Hello, fellow goal-driven entrepreneurs! Can you believe we’re already halfway through 2023? June is the perfect time to pause, reflect, and recalibrate your business goals. Whether you’re on track or need a slight course correction, reviewing and resetting your goals mid-year is a crucial step to ensure your business growth ambitions stay on the right trajectory. So, grab a cup of motivation and let’s dive into these 10 tips on how to review, reset and recharge your business goals for the remainder of the year:

1. Evaluate your progress – start by reviewing your goals set at the beginning of the year. Assess how far you’ve come, what you’ve accomplished, and any gaps or challenges you’ve encountered. Be honest with yourself and analyse your wins and areas for improvement.
2. Celebrate achievements – take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate your achievements thus far. Recognise the milestones you’ve reached and the progress you’ve made. Celebrating successes fuels motivation and creates positive momentum for the rest of the year.
3. Identify lessons learned – reflect on the lessons you’ve learned during the first half of the year. What strategies worked well? What didn’t go as planned? Use these insights to refine your approaches, adjust your tactics, and optimise your goal-setting process moving forward.
4. Revisit your vision – your vision serves as your North Star. Reconnect with your long-term vision and assess if it needs any adjustments. As your business evolves, it’s natural for visions to evolve too. Ensure your goals are still aligned with your overarching purpose and values.
5. Analyse market trends – stay informed about market trends, industry shifts, and consumer behaviour. Analysing these factors will help you identify new opportunities or potential threats to your business. Stay nimble and adjust your goals to stay ahead of the curve.
6. Set priorities – prioritisation is key when reviewing and resetting goals. Identify the most critical objectives that will have the greatest impact on your business growth. Focus your energy, resources, and time on these high-priority goals to maximise your chances of success.
7. Set stretching but attainable goals – strike the delicate balance between ambition and achievability. Set goals that push your limits yet are still within reach. Stretching goals challenge you to grow, innovate, and reach new heights, while realistic targets ensure you maintain motivation and avoid overwhelm.
8. Break it down – break your goals into smaller, manageable milestones with specific deadlines. This approach allows you to track progress, stay accountable, and maintain a sense of momentum throughout the rest of the year. Bite-sized tasks are easier to tackle and build upon.
9. Develop your next 6-month roadmap – a roadmap outlining your plan of action p transforms your goals from aspirations into actionable steps. Outline the specific actions, strategies, and resources needed to achieve each goal. Assign responsibilities, establish timelines, and track progress to ensure steady progress towards your objectives.
10. Regularly review and adjust – goal setting is a dynamic process, not a one-time event. Schedule regular check-ins to review your progress, evaluate your strategies, and adjust as needed. Adaptability is essential to keep your goals aligned with the ever-changing business landscape.

With these tips, you’re well-equipped to review your business goals mid-year to reset and recharge for the remainder of the year. Remember, reviewing and adjusting your goals is not a sign of failure; it’s a sign of adaptability and growth. Embrace the opportunity to course correct, aim high, and set the stage for remarkable success in the second half of the year. Cheers to your continued business growth!

And if you’d like any support with this process, get in touch – we love to help fellow business owners and entrepreneurs with strategic goal setting. Drop us a line at: hello@dicebusiness.co.uk or over on LinkedIn.

Henry Ford said that ‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently’.

The word failure in business is often shied away from and it is true, it is a strong word. For the purpose of this blog let’s consider it as being when things don’t go exactly to plan, and let’s reframe it because we believe that failure is an opportunity.

It provides an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to make a different choice, a different decision, to make sure that something doesn’t happen again. It also provides you with the opportunity to grow and develop yourself further.

Consider this, have you ever grown from solving an easy task? When everything is going smoothly and there are no challenges you aren’t developing new skills. Don’t get us wrong, comfort zones are nice places to be for a while but make sure you don’t stay for too long or you might be missing out on growth.

When you are facing a challenge or don’t achieve a big goal, see it as an opportunity to increase your mental strength and improve your chances of succeeding next time. Like training a muscle in the gym.

