Controlling Other People’s Decisions: As Easy As Walking Uphill In The Snow

How much time do you spend worrying about what someone else is going to do?  You may ask yourself if your employees are going to do their jobs today, are your kids going to clean their rooms, is that prospective client going to say yes to your product or service.  Despite the fact that you have no control over the decision making process of someone else, you worry anyway.

Call it laziness or simple thinking but I prefer to take the easy road when it comes to decisions.  I worry about the decisions that I can make not the decisions that other people can make.

Now you may say to yourself that if your business is going to survive you have to worry about sales and you have to worry about employee management.  Sales and employee management are important.

Rather than worry about what employees and customers are going to do, focus on the landscape that you are creating for these different group of people to operate in.

Here’s an illustration of what that looks like.

From A Customer Standpoint

Rather than worry about whether or not a customer will say “yes” to you, there are better things to concern yourself with.  Things like how good of a job your website is doing conveying your message, are you clear on what it is that your business actually does, does the sales process that I take them through make sense and answer all the questions the customer may have.

From An Employee Standpoint

Rather than worry about if an employee is going to do their jobs today, there are some more important things to worry about.  For instance, how well have you trained your employees, do you know what motivates them, have you given them specific objectives and are you continuously painting the big picture for them.

This thought process is all about the system that people operate in, not the end result.  When the system with which the people that do business with you functions like it is supposed to, you are going to get the results that you are looking for.  The system that you build is up to you.  That’s where you have control.

The right system doesn’t mean that everyone will say yes to your product or that every employee will work out.  It does, however, mean that you have done everything that you can to make that relationship a success.  That’s a business owner who worries less and travels downhill with the wind at his back in seventy-five degree weather.