1. Get excited.  If you are not energized by your idea, why should anyone else?  Show enthusiasm for your idea.

2. Raise more than you need.  Regardless of how much capital you think you require, getting a business off the ground always cost more than you anticipate. Aim to raise more than you think you need.   This applies to your non-for-profit too.

3.  Develop a team of advisors, mentors and coaches. No one person will have all the answers for you. Think about the kind of guidance you need to develop your business and connect with a variety of experts you can tap into as sounding boards.

4. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Find your niche and go deep, becoming an expert in what you do.

5. Pay yourself first.  When putting your business’s financial strategy together, don’t forget to add a line item for your salary. You have to eat!

6. You don’t have to do it all yourself.  If you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself. Wrong! Think about where your weaknesses lie, and hire people to fill in those gaps. 

7. Set your sights high and dare to be different. Certainly common sense matters, but don’t be afraid to go against the mainstream and innovate. Dare to be the next Apple, EBay or Google.

8. Faster is not always better. Be mindful of growing your business at a pace that is sustainable. Growing as fast as possible is good – but not so fast your company can’t handle the demand!

9. Finding the right business partner matters. Carefully selecting your business partner is important. The partner you choose will be a long-term relationship, and life is short.  Choose a partner who is intelligent, highly knowledgeable of your company and industry, is passionate about your business and complements your style.
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About the Blogger:  

Professor Murray Low is the Director of the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School.  He is an experienced entrepreneur and a leading authority on entrepreneurship in independent, corporate and not-for-profit settings. Starting businesses in several industries led him to study how the entrepreneurial process differs by context. His current research examines the dynamics of entrepreneurial careers. As the founder of the Columbia Entrepreneurship Program, he has worked to make entrepreneurship a viable career option for MBA graduates. Low consults to both small and large companies, family businesses and not-for-profits. He teaches executive seminars in the areas of entrepreneurship and strategic management and makes frequent presentations to academic and industry groups. He has published widely in academic and practitioner journals and is a regular commentator in the media.

Recently, I asked a seasoned therapist how he chooses to deliver responses to his clients. Basically I wanted to know; if Client A came to him with a problem and Client B came to him with the same problem, would he give them the same response? His reply to my question was eye opening.

The therapist replied “It is not my job to push my thoughts and ideas onto my clients. I am not their friends. Friends do that. When someone comes to them with a problem they respond ‘well this is what I would do…’ then explain their point of view instead of giving tailored advice. My job is to listen to my clients, take their needs & personalities as well as the way in which they explained their problem into account, and really understand what kind of help they are asking for.  From there, I tailor a response that the specific client will be able to absorb best as well as one that their personality will be able to use. My personal opinions are thrown out the window.”

Wow, if this didn’t make some connections in my head.

That is precisely how a User Experience Designer is different from the majority of professionals out there in corporate or start up land. Let me explain further. Our job is not to push our opinions about how to create websites or features we like onto our users. There are a ton of interactions out there that I personally despise that I include in my designs. You may ask “Well if you despise them, why do you include them in your work?”

I do so simply because the majority of the users that I’m designing for do NOT share my opinion. These interactions and features are ones that they actually feel comfortable using or that make their experience delightful. My role as a UX Designer is not to force my opinions about certain treatments or interactions onto users. Just because I love or hate something does not mean it will facilitate a great user experience. A UX Designer should NEVER talk in opinions. That is one of the first things we learn in our profession. Instead we take a great deal of our time, including “non-work” time, to study people. We learn what works for users and what doesn’t. We try to understand others’ behaviors and by doing so are coming to our clients with facts and not opinions.

When I tell a client “That is not something that users will understand.” It is because I have studied users, not because I don’t understand it myself. This is a key feature to look for when hiring and working with a UX Designer.

This thinking is a big shift for most people dealing with the web. For example, many people tend to pick colors for their websites because they like the colors, not because these colors facilitate easier reading or emotional response. This same behavior happens with other features (i.e. I like drag and drop and I want it on my site, even if there is no need for this type of treatment). There is actually a science to website creation and the number one rule is to throw away your personal opinion.