Embrace adversity and analyse things that haven’t gone to plan. Ask yourself why you didn’t achieve your goal. Was it because of a lack of effort or the wrong strategies? How can you do better next time?

It offers the chance to re-evaluate and come back stronger with a different approach. Take these famous examples:

• Albert Einstein said: “I have tried 99 times and have failed, but on the 100th time came success.”
• Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” He was fired from his first two jobs for being “non-productive.” As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.
• Henry Ford’s first two automobile companies failed.
• Oprah Winfrey was fired from an early job as a television news anchor.
• Sir James Dyson suffered through 5,126 failed prototypes before he landed on the first working Dyson vacuum.

Whether failure is final or not ultimately depends on your ability to get yourself off the ground, dust yourself off, learn from it, and try again. The faster you can do that, the sooner you will turn things around.

We believe that one of the most important things in business is having a growth mindset – seeing the opportunities in adversity, seeing the possibilities when things don’t go to plan. If you need some help to embed a growth mindset culture in your organisation, get in touch – we can help. Drop us a line to find out more: hello@dicebusiness.co.uk

When starting out with any kind of strategy or plan, whether it is for a business or for an individual, we always find value in starting with the end in mind. Having a goal or a destination in your mind helps to shape what actions you might want to take to get you there. In his book the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr Stephen Covey says all things are created twice – first in the mind and then in the real world – like a blueprint for a house.

Sitting down with a blank sheet of paper can be overwhelming but try fast-forwarding 12 months or 2 years or 5 years – what would be different about your business? If you had a magic wand, what would you be doing?

When you start to build up a picture in your mind of what your business will look like, you get closer to working out the actions that will help you get there. The saying goes that inaction breeds doubt and fear, whereas action breeds confidence and courage. This is where it is often helpful to get an accountability partner to help you stay on track. Like hiring a Personal Trainer at the Gym – this is where hiring someone like a DICE Roller can help you in your business!

Sometimes it can be the very first action that is the most difficult one to make, but once you get going you get into a routine. In your business you might aspire to grow but it is taking that first step towards growing that will actually get you closer to it.

We know that it can be scary when you set goals because there’s always that nagging doubt at the back of your mind that you won’t achieve them but really, what is the worst thing that can happen? There’s no Goal jail! You might have to tell employees and shareholders that it didn’t quite go to plan and that you are tweaking the course of action, or you might surpass your own expectations. Either way you are more likely to get closer to achieving the goal if you’ve taken some action towards it.

Start by getting things out of your head. It’s not enough to just have your ideas and goals floating about in there! Go old-fashioned and find a pen and paper to write them down. Yes, you can use your phone or a spreadsheet, but we recommend physically writing them and breaking down those large-scale ambitions into smaller actions or baby steps.

Set yourself targets to achieve each week or month and make a commitment to look back on how far you have come. Consider diarising time for the actions you are taking so that you don’t get busy caught up in doing other things. Also factor in reflection time once a month, once a week or even once a day depending on how focused and committed you want to be!

Once you are clear on where you want to go and the actions you are going to take to get you there, you have to fully commit to actually taking action! Put the actions onto a roadmap or a calendar for the year ahead and then use it at quarterly intervals to keep you on track.

Breaking down your big goals into actionable steps is how you will achieve them. And if you need any help – this is what we do! Get in touch to get the dice rolling: hello@dicebusiness.co.uk

There are many times in our business where we can feel stuck. We may hit a wall of our own self-limiting beliefs, or it could be that we have a setback with loss of clients or challenges in our market.

At these times calling upon a business coach can really help get you unstuck. However one of the most common things we see is that many people simply lack the courage to ask for help. As humans we can have these feelings that we should be able to do it all on our own, that asking for help is a sign of weakness. In fact, the opposite is true.

When you are able to recognise that an outside perspective will help you, that is a sign of great self-awareness and therefore strength. A coach has a neutrality to a situation that means they can therefore provide a different opinion. Being asked probing questions can feel uncomfortable but it is in that discomfort that growth usually takes place.

