Success

What To Do About Bad Leaders

Garth Beyer

I’ve had to work with my fair share of bad leaders. Like most, I started out by complaining about it. I was too nervous to speak up. In fact, I had no clue who to speak up to. It’s sort of stupid to go up to a leader and say they’re doing a bad job. Ignorant, actually.

There is a way to work with bad leaders, though. (Because in this world, some bad leaders, stay leaders. It’s up to you to make the most of it.)

The best way I have found is to ask them if they’ve done the things you would do if you were in the their position.

  • “Hey, I was wondering if you’ve scheduled that appointment yet.”
  • “Just curious, did you call the VC about product X and tell them we’re ready to ship on the third Friday of this month?”

These are positive examples. What you’re doing is making the task more salient to the bad leader. I’ll tell you why this is a good thing after I mention a few don’ts.

What not to do:

  • Specifically point out what they are doing wrong
  • Say they are doing a bad job and that you expect them to get their head in the game
  • Tell them you could do it better
  • And, as much as I hate to write this one: Don’t ask them if they want help

Most bad leaders don’t want help, most bad leaders hog their positions, most bad leaders just don’t care enough to take you up on your offer. They will, however, be happy to dish something out to you if you handle it right, say, maybe, by asking them if they’ve done something that you think they should have already.

When a bad leader faces more and more tasks they simply can’t put off, they’re more likely to either delegate those tasks (especially to the person who “reminded” them of the tasks in the first place) or they’ll be more prone to step off their throne and give up.

Poor leadership is something we all have to prepare for and know how to deal with it.

You may be an expert in leadership, but, trust me, a lot of people aren’t. And sadly, don’t care to be.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Not Your Job To Help Them

(It’s your job to help the company, the business’s clients, your team and your self)

“What’s Your New Book About?”

Garth Beyer

It might not work, but my new book is out and ready to be read.

Not to call it out, but a lot of people have asked me the wrong question. “What’s your new book about?”

Really? You don’t care what the book is about, what you really care about is the value of it.

I can tell you it’s about a garbage man who is fed up with the way his life is going and who decides to transform it. That doesn’t hold much value to you unless you’re a garbage man fed up with the way your life is going.

The value really lies in four corners:

1) The most successful people attend seminars on success, on business, on self-growth. I’ve written this book to give you a temporary shortcut; for you to gather insight into the way seminars are ran and the unique lessons you can learn from them. (Learn for $4.99, what most will charge you $100, $300, $900 dollars to learn.)

2) So often we read stories to escape the real world. Nothing wrong with that. I’ve written this book so you can escape the real world, but also return having learned about fear, about taking chances, about finding and following your passion. It’s a book that you’ll be happy to return to the real world at the end of.

3) In the end, you’re the hero, you’re the protagonist, you’re the one who has grown, not Alex (the main character in my novel).

4) You’ll get to say you’ve tried something new. I know how hard it is to go out of your comfort zone, to buy something that coincides with uncertainty, to try something new. This book was written to ease you into a new habit of expanding your comfort zone and confronting the barriers holding you back from adventure, from a life fully lived.

If all of this doesn’t seem to be valuable enough for you, perhaps my next book might be for you. Alas, I still encourage you to give this one a shot.

 

Stay Positive & My Gratitude Is Endless

 

Building A Winning Team

Garth Beyer

I was ignorant when I began building teams. I didn’t necessarily make a big mistake, I simply wasn’t as efficient in my gathering of team members as I could have been. Early on I thought the best team members were the ones who were extroverted, spoke up in classes, sought extra work out and openly challenged things often. (Yes, basically people like myself.)

Doing so left out two extremely important categories of team members.

1) People who are extroverted and speak up, but only when called upon.

2) People who are introverted in the environment you see them in, but who are extroverted when on their own turf.

I don’t believe there are people who are introverted 24/7. I don’t buy into the idea that those who are extremely intelligent and passionate about something can do so quietly. They may put on a decent illusion, but if you get to the heart of what they love, there’s no stillness, quietness or introveredtness.

There’s talent all around you. What makes you a good leader (and gets you a winning team) is when you’re willing to actively call on people to join you as well as meet them on their own turf.

There’s a regularly held belief that if manager’s employees don’t see their managers doing tasks that they (the employees) are set to do, then the manager misses out on important respect. For example, a store manager needs to stock, run the register and reorganize the decor section (it’s one of the worst kept sections) in order to earn the trust of their employees as well as inspire them.

The same goes for those wanting to build a winning team. You’ve got to meet people on their level, ask to learn from them and show them what you already know. You’ve got to connect.