You are not your user, and your opinions may or may not match theirs. The fact is you are the one that needs your users to use your website or buy your product and you should make that experience enjoyable. The way to do this is to remove the subjective and work in the objective.

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About the Blogger: Lis is the Founder of Hubert Experience Design, a boutique user experience firm based in NYC. Her firm has worked with a wide range of organizations, from Fortune 500 to start-up. Hubert Experience Design takes pride in making websites better and easier to use.

This new way of segmenting entrepreneurs is not only a boon to marketers and consultants like myself, providing a means to segment and target our audience, but also to the legions of emerging entrepreneurs who are in need of clarity and definition of their new life’s path. 

Regardless of how you choose to categorize yourself, ____preneur or entrepreneur, we look forward to seeing you at New York Entrepreneur Week in April 2010.   The following list contains some of the most popular “preneur” titles in common use, if I have missed any, and I am sure I have, feel free to add any other “preneur” titles you have heard to this list in the comments section.

Solopreneur-is a single individual operating a business enterprise formerly known as a sole proprietor entrepreneur

Spiritualpreneur – is someone who operates a business enterprise based on the guiding principles of their spiritual beliefs for wealth, prosperity and abundance.  Also may include spiritual based ventures such as energy healers, reiki masters, acupuncturist, etc. 

Socialpreneur – is someone who operates a business enterprise to create social change, OR

Socialpreneur-  is an entrepreneur who uses social media to operate a business enterprise.

Serialpreneur- an individual, who has founded, built and sold numerous ventures.

Womenpreneur- is a female entrepreneur.

Mompreneur – is a woman who is both a mother and operating a business enterprise, also has a magazine specifically devoted to this entrepreneur niche.

Epreneur- an individual who operates an ecommerce business enterprise

Webpreneur – also an individual who operates an ecommerce business enterprise

Infopreneur is an individual who operates a business enterprise which gathers, packages and sell information or information products.

Petrepreneur is an individual who operated a business enterprise in the pet industry.

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About the Blogger: Will Corrente, is the founder of Operation Entrepreneur, an entrepreneurship consulting firm based in West Palm Beach, FL. In addition, he writes a weekly column on small business and entrepreneurship for The Bergen News.

John’s wealth started with his grandfather’s company.  The family ran and grew it into a conglomerate that was eventually sold.  John now managed the family’s assets of over a billion dollars. I was really nervous when I pitched him, knowing what he could mean to my company.  But after listening to me for a few minutes and asking a few questions, John politely rejected my request to invest.

I forgot about John until about a year later when we were at the next level with our business.  I knew John was not interested in us but I was able to set up a meeting to get his advice on how to get the next round of financing in, which we were in desperate need of.

At lunch John asked me a bunch of questions and I gave him updates.  And while I had answered most of his questions hundreds of times before to other investor leads, at lunch I was just being honest as I knew he was not interested.  Polished sales pitch was off and guard was down.  I just wanted his advice.

After desert, John asked me how much I was looking for. “Quarter of a million” was my answer.  He said, “Why don’t you walk back with me to my office and I’ll write you a check.”

I said, “Excuse me??!!”, to which he smiled and said, “Let’s go.”   And in that moment my company took a giant leap forward.

It was far more than the money John invested, it was how involved he became in our business that made him so amazing for us.  Instant credibility was gained when people learned he was involved in the business.  In fact often our staff would say, “Stefan, John’s on the phone… again!”

And John would call to tell me things like, “Stefan, I just spoke with [so-and-so]. He/she is a $xxx million-dollar guy and they told me to tell you to call them.”

A week later he would check to see if I had spoken with his referral.  The times I told John the person did not return my call, he would curse and hang up before I could even finish my sentence. 

Ten minutes later the phone was ringing with that person on the line.

And that is an angel investor.  In fact, a dream angel. 

Angels, if you’re not familiar with the term, are investors that do far more than give you money.  They roll up their sleeves and help build the company.  The love the excitement and energy the business is generating and they want to be a part of it.

So how do you find one for yourself?