The difference between a coach and a mentor is through the questioning process. A coach will ask questions that require you to find the answer, as opposed to a mentor who will tell you ‘this is how I did it’. There is benefit in both approaches, but with a neutral mindset, a coach puts the power in your hands – you have all the answers within, they are just teasing them out of you!

If you’re unsure as to whether you’d benefit from some business coaching, consider these questions….

• Are you feeling stuck in a rut about where you currently are in your business/career?
• Do you have ideas but aren’t sure of how to move them into actions?
• Do you have big goals you want to achieve?
• Are you in your comfort zone and feel ready to get out of it?
• Have you lost your mojo and want some help to get it back?
• Are you lacking people around you who challenge you and give you honest feedback?

If you have answered yes to any of these questions, coaching can help you. At DICE our business coaching is not off the shelf – we get to know you and your business so that we can become that real trusted advisor to you. Our coaching relationships go deep, so if it’s a superficial cheerleader coach you’re looking for, we are not for you. But if you are ready to take action on your big goals and would like someone on your team who is rooting for your success, we can help. Get in touch with us today at hello@dicebusiness.co.uk to get the dice rolling.

Running a business has never been an easy option. Anyone who thinks it is clearly has never done it. Even if you have the best strategy and business plan in the world, there are no guarantees of success and there will always be curveballs thrown at you that you have zero control over (Covid-19 being a classic case in point). Add people into the mix with their foibles and differences, and you suddenly realise that as a business owner you need to be an expert in human behaviour and psychology, as well as everything else.

However, when you are the business owner, the buck stops with you, and you have to stay motivated and committed to the long game in order to inspire and drive everyone else around you. So how do you stay motivated as a business owner? Here are our top tips…

1. Know and play to your strengths – when you are doing work that you are good at and able to make a difference, it makes your working week a whole lot easier. We find that when we are coaching business owners who have got themselves into a bit of a rut, it is usually because they are operating outside of their zone of genius and being dragged into things they are either not good at, or don’t enjoy. Obviously, we can’t always work on everything that lights us up, but you want to be aiming for a solid 80% of your time to avoid getting dragged down!
2. Set goals and targets – these can be motivating for you and everyone else around you. Consider creating a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) for your business – something that is really aspirational to aim towards. This can really focus you and get everyone else around you focused on the future and the potential that is out there.
3. Recognise yourself – when you are in charge you won’t have people lining up to pat you on the back, so you must do it yourself! Take time to celebrate your own wins – keep a note of them each week/month in a notebook that you can look back upon and see how far you have come.
4. Keep learning and growing – it is natural to get bored when you do the same things over and over again. That’s why we are such big fans of lifelong learning. It doesn’t have to be related to your business; you can take up a new hobby.
5. Head back to the floor – remember that TV show when the boss went undercover in their business? Take a few days or even a week out and go and experience what it is like to be an employee in your business. Sit with different teams, lunch with your employees, get out with your field teams. It’s a great way to engage with people and also will give you loads of insight and fresh ideas that you can take back and implement.

Our final tip is to drop us a line because this is what we do with business owners day in and day out. In our coaching we are there as a trusted advisor, we are an ear to chew, an extra pair of eyes, and we care about helping you succeed. Get in touch with us today at hello@dicebusiness.co.uk to get the dice rolling.

One of the things business leaders often share with us is that they would like more honesty from people in their organisations. During employee listening exercises they want to know how people really feel and not be told things that they think they want to hear.

Ghandi once told a child’s mother “I cannot ask your son to stop the bad habit of eating too many sweets until I have dealt with my own bad habit first”. He started with looking inwards at himself and being honest about his own shortcomings before casting any judgment on the child.

In business, honesty is something that is often talked about, but this type of self-reflection and empathy is often missing. The bottom line is that as a business leader, you can’t expect others to be honest with you unless you are willing to be honest with yourself.

This requires self-awareness and the willingness to challenge our own abilities as leaders. It’s not about what we say but about what we do every day in terms of our behaviours – remember actions speak louder than words.