You might be able to gain a following sitting behind a computer screen, but you’ll never build a winning team.

 

Stay Positive & Go Build A Winning Team

For Those Looking To Transform

Garth Beyer

One event and one thought inspired me to write a book. The event was National Novel Writing Month. In early 2013, I committed to writing 50,000 plus words come November. I did it.

The thought behind the book was that I wanted to give people hoping to transform their lives the ability to go to a seminar on success without having to pay hundreds of dollars. It’s not that I don’t hope you do, but I understand it’s not the most practical thing for people who really want to transform their lives to do.

My novel offers an escape from the real world as many novels do, but I promise you will not come back without having learned something valuable to use in the real world.

Alas, you can find my novel here. I hope you find it worth your time.

 

Stay Positive & Enjoy

 

Don’t Change, Run With It

Garth Beyer

Complicated ColorsI love painting. I’m super optimistic. And a lot more weird than you. I run with it.

Instead of being less weird/more normal, I justify my weirdness. I profess we’re all weird, I write that the weird is what sells most and the weird (the vulnerability being weird requires) makes us a more successful society.

Instead of lowering expectations, letting go of my confidence and settling on someone else’s “reality,” I defy the naysayer. I isolate the Debbie-downer. I raise the bar even higher to create a new reality and I’m happy to bring .

My SO can vouch for me that I have a problem with putting too many colors into my paintings. Instead of learning how to paint with just a couple of colors, I’m learning how to paint with them all.

You don’t need to change, what you need to do is run with it. Run with your odd way of thinking, run with your risk-taking, run with what the critics hate on. If you’re looking to stand out, looking for success, looking for something that’s very rewarding, you can’t just walk with it, you’ve got to run with it.

 

Stay Positive & Please Don’t Change

Photo and art by myself $500, free shipping thegarthbox@gmail.com

The Pickier You Are

Garth Beyer

Pick the Gold

Here’s a piece of advice you won’t buy (until you finish reading the post): don’t be the agency with the most accounts, don’t be the client service team with the most clients, don’t be the business that tries to appeal to the masses.

If you’re shooting for success, whether it’s in entrepreneurship or freelance, you have two options. You can be the best in terms of producing a select few outstanding accounts/clients/products or you can be the best in terms of producing the most accounts/clients/products.

With the latter, you sacrifice a lot. You take on clients who don’t have high expectations of themselves. You end up running client services for clients you don’t care about. You create products without any heart, without a story worth buying.

With the former, quite plainly, you get to practice your best. Now, I can’t express enough how important it is to define success for yourself. Even if it’s an assorted list of things, feelings or goals. You don’t need some four paragraph structured mission statement. Life isn’t cut and dry enough for that to work anyway. To define success is to understand what being the best really means.

Success – or growth of that matter – are not always by the numbers. Think of yourself as a publisher. Do you take on 5,000 novels a year, pushing them out the door as quickly as possible? Or do you get picky and cater to the 100 novels that are sure bestsellers?

This example is about to get interesting, so keep up.

Perhaps you’re going into PR. Are PR agencies looking to hire as many aspiring specialists as possible to build the agency up? Or are they going to seek the few specialists who actually represent their title of “special”its? Let’s flip this around now.

You’re looking for a job in PR. Are you going to shotgun your résumé to all the big agencies that run through new interns like a laundry list? Or are you going to seek the small agency that pours every drop of their heart into the work they do (after all, they have the time since they aren’t trying to baby an intern a week)?

You have an option to be remarkable, to be picky.

 

Stay Positive & Why Waste It?

Photo credit

How To Become A Breakthrough Blogger

Garth Beyer

You’ve got to do crazy shit that other people wish they had the courage to do. It’s really as simple as that.

You can blog every day for years, but that’s no guarantee you’ll attract the following you want.

Travel bloggers get popular (and make bank!) because they dropped everything to travel or they had a heartbreak, travelled to get over it and blogged along the way. Their blogs tell not just any old story, but one other’s wish they could live. Like reading a book you can’t set down.

Business bloggers with all the readers have all the readers because they’ve made some extremely risky calls or have dealt with some outrageous ventures, customers, competitors, etc.,. No one visits their blog to hear that it was another uneventful day in the office.

Life and style bloggers… they don’t just have good taste. They get others to look at them like style gods. Do you get it yet?

That’s why we read the blogs we do, isn’t it? We want to live like the authors of them. And in an almost indescribable way, we feel as though we are when we read their blogs.

 

Stay Positive & Bloggers Take Ridiculous Risks