Seven Steps for Finding Your Billionaire Angel Investor:

1. Refine your vision.  Make it “billionaire”-like in scale.  Make sure it fits the mindset of someone accustomed to thinking really big and powerfully.  This doesn’t necessarily mean the size of the business.  Make it real and realistic, but your (authentic) passion and intensity of it must be huge. 
2. Pick your Angel.  Identify them by name.  Find out as much as you can about them. What they like and have they funded before.  Find out their key people:  their spouse, personal assistant, administrator, etc.
3. Use the back door. Often times they are not accessible directly.  Find out how to get in front of a key contact of theirs.  That should not be nearly as difficult.  Start to build a relationship with that person.
4. Get your ducks in a row.  The basics like finances, business plan, executive summary, sales pitch, etc.  Make sure you know your industry and what is going on.  Feel very comfortable in what you know and what you don’t know.
5. Practice on your D-list first. Then C-list, then B-list before going to your billionaire contact (i.e. “A-list”.)  Make your mistakes and iron out the kinks on those you are OK with messing up on.  And you WILL mess up!
6. Be comfortable in your skin.  Passionate about where you are taking the company… and most importantly, be real.
7. Ask for their advice.  These guys are usually hit up all the time.  To help them relax and really “be” with you, let them know you (authentically) would like their advice on what to do next for your business. 

These steps do not ensure you will nail it every time, but do know what makes you 1,100% more attractive to someone who is constantly approached for money, is just being real with them.  Being relaxed and yourself.

So go to it and perhaps you will walk home with someone just like John!

Action Steps for the Week:

• Looking for funding in your business?  Who is your dream investor?  What do you know about him/her? Research that person until you feel you really “know” your billionaire angel investor. 
• Make sure your business is something that would excite them.  How you will know this is a) how excite are you about it and b) their interest level in your industry.

Do you have a way to get in front of them?  If not, who do you know who knows an inner-circle person?  Still drawing a blank? Then who do you know who knows someone who might know an inner-circle person? Don’t give up and more-than-likely you’ll be in front of your potential angel sooner than you think.

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About the Blogger: Stefan Doering is the creator of BEST Coaches’ groundbreaking 90-day “UnReasonable” program which brings to the table his almost 30 years of hard-earned business savvy and 4-plus decades of pure heart.

Stefan started his first company at the age of 17. His later companies included the leaders of major companies and institutions as well as multi-millionaires and billionaires as investors, board members and mentors, and had household names among their clients.

Friends, Family and clients still ask on occasion “how did you do it – how did you manage to sell over $500K in shoes within 14 months?”

As mentioned in previous posts, the supposed “secret” to selling is actually not a secret at all. Based on my experience, there are three skills you must embrace to become a top-tier sales Jedi in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace:

1) Understand selling is just a numbers game

One day you’ll sell $11K in three hours of work and the next you’ll struggle to sell $1K over the span of an entire day. But in the aggregate, remaining steadfastly focused on your goals will pay off, with a gradual climb toward long-term success.

2) Understand the 80/20 rule

As mentioned in post #2 of this series, memorize the 20% that makes 80% of the difference until it’s instinctive. This is imperative; your long-term viability as a sales professional depends on it.

3) Develop the ability to quickly identify, hone and leverage the triggers of your target consumer

Of the above three skills, point #3 will catapult you the furthest and fastest. Triggers become significantly more apparent as the frequency of sales presentations increase.

Nordstrom is the ideal environment for scaling sales trigger understanding because a sales rep executes roughly 20 presentations/day during the week and more than 40/day on the weekend. Retail is a fast-paced and transaction-oriented environment. Therefore, within a very short amount of time you’re blessed with the benefit of executing hundreds transactions and obtaining large swaths of customer feedback. These are crucial in facilitating your understanding of the wants, needs and ultimately the triggers of your target consumer.

The downside of this type of sales environment is the very “short leash” you’re given. If you don’t produce the boot will arrive on the horizon very fast. You are expected to ramp up sales significantly faster than in other sales contexts.

For instance, on the other side of the pendulum reside enterprise sales. In the beginning, these are long, drawn out and sporadic transactions (2 – 6 month sales cycle). Every opportunity to identify and hone sales triggers must be cherished. In this environment, you are given a longer lead time to “figure it out,” but even then your “leash” is only as long as the market allows – which isn’t more than four months.

If the answer to that question is yes, then the next question is usually “When in the process should I hire this skill set?” Let’s look at each question in more detail.

