Business Intuition: How to keep your employees happy and creative

Millions of Americans get up every morning and go to work in Corporate America. How many do you think feel proud, inspired, supported in their work environment? How many feel happy?

Corporate America was bled to death by the downsizing and outsourcing eras.
Employers and employees have become enemies, struggling against each other in a desperate effort to stay alive.   In order to stay competitive, American businesses commonly have to resort to cut throat strategies, legal or not.

The small business owner, the franchise retail store, the big financial corporation, we're all affected by this. It's pervasive, like a poison working its way through a living organism. And it doesn't matter how we got there. The fact remains that we're now facing a wide spread cultural contamination. This is clearly not a sustainable business strategy for Corporate America.

Fundamentally, everyone wants the same thing: to be happy. Whether it's through money, power, social status, relationships, material possessions. It's all one big quest to feel better.  Heck, we fight wars so we can feel better and less afraid!

But it's easy to get backed into a corner. When you strip down every once of happiness from the work place, you're starving everyone from the thing they most desire. And if you've ever been really hungry, you know that by then you'll eat just about anything...even things that are bad for you.

People fundamentally want to do good. They want to be successful. They want the company to make profits. They want to help the customer. They want to facilitate their coworkers' job. But when the company doesn't support their ability to feel happy at work, you've got a ticking time bomb sitting at that desk.

There's costly consequences to unhappy employees and partners:

1) Their ability to generate profits is greatly limited.  Unless you're using fear or greed to motivate your troops (which is not a sustainable success strategy since it's not based on what people want), they won't be interested in going the extra mile, finding new ways to be more efficient or taking good care of an annoying client. You've just shot down their creativity.  And if anybody can tell you the real pulse of your business, it's those people in the trenches.

2) They will start to look for ways to "feed" their need to be happy with whatever they can get their hands on.  That's a fertile ground for embezzling, back stabbing, drug use and absenteeism.

Of course, being an employer doesn't mean you have to become everyone's mommy. Some people have problems in their personal lives and that's not for you to solve. But ignoring or countering employees' needs to be happy at work is probably costing more than trying to find creative ways to meet those needs.

The question is:  How can you support happiness in the work place without plundering your profits?

Benefits costs money, raises cost money, time off costs money...Yes. But what do you think you'll find if you look behind the request for benefits, raises and time off? A desire to be happy!
Why not cut the middle man and finds ways to keep your employees happy without always dipping in your bank account?

This is where Business Intuition comes in.  Using your intuition in business can open the door to creative solutions you didn't even know existed!  And in order to find these solutions, you can leverage your best asset: your people!

Business Intuition is not just for CEOs. Every employee in your company can be taught to use their intuition. We tend to associate strong business instincts with CEOs because you really can't be a good leader if you don't know how to use your intuition. You might not call it