Actionmint

Perhaps you believe you already have good communication skills with little room for improvement, but are you really a good listener? Because being a good listener is fundamental to being a good communicator, yet we have probably all been guilty at times of not paying attention to what another person is saying to us.
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One of the biggest headaches for startup founders is finding sufficient funding to get the company off the ground and to keep it running. It’s an issue that many startup founders would rather not deal with in order to focus on the business at hand, but in the real world, every company needs liquidity to pay for the most basic expenses.
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Entrepreneurs are passionate, but we’re stubborn people. This combination helps us overcome seemingly insurmountable boundaries, but it also prevents us from seeking out and absorbing tough to swallow information, including criticism.

If you would’ve taken all of the advice and criticism from others over the years, you wouldn’t be an entrepreneur, so it’s natural to fight back against those who doubt you.
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Back when I was a newspaper editor, I got into a monumental special edition, our self-congratulatory recognition of the paper’s 150th anniversary. It made a lot of money, but our management of it failed to match the grand expectations in other respects. The organization mostly treated the matter as a replication of what we all did every day, only bigger and with a more extended schedule.
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With organizations increasingly adopting distributed team approaches for their workforce, new and frequently unanticipated communication challenges are surfacing requiring novel or at least highly considered approaches to solve. Project teams particularly are susceptible to many of these issues as, by their very nature project teams are formed for a specific task and then dissolve either back into the host organization or, into the more general workforce. Many insights gained in one project can easily be lost to future projects.

Among the many novel challenges which are typically encountered by these distributed teams is the question of how to best manage communications between office locations, when the offices may be separated not just by distance but also by time zones.
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As a writer on career issues, I receive scores of emails each month from working people with questions about every aspect of their professional lives and aspirations. Some want to quit, others want to start their own businesses, and some want to be promoted, get a raise, move to another country, tell their boss to jump off a bridge, etc. Some questions represent a dilemma that hundreds of thousands of people are facing, like this one I received recently:
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Marketing is all about getting more – more leads, more email subscriptions, and more social media likes/followers. Unfortunately, in our efforts to get “more,” we tend to annoy everyone who has already connected with us. We ask everyone to share our stuff, refer people to our pages, follow us on other accounts, and a thousand other trivial things. Instead of garnering us “more,” this only serves to lessen our current following because we sound like a broken record.
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Why, as project managers, do we think that what worked on our last project will work on our current one? If the definition of a project revolves around it being unique, why do we try to standardize our approach so much? Checklists, templates, a PMO mantra of “this is how you should do project management” isn’t necessarily well received, especially during the early stages of product development.
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When people think of spring cleaning, they usually think about cleaning their house from top to bottom and clearing out clutter, but spring cleaning can also refer to cleaning up your finances.

I’m talking about cleaning up your business finances. Maybe you’ve been ignoring the books lately because business has been busy since the first quarter, but Q1 is up and it’s time to take a look at the results and figure out where to go from here.
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