Hiring a UX Designer

When I talk to entrepreneurs and start ups about this topic, I usually try to get a feel for several things. First, does your product and/or service plan on interfacing with users? In my career this interfacing has most often been through a web site (web browser) or a mobile device. However, I have also been hired to work on intranets, desktop applications and database entry systems. Users are not always direct consumers of a product. They may also be employees that are interfacing with objects that enable your product/service to get to market, or maintain a product/services presence within a market. So my advice would be if your product or service relies on these types of interactions, bring in someone who knows users of all kinds, and the types of behaviors to expect from these users.

The second thing I try to get a feel for, is how familiar the entrepreneur or start up is with a user experience designer role. Meaning how well do they know what I do and how I can help. You might find yourself asking “what does a user experience designer do that I can’t do? I know people. I know how people think and act, after all, I interface with systems, websites, and mobile devices all the time, and am a pretty average user. How hard could it be to look a little closer at how I function and design for interactions based on my behavior?”

When I see someone asking these questions, I know that they haven’t worked with someone that does what I do before. So, I would answer these questions with, of course, more questions:

• Who are your users?
• What need is your product filling?
• How are the users filling this need without your product?
• How can we learn lessons about their present day behavior (if there is any) and translate that into the medium that you will be delivering your product through?

Oh, and usually, your user is nothing like you, or not as close as you think. Users surprise us at how stupid they are for not realizing how the product/service works. They should just get it. Well keep in mind you want them to pay you for your goods, not the other way around. Why not bring in someone that can help take your product and make it more clear to users? Why not cut the users’ learning curve and instead of trying to completely change their behaviors and habits, work with them or at least learn from them. Considering everything else that you have to do in your day, get funding, talk to stakeholders, plan risk assessments, network your tail off, don’t you think you should bring in an expert to bridge the user gap? It not only ensures efficiency, but also a higher quality of product.

So, when in your process should you bring in a UX designer? Well, in reality this always depends on budget. However, I think that bringing someone in as early as possible, like when you are first considering a user interfacing product, is beneficial.

They can help you to think from a user’s perspective about what the product might be and also help you talk through what features might exist. How helpful would that be in a stakeholder/board meeting? This doesn’t have to be a huge amount of effort from the UXD at first, but could be hourly consultation to steer you in the right direction. The UXD can begin doing user research at this time and can help to define a more detailed strategy for your product, again by bringing in the user point of view. So, ideally you would bring in a UXD before you are even beginning to put together your website or application. If this is not possible, then it is essential that the UXD be present during the website/application planning phase. If you want to do holistic planning, then leaving out your users is not the way to be successful.

The moral of the story is, user research is intensive, and taking the research and knowledge and designing an interaction around it is even more intensive. This is not something that can be done just by knowing websites and computers. User Experience Designers can help you to plan your product and service and create an interface that is pleasant and easy to use. This does not have to be high budget either. A great UXD is flexible and creative and will try to help as much as possible if time is available. But you must be open to someone else being the expert when it comes to user/customer behavior.

This doesn’t mean you should give up all control, but it does mean that there are people out there that can teach you a thing or two about who you’re trying to reach and who can help make your product/service better.  Why not let them help?

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About the Blogger: Lis is the Founder of Hubert Experience Design, a botique user experience firm based in NYC. Her firm has worked with a wide range of organizations, from Fortune 500 to start-up. Hubert Experience Design takes pride in making websites better and easier to use

And here is what they learned:  the difference between selling the features and benefits of your product or service.

Features—a physical or tangible component of your product / service.  Using a product example, a bicycle:  weighs only 23 pounds, has 21 gears, Shimano brakes, 110PSI high-pressure tires, and is designed light and built for speed.

And for service-based businesses, an example would be a chiropractor’s office:  we offer a 10 minute evaluation and assessment of your pain (or situation), then do a series of 3 to 5 treatments over the course of two weeks, followed be an additional assessment, and so on.

Benefits—the non-physical, emotional and intangible reactions to your product / service.  In our product example:  this super-light, super-fast bicycle with 21 gears will make sure you can get up that insane mountain you have been training for all these months.  When you get to the top, you’ll look behind you and know you just conquered that amazing ride you’ve been dreaming about….