It requires leaders to accept their own shortcomings and be vulnerable in sharing them as opportunities for development. Gone are the days when business leaders need to be hero’s coming to everyone else’s rescue. Employees are looking for authenticity, vulnerability and real honesty – not just paying lip service to the word.

Leaders who are truly honest in their approach will accept their limitations, will openly share those with their team and seek opportunities to plug the gaps with a collective and collaborative approach, rather than trying to go it alone.

They will seek feedback regularly from all areas of the organisation and be curious to understand how things can be improved. They won’t be defensive, they will see any perceived negative commentary as a chance for growth and improvement.

They will accept when things don’t go to plan, not seeking to blame. They will give recognition to those around them when things go well, even if they were solely responsible for the success.

So, if you are looking for more honesty in your organisation, maybe it is time to look in the mirror and see how honest you are being. Commit to sharing more openly about your own deficiencies, show humility with your employees, and over time you will create the environment and the culture in your organisation that allows employees to do the same.

If you are a business leader and would like some support with your employee engagement, your mindset, or just a trusted ear of someone who has been in your shoes – get in touch. That’s how we roll.

There is something about Springtime that we think brings a new energy to business – the days are lighter and brighter (generally) and there’s plenty of the year still left to go at to achieve our goals.

The Winter months of January and February can be challenging from a motivational perspective, it can be cold, damp, dark. When the new leaves start emerging on the trees and those green shoots and flowers start sprouting up, you will be hard pressed not to feel that same burst of renewed energy.

As the first quarter of the year draws to a close, it is also a great opportunity to review and maybe reset those New Year intentions you set out for your business. Are you on track? Are there action steps you need to take that maybe you’ve been procrastinating? It’s time to spring into action!

The strategy work we support our clients with is the DICE Game Plan. Every business needs one – we call it your ‘Plan to Win’. Of course planning has to be fluid, as we can never plan for every eventuality in business (we see you Covid-19), but having a plan on a page which articulates what you want to achieve in your business over the year ahead is a great tool. Not only does it keep the leadership team on track, but it is also a great engagement tool which helps employees understand the bigger ‘why’ behind the everyday tasks and actions they are carrying out.

We love helping business owners to translate their over-arching vision into a roadmap that details step by step the milestones they need to achieve to get them there. In the face of constant change, planning timescales are shorter than they used to be. The key to success is that the roadmap isn’t just something written on a page – it must be implemented, and it must be a live document that ebbs and flows with every month.

When you work with DICE, we are there as your conscience, keeping you on track, looking for solutions to issues as they crop up, considering ways to pivot and change if needs be.

Here are our top 5 tips on creating your Game Plan:

1. Be guided by your Vision – having a clear vision to where you want the organisation to be in 5, 10 years plus is a great ‘North Star’ for you to be able to hang onto.
2. Think long and short term – once you have your Vision, it is important to work out what are the longer term and shorter-term actions that are going to help you get there.
3. Hold regular (ideally monthly) reviews to track progress – as outlined earlier, the need for your Game Plan to be a live document is because things can and do change regularly. Make sure you have a meeting structure with the key implementers (usually your senior leadership team) that is in place to track progress and make changes to the roadmap as needed.
4. Communicate, communicate, communicate – see your Game Plan as THE most important tool in your business toolbox for engaging your employees in the bigger purpose behind why they do the work they do. Schedule regular (ideally quarterly) all-employee briefings to share progress against the plan.
5. Rinse and repeat – planning done well is a cyclical process – it isn’t one and done. Create a calendar for your business and schedule those monthly, quarterly, and annual dates – it will really help to keep you on track.

To be a truly strategic organisation requires discipline, and it can help you to have the outside support from a DICE Roller to answer to! If you need some support or accountability in achieving your big goals this year, get in touch – we can help.

PS: If you’re coming to this blog at another time of the year, see it a sign that you are ready to spring into action regardless of the season!

One of the most common things we are approached to help clients with is improving workplace culture. Culture seems to be one of those elusive things that often gets put in the ‘too difficult’ box to tackle. But at DICE, we see culture simply as how people behave when no-one is watching, and if you don’t like the current culture, you can change it.

