Business Mentor: Personal flaws can curb your progress

I'm really busy with my business but don't seem to be getting new customers in the door. Can you give me some tips?

Margaret Mulqueen, general manager of Quantel Business Solutions, replies:

What are the personal characteristics that enable some people to nurture businesses where others fail?

Emotional intelligence is a seldom-articulated aspect of business success.

Many businesses have been started with boundless enthusiasm, a seemingly sound idea, an obvious market and capital, yet too many fail to achieve their potential.

One of the underlying principles of business success not well understood by the general population is that how you function in your personal life is how you will function in your business.

If you are the sort of person who pulls back from confronting and overcoming fears and challenges, you will entrench this modus operandi in your business practices and this is likely to severely limit your chances of success.

Businesses go through many challenges. Change is often a constant companion and you need a high level of self-awareness in order to make the best business decisions at varying points in the growth process.

You have two broad choices: you can confront the real issues, do whatever it takes to deal with them (this often seems the harder choice) and move forward, or you can avoid what is really going on.

Avoidance has some defining characteristics. You may continue without implementing the people, structure or process changes required and keep your attention away from the source of the problem, even creating other diversionary crises (the well-known activity of firefighting and crisis management) in an ongoing attempt to ignore the core issues.

This results in a non-productive, repeating cycle that slowly reduces your profitability and undermines your power and potency as the driver, manager and owner of the business.

You lose the respect of your staff (hard to regain once it's gone). Your personal performance suffers, you may sleep poorly and your focus and effectiveness will come under siege from overwhelming feelings of anger, powerlessness and anxiety.

This indicates a low level of emotional intelligence.

But if you have a high level of emotional intelligence, you inherently believe that you have mastery over challenges in both your personal and business lives.

You will wholeheartedly take responsibility for overcoming the obstacles to survival/growth. You will be willing to do whatever it takes.

This includes honestly evaluating your personal strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes. Once you are clear on how this affects your business you can bring in appropriate people and design and implement processes and structures to strengthen you where you are weak.

In this way you build a team and business that are capable of delivering.

As a business owner you do not have to do it all (you can't), but you do have to be brutally honest about your limitations.

With this invaluable understanding, you can take steps to minimise the negative impact on you, your staff and business. There is no shame in this. It is applied emotional intelligence.

People who are willing to build both their business and personal capabilities will have a sense of self-worth that enables them to learn from mistakes (rather than hiding from them), to re-evaluate and to approach situations in terms of how to handle them.

This in turn develops greater competency - you are more willing to make the hard calls, take risks and seek more demanding challenges.

In a nutshell, emotional intelligence is not a fixed quotient, so you have a chance to improve your business success profile.

You can develop your interpersonal skills through personal development. This will give you greater control over your emotional impulses, making you far less vulnerable to the emotional hijacking that interferes with focus and drive.

Above all, you can make your business decisions in a timely and conscious manner. This will deliver personal and business benefits, as well as improving your bottom line. Good luck!

* Margaret Mulqueen can be contacted on (09) 414-5030 or at margaret@qlbs.com

* Send Mentor questions to: ellen_read@nzherald.co.nz Answers will be provided by Business in the Community's Business Mentor Programme.