In our service example:  your initial evaluation with our top chiropractor will immediately ensure you are getting the exact treatment you need for your situation, and as quickly as possible.  With this you can relax and let our expert chiropractor do his (her) magic on your body.  Watch how quickly your body will respond to his (her) touch and adjustments.

Question:  Do you think people buy from features or benefits?

In our class this week this became a debate.  Some said features, some said benefits and some said both.

We all agreed that people buy on benefits.  BENEFITS!

Why?

Because people want to know how they will benefit from using your product or service.  Yeah, sure it is helpful knowing how many gears the bike has, but really getting them to feel the accomplishment of getting to the top of the amazing mountain is what is going to override the features.

If they feel the possibility of owning your product (or hiring you for your service), you will make the sale so much easier to accomplish.

People buy on emotions!

Still not convinced?  Look at Apple’s iPhones.  For many, many people, if it ain’t an iPhone (or other Apple product) they are not interested.  It is NOT because of the features (although this certainly helps) it is because they have positioned themselves quite successfully as a hip, cool, state-of-the-art company.  And people want a piece of THAT in their lives.

STILL not convinced?  Park your rear-end in front of the TV for 30 minutes.  Watch two cable stations:  Home Shopping Network and QVC.  Just watch what these masters of selling do:  they can take the ugliest piece of (you know what) and sell millions of them.  How they do it is mention (briefly) a feature and then spend 10 minutes talking about all the benefits of it.

Benefits, benefits, benefits!

So if it is in fact benefits that sell your product or service, where are you putting your marketing resources:  features or benefits?

If the former, I highly, (I mean highly) recommend you immediately shift your energy into the latter.

And if you do not immediately see results, please e-mail me.  I’m not kidding!

Action Steps for the Week

Take a look at your product or service.  Make a list of the top 5 features of it.

Next, write as many benefits as you can think of for each of those features.  Go nuts with this and then pick the top 10-15 of them (depending on how you will use this information.)

HERE’S THE CATCH:  Do this from your customers’ perspective, not yours!

If you are not sure their perspective, find out.  There are many ways to get this feedback from them:  surveys, calling them, standing on the street corner and asking them, you name it.

Once you are clear on what the benefits are, you are now ready to put your promotional materials together.  Briefly mention the feature and then all its benefits.  Do this for the top features.

NOTE:  avoid grandiose claims like, “The world’s best…” or “You’ll love the taste of…”  That stuff does not work.  Instead, back it up with statistics, data, survey results, scientific discoveries, etc.  Third party endorsements are golden.

Lastly, use testimonials that add credibility to what you promote. Do these to your marketing and you will most likely be amazed at the quick results you will see.

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About the Blogger: Stefan Doering is the creator of BEST Coaches’ groundbreaking 90-day “UnReasonable” program which brings to the table his almost 30 years of hard-earned business savvy and 4-plus decades of pure heart. Stefan started his first company at the age of 17. His later companies included the leaders of major companies and institutions as well as multi-millionaires and billionaires as investors, board members and mentors, and had household names among their clients.

Then there’s the Cheshire cat, smiling brightly because he knows the way out of recession, but like the economic recovery, keeps fading in and out of view. Commercial banks are happy to come to tea, but they are hard to pin down when Alice asks them for a loan. And where is the Consumer in all this? In the teapot of course – like the Dormouse – trying to avoid more taxes and ever increasing health care costs.

What is Alice to do? At the table over the past few weeks are some thoughts from entrepreneurs about the current economic conditions that are worth reading. Many of them agree – “money is the biggest challenge”. But they suggest this is not the time to give up your dream. Downturns often create opportunities. They say: “Study the landscape to make your product better or different from the competition”. And “price your product appropriately”. Use technology to grow if you can’t expand your staff. Mushrooms may work for Alice when she wants to grow, but the real world requires hardware and software. “Get systems in place to guide everyday tasks.” Then you can manage the work flow and your future growth.

Remember to keep everyone in your organization “on the same page”. These entrepreneurs have a lot more to say and it can be found here in the “How to Succeed” section.