Firstly, if you haven’t set parameters for what the expected behaviours are that you want to see then don’t be surprised if you end up disappointed. Having a strong set of values that set out the guiding behaviours you want to achieve in your business is the first step towards driving your culture, but they must be lived – not just words on a wall or on your website.

This is one of the most rewarding pieces of work that we do with clients, particularly those organisations who have never articulated their values before. We work with your senior leadership team in the first instance asking questions like:

• What are the best things about working here?
• What are your competitors most envious of?
• If your organisation was a person, how would you describe them?

Probing into these questions helps us to tease out what your organisation’s personality is and what makes you unique. Once we have this in a raw format the key is then to chat to other employees and get their input – asking them what they think. Does it resonate with them, or is it a million miles apart from how it feels to work there day in and out?

We don’t usually find there’s a huge gap in thinking, but it is a great way of engaging people into the process because ultimately it is everyone living and breathing these values which will embed them, so they become ‘how you do things around here’.

The key is to bring them to life and embed them into everyday behaviours, getting people engaged in the process. How do you do this? Well obviously, you get in touch with us to help you! But if you’re not up for that just yet, here are five ways to do it:

1. Bring them to life – words on their own can be mis-interpreted. Leaders need to role-model the behaviours that they want to see in others. Get creative in how you explain the ‘why’ behind each value. Make sure employees ‘see’ the values visually displayed (on computer monitors, posters, website, Intranets, etc), but also that they ‘feel’ the values in the way they are treated.
2. Ensure that as well as commercially driven employee objectives, every employee has an objective which directly links back to how they behave according to your values. This then becomes an ongoing discussion during monthly 1-1 meetings to pick up any behaviours that aren’t in-keeping, and also to reward and recognise when they are displaying the company values.
3. Use employee briefings to remind people of the values, and spotlight behaviour from people which is in alignment with values. Use your monthly/quarterly employee briefings to celebrate and recognise great behaviours from people that is in-line with your values. If you have an employee recognition scheme, link it directly to your values,
4. Theme your employee engagement activity around a different company value each month or quarter. For instance, if one of your values is ‘entrepreneurial’ consider running an all-staff competition to come up with the most entrepreneurial ideas to improve the organisation.
5. Start before they even join. Part of your recruitment process should be to test alignment with your company values. Clearly this needs to be an inclusive process, but it is an important part of testing whether there is a cultural fit for the individual and you as the employer.  

Improving workplace culture is a key component of our DICE Team Spirit package. Get in touch to find out more about how we can help you.

On the first Friday in March every year it is ‘Employee Appreciation Day’. In our eyes, employees should be celebrated and shown appreciation every day of the year and it shouldn’t need a special day to commemorate it (much like Valentine’s Day shouldn’t be the only day we show love to our nearest and dearest!).

But just for a moment imagine a job where your work isn’t appreciated, your effort goes unnoticed, and you could be replaced instantly. Not exactly a place you’d want to stay for long. As a leader, this isn’t the type of environment you want to develop or sustain. So how do you show your employees that you value them – not just on Employee Appreciation Day – but everyday?

When you are a people leader, a significant part of your role is about making time for people. This used to be known as ‘leadership by walking about’ but nowadays you don’t have to physically walk about to do it. Use the channels of communication you have available – and don’t ignore the obvious!

Contrary to popular belief, for employees to feel valued, it isn’t all just about money and benefits. It’s about showing you genuinely care about them as an individual.

Here are a few simple ideas to get you started…

1. Say hello when you see them and get to know their names.
2. Remember birthdays and work anniversaries.
3. Write a handwritten note or card to say thank you when they’ve done a great job.
4. Ask about their holidays – what they have planned, where they have been, etc.
5. Genuinely be curious about what makes them tick – find out what their interests are outside of work and ask them about it from time to time.

When you show your employees you think about them, they will feel respected and will be more likely to go the extra mile when needed to. This is known in Human Resources as ‘discretionary effort’, i.e., it is at the employee’s discretion as to whether they do it or not.

