And I think the thing that I am most proud of is the way that I have been able to help them develop and ‘improve’.

Small businesses can find it hard to set concrete goals for employees’ performance because they need to be flexible in a fast-moving marketplace. I don’t stress about it, although I do ensure that everyone has a clear job description.

 

Instead I’m happy to let goals evolve from something more fuzzy. Here’s an illustration of what I mean:

One of the young lads came to me the other day and told me that he was applying for a new job. I was delighted for him. He joined me when we were short-staffed and came in to help in the stores for a couple of weeks during the holidays.

 

I subsequently took him on permanently in a customer service role and, in less than three years, he has turned from someone who vaguely knew that he wanted to be in “youth work” to someone who is disciplined, motivated and has a clear direction in life.

To get to this point, I have pushed him down avenues that he never knew existed and it has given him the ability to make decisions without having to refer to anyone else.

 

He has taken on responsibility for our quality management, worked on our Health and Safety and Investors in People standards and expanded his own horizons. Now he has achieved his goal of “working in youth” (as he terms it) and I am really pleased for him.

I don’t expect people to come to me and just “do a job”. Certainly, I have staff members who think that they have reached the limits of what they are capable of doing. But I will keep pushing them out of their comfort zone and into areas in which I think that they can develop and grow.

 

Two of my team have taken on people management roles, even though neither of them have ever done anything like it before. Using external courses from our local Chamber of Commerce and mentoring them into their new roles, it has been a real privilege to watch them rise to the challenge.

I think creative people are the most difficult to manage though and they are also the hardest to recruit. When you are lucky enough to find a really creative individual who wants to work for you, how do you maintain their creativity and channel it so that it can best benefit the business?

For example, when three people come to you and say that they want to build the company logo in Lego bricks, do you:

When this happened to me, I was in a bit of a cleft stick. I could see the benefits to the business in terms of exposure and the potential for building incoming links to our web site, but I didn’t want the guys to do it in full view of the rest of the team.

 

Trying to explain and justify the fact that three of my cleverest lads were playing with Lego during work hours while the others were doing their regular jobs was just beyond me.

 

So I sent them home to do it and asked them to video the final result. This approach worked well. We got a huge response from bloggers, which was our aim in the first instance and generated nearly 600 incoming links.

When I first recruit people, I tell them that I want them to come to work “with a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts”. To go to work every morning and dread it must be soul-destroying. I’ve tried to do lots of things to boost morale and the ones that work best are:

 

 

 

Motivating your staff needn’t be about just money and bonuses. It’s also about involving people. As a small business, we are close enough to each other to discuss problems and opportunities as they arise.

The hardest thing for an employer, in my opinion, is opening your ears and your mind to really listen. If your employees feel that each individual is important, they are involved and their opinions and ideas count, it goes a long way to motivating them.

 

But the nirvana is to make everyone feel that they have ownership of the business so that they will take decisions with the best interests of the organisation in mind without you having to worry. When that happens, you have a really powerful ethos to help the business grow and move forward.

As a result, I don’t want my team ringing me up with problems when I am out of the office. As far as I am concerned, everyone has a job to do, they all know what is expected of them (because we have job descriptions and annual reviews) and they don’t need to come to me to ask how something is done.

 

If they do, my invariable response is “what is the right thing to do?” and I let them come up with the answer. I find that giving people that level of trust and empowerment makes them blossom.

It is difficult in any small business to develop a clear path and structure for career progression, but the flip side is career flexibility. Because everyone has to be adaptable, it is possible for any member of the team who is capable of “thinking out of the box” to take new directions.

 

For instance, my stores supervisor now has responsibility for internal quality audits for our ISO9001 procedures, yet when she joined us she was looking for cleaning work.

Managing people effectively is the most rewarding thing that anyone can do, whether in a small or large team. In the early start-up days, everyone is very motivated and involved, but as the business grows, keeping that level of commitment and ownership within your team becomes a real challenge.

 

Mastering that one is all part of one’s own personal development, however. It’s about moving from being an entrepreneur to becoming a business person.