Alice in Wonderland has an easy way out thanks to Lewis Carroll – she can just wake up! But the rest of us need to come up with something more specific to get out of this economic rabbit hole. Hopefully the advice from these entrepreneurs will help.

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About the blogger: Alice Krause, former Deputy Executive of Chase Bank’s retail businesses, is Founder of the award winning NewsonWomen,com, a daily news site that focuses on women’s achievements. News on Women reports on what women are doing in business, education, science and technology, philanthropy and the arts.

The story reminds me of an important fact. Entrepreneurs are often at the forefront of innovation. They possess a unique set of skills that lends itself to inspired invention and driven change. Really good business solutions and radical transformations in history have one thing in common. Somewhere, someone believed that you could do something better, different or completely new. Someone challenged the status quo or saw failure as an opportunity to try again. Often, those people were entrepreneurs.

One reason is that entrepreneurs tend to see the world around them differently. As Thomas Edison said to his laboratory assistant, “There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish somep’n!” Innovation is most often simply a matter of having a different perspective than everyone else, and the perseverance to make it happen. For example, some of the most creative people I know had learning disabilities growing up. Forced to adapt so they could fit into a rigid school format, many developed alternative ways of making sense of the world.

Tony Buzan, father of the world-renowned creative technique of Mind Mapping, is a point in case. Tony admits he came up with mind maps because he was “doing badly at school”. He was also smart enough to realize that the way people were measuring intelligence was rather limited. Quick experiment: in your mind’s eye, picture the moon, the sun, the earth and a lemon. Which one is different? While you may be like most people and select lemon as the odd-one-out, Tony would point out that if you were using color as your filter, earth would be odd because it’s not yellow.

Innovation is therefore inspired by understanding that there’s not always only one right answer. Or realizing you may have an answer to a problem that doesn’t yet exist. Did you know that the parachute was invented before powered flight? In a “fascinating facts” piece about James Dyson, you’ll read that his inspiration for cyclonic technology happened one day while he was vacuuming his house (in itself, fascinating!) and he realized his top-of-the-line machine was losing suction and getting clogged. Dyson refused to accept there was only one good way to build a vacuum cleaner, and the cyclonic suction, roller-ball Dyson vacuum cleaner was born.

Innovation is also about seeing an idea for what it’s really worth. Think about all those stories of accidental invention. Like Wilson Greatbatch back in 1956, who was experimenting with a device he was building to record heartbeats. He grabbed the wrong resistor and connected it, and discovered that the circuit emitted a pulse. Voila, Greatbatch realized his device could be used to control heartbeat, and the pacemaker was invented.

Which brings me to a final point on inspired innovation. I believe the most profound and valuable innovation and creativity has to come from a sense of purpose or a powerful cause – it is unbounded thinking about how to make life and the world more meaningful that leads us to solve great challenges and achieve impossible objectives. Just look at how one company’s mission transformed the lives of millions of people: Microsoft, with its tagline of “A PC on every desk”. And behind that audacious goal, an inspired cause to find ways for people and things to achieve their greatest potential.

Innovation comes in many forms and is a tool that’s wielded well by many entrepreneurs. Having a different perspective has inspired many of Apple’s products – simply because Steve Jobs refused to accept that everyday things such as radios and phones and computers had to be mundane and ugly. Ergo: Apple is synonymous with easy, simple and beautiful. Sometimes the entrepreneurial way out has to be invented. Understanding that there’s not always only one right answer gave us solutions like Galileo’s telescope and James Dyson’s vacuum cleaner.  Then there are the accidental innovations, like 3Ms’s experimental polymer that turned out to be less of an adhesive and more of a sticky fix that today everyone calls a Post-It™ note. Ultimately, there’s the kind of innovation that really makes this world a better place, because it comes from a passionate sense of purpose. Like Google’s search engine, motivated by the cause of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.

Because entrepreneurs have had the courage to ask questions and take risks – wheels were invented, men learned to fly, machines were made to work more efficiently, and the world has moved forward. The spirit to invent and innovate lies at the heart of true entrepreneurship. Or, to loosely paraphrase Peter Drucker: innovation is the specific tool that entrepreneurs use to increase their capacity to create wealth.

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About the Blogger: Janine de Nysschen is the founder of WhyTelligence and uses change and purpose dynamics to create unique strategies for complex problems, helping businesses and executives increase their impact and performance.

Often, business leaders choose passive methods for giving feedback like communicating important feedback via email (where an employee might not fully understand the intended tone and doesn’t have the opportunity to ask immediate questions).  Another poor approach is what I call a “drive-by.”  This method usually involves a leader quickly blurting out information while walking away.  Like communicating through email, this approach doesn’t provide the opportunity for a genuine conversation or the opportunity for an employee to ask questions or get clarification.

Developmental feedback, however, can empower you as a leader, improve communication between you and your team, strengthen relationships, improve customer service, and drive results.  Using a structured approach to giving feedback can ensure you communicate clearly and cover all of your points.  It can also provide an opportunity for you to show support and encouragement and share praise

There are two categories of developmental feedback, one is reinforcing (when you ‘catch someone doing something right’ and you want to acknowledge their positive contribution so they continue to behave this way).  The other category is redirecting (when you observe a mistake or poor performance and need to correct the behavior).

Consider these five steps when giving either reinforcing or redirecting feedback:

1: Check in first. Instead of telling, try asking.  It might seem surprising, but the best way to offer developmental feedback is to start with a question.  Ask an open-ended question to better understand the employee’s point of view and to learn more about his/her motivation for acting the way they did.  To start the conversation, you could ask something like, “I want to get your take on our new timesheets, are you having any challenges completing them?”

2: What is the standard for behavior? Once you’ve asked an open-ended question and heard the response, you can remind him/her about your expectations of their behavior.  For example, “I need everybody to complete their timesheets by Friday at 2pm so I can process the payroll for the entire team.

3: What did you observe? State the behavior or action you observed and be as objective as possible.  Don’t speak in universal terms like, “You always do this” or “You never do this.”  Comment on this particular situation and use a real example of observed behavior.  Say something like, “I noticed that you submitted your timesheet at 6pm for the last two weeks,” as an example of redirecting feedback, or “I want to thank you for submitting your timesheets on time for the past month.

4: What is the impact? Explain the specific impact that his/her behavior has on colleagues, customers, or a work process – whatever makes sense for the situation.  Instead of saying something vague like, “You’re unprofessional” say something like, “When you submit your timesheet late, it holds up the payroll process and then some people won’t get their checks until Saturday” or “Because you submitted your timesheets by the deadline, I was able to process the payroll and pay everyone on time this month.”

5: Reinforce or Redirect. Explain why you want them to continue their behavior, if you’re reinforcing.  You could simply say something like, “Thanks again for making the deadline.”  If you’re redirecting, you could say something like, “If you’d like, I can remind you on Thursday to start completing your timesheet so you can make the Friday deadline.  Does that work for you?”

Following reinforcing or redirecting feedback, you should always end on a positive note to motivate the listener.  Use statements like, “Eventually, completing your timesheet will be quick, we’re all adjusting to the new form.”

Timing is everything.  Make sure you’re in the right frame of mind when you give feedback.  If you’re tired or angry, your emotions might sneak into your words and/or body language.  Also consider the timing for the listener.  Are you trying to catch someone when they’re walking out the door or feel terrible because they just made a major mistake?  Try to give feedback when someone is relaxed and open to hearing your ideas.

Timing is also important regarding how often you give feedback.  Don’t wait until an annual performance review to give feedback.  Give feedback often; make it a part of your regular leadership approach.  This five-step feedback process might seem cumbersome at first, but with a little practice, it will get easier.  Add developmental feedback to your leadership toolkit and, in addition to driving results, you’ll be strengthening your human resources.

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About the Blogger: Holly Landau is a leadership expert, former US Army Officer, and CEO of Landau Leadership – an innovative training & development firm providing customized curriculum, public leadership events, and online learning solutions to boost individual and team productivity.  Holly is an active facilitator and keynote speaker covering topics like leadership, strategy, creativity, and communication. She is also a regular contributor to several business blogs including nolcha.com and her own leadership blog. She is one of the contributing experts for the upcoming American Express OPEN Book on Leadership. Contact Holly at hollylandau@landauleadership.com and follow her on Twitter: @LeadershipMuse.