Leadership is all about people and it is the little things that can make a huge difference. Our work is all about creating organisations where people thrive. They can show up as their true selves, do great work that they enjoy and are motivated by, and ultimately feel a sense of belonging.

If this is an area of your business you need some help with, get in touch. Our expertise is in creating high performing workplace cultures where employees are engaged and feel valued. Because organisations that value their people are the ones that ultimately succeed.

The concept of ‘quiet quitting’ is a more modern term for what many of us know as ‘work to rule’. In other words, it is where employees work within their defined hours and do exactly what the job requires – nothing more. It is said to be a post-pandemic phenomenon – particularly in younger workers or those who were furloughed during the pandemic and might still be holding on to some residual antipathy.

With productivity at the forefront of the minds of many business owners, especially in this time of financial pressures across the economy, quiet quitting is a concern. It is the opposite of ‘discretionary effort’, which is what we work with our clients to encourage through developing a workplace culture where employees are well engaged and motivated to do more than the bare minimum.

Disengaged people who don’t feel like they have a sense of purpose in their job role, or connection with their colleagues and the business they work for, are less likely to go above and beyond. Employees who enjoy their work and the working environment will always put in more effort because they get a buzz from achieving and being part of a bigger vision.

Author Daniel Pink argues that there are three crucial elements to encourage intrinsic motivation in your employees (i.e., it comes from within them and not through threat of punishment or promise of reward): autonomy, mastery and purpose.

He suggests that leaders should encourage autonomy amongst employees across time, technique, team, and task. For instance, some organisations allow employees to have time at the workplace for their personal development or to encourage a work-related project outside of their usual tasks, which can lead to innovative ideas and solutions (Google is the famous example of this). More flexible working practices is another example of allowing employees more autonomy as they are trusted to get their work done in a way that suits them. Teamwork is another good way of facilitating autonomy, particularly where the team members pick the team and people get to work across functions.

Pink describes Mastery as the desire to continually improve. Most people get a high degree of job satisfaction from getting better at things or developing their own skills. Creating opportunities for employees to develop themselves in different ways contributes to an increase in their inner drive and motivation. In contrast, a lack of opportunity for people to spend time improving themselves or investing in their professional and personal development leaves the potential for employees to feel demotivated and even bored by the lack of perceived progress they are making in their own careers. The key is to find the ‘Goldilocks’ tasks – those things which are neither too stretching, nor too easy – they are just right!

Finally, and we would argue is most important for business owners to cultivate, is Purpose – that is the desire to do things that contribute to something larger than themselves. Doing things that matter and make a difference is a big motivator – particularly to younger employees who are said to be more conscious of their impact socially and environmentally. Regardless of age, most of us spend half of our waking hours at work and we want that time to matter.

A key part of adding purpose to work is to ensure that the organisation’s vision and goals are clearly communicated to employees in a way that is personal to them. They need to know the big picture and understand how their work and contribution fits into that. Having a clear line of sight from the large organisational goals to what an individual is working on day to day is a great way of establishing this, but like most things it isn’t a ‘one and done’ exercise. Regularly updating people as to how the business is performing against those goals is key, as is giving employees regular feedback on their own individual performance.

Of course, none of this works in isolation and in the current climate there is no denying that additional money above the set salary is a motivator for many at work, but Pink argues that once people perceive they are paid fairly for the contribution they are making, then they become much more motivated by intrinsic elements.

Our biggest piece of advice is for line managers to get to know their people and really understand what motivates them. If you have employees who you suspect could be prone to becoming quiet quitters, start there. Encourage line managers to have a conversation with them, acknowledge that the phenomenon exists and seek their feedback on what motivates them. Employers often shy away from these conversations in fear that people will make demands for more money that they can’t meet but this often isn’t the case, and you might just be surprised at some of the ideas they have which cost little or no money.

Weaving the crucial elements of autonomy, mastery and purpose into your employment offering is easier than you think, and the DICE team has a wealth of tools and techniques that can help. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more and ensure your employees don’t quietly quit on you, because they are likely to quietly quit before they actually quit. Email hello@dicebusiness.co.uk to organise a free and confidential chat about your business.