. If the ducks aren’t in the pond, your hunt isn’t going to be very successful. However, just because the ducks aren’t there, doesn’t mean you have to give up the hunt. You have two options: wait for them to come back or move to another hunting ground.

Prepare for Turbulence

There are many professional and personal reasons that are deciding factors behind life-changing decisions. Unfortunately, you’ll never be able to manage them all, but you can be aware of certain elements that may make a candidate more hesitant to join your team.

Most people hate change, so it’s common for employees to stay in an unfulfilling, boring career just so they can feel secure. Security doesn’t just mean workplace comfort; people want to feel secure financially. Making a switch can impact their lives so dramatically, so an opportunity has to be worth the preparation, turbulence, and elevated stress on their daily routine and temporary finances. Anticipate their concerns, and make sure your offer accounts for them.

Set The Lure

To get the candidate everyone is gunning for, you need to have a winning strategy to lure them in. To lure in a duck, you need to provide elements for the duck to deem the space as a habitable location. The duck needs to feel secure, safe and the location have life-sustaining components.

What does your candidate need and want to feel secure in the role? Take it one step further, what would make your candidate dream about taking a position at your company? For a duck, that may be an endless supply of worms, for your candidate that could mean perks above and beyond the usual offerings like PTO, 401k, and health insurance.  For us here at Keyser, having an extraordinary culture is the ultimate lure.

Spotting A Prize-Winner

If you’ve never been on the hunt, you may not even know what to look for. Some ducks can have shiny feathers and a great outward appearance; don’t base your decisions off of looks—looks can be deceiving. If your target duck has a disease, the resources you’ve expended to capture that duck will have been wasted. You’ll want to carefully inspect the ducks before bringing them into your flock. How can you tell the difference between a long-term champion and a duckling that’s not ready to take the lead?

Start With the Breed

Just because it has wings and a bill, doesn’t mean that it’s the best bird for you. Similarly, because someone is good with numbers, doesn’t mean they are a good candidate for your accounting team. There are different breeds of ducks that communicate differently, have different backgrounds, and because of this, will act differently in certain scenarios. Define what you’re looking for before you start hunting to make sure you’re at the correct hunting grounds at the right time.

Take into Account Habits

Your candidate should be in the habit of taking criticism and turning it into an opportunity to improve themselves. To stay healthy, ducks constantly have to improve themselves—the same goes for a leader.

Can They Fly?

Not every duck is fit enough to lead the flock. Watch how your candidates interact with others and if they are willing to serve the other members of the flock. The best people to tell you about your candidate’s style of interaction is not the candidate themselves, it’s the flock they were a part of. Check their network and references to see if they truly live up the way they are portraying themselves. It would be very costly and detrimental to your flock if you invited a duck to lead who had no experience flying.

You should always be striving to hunt the best candidates. It’s important to be swift in your search but make sure you’re targeting the right duck before you pull the trigger.

Selfless Service is the single-handed most self-interested financial strategy ever. The more you work to authentically serve your clients, the more likely they are to become your biggest endorsers in the marketplace.

The idea of service has been around for thousands of years. Countless religious leaders and gurus have taught this idea, but many business people do not embrace it. One of the primary reasons for this is that they don’t believe that service leads to money.

We founded Keyser in 2013 based on a selfless service business model. Within two years, we have already seen tremendous growth, financial success, and most importantly our reputation for service is unparalleled by anyone in the industry. Even in one of the most cut-throat, self-interested industries out there, we have put the selfless service model into action and found success in doing so. If we can do it, so can you.

Here are three simple changes that you can start implementing today at your organization.

Be authentic
Not doing what one commits to doing is a huge deficit in the business world today. When someone says, “I’ll call you next week,” or, “We should grab lunch sometime,” it is very often an empty statement or invitation. That may not seem like a big deal at the time, but when your client decides that your word is no longer valid, it is unlikely that they will remain your client for very much longer.

Alternatively, a selfless service business model is based on people who are always true to their word, because words have true power, and that should not be discounted with inauthenticity. It is a simple change you can make right now.

Make it your mission to be authentic in all things you do or say.

Make all interactions meaningful
Rather than cold calling, where you are generally selling yourself or your product by telling the person what they want to hear, mirroring their interests, and thereby being completely inauthentic, you should always attempt to make every interaction meaningful. This behavior resonates with people much more than a sales pitch.

With this in mind, you will attract clients that believe in your vision and want to work with you. These clients will be your strongest marketing tools because they will become evangelists for your brand and your mission.

Make it your goal to have every interaction be meaningful.

Only take on the right clients for your business
Bad clients are like poison and they bring everyone in the organization down. Before taking on a client, you should think first about the attitude, second about the profitability. Keep those two things in mind, and don’t be afraid of saying no to a potential client because you feel like you need the revenue.

You have to believe strongly enough in your business and your people to not take on a client that you know you shouldn’t. Saying no will empower you and your people and will start to set a tone in the market that you do not just take on anyone as a client, which will lead to more business.

Prepare for change
Shifting to a selfless service business strategy is not an easy or short process. You will likely be mocked, and told it is an unrealistic and fruitless venture. We’ve heard it all. Rather than let those opinions deter you, start with just three simple changes to start the transformation to a selfless-service mindset for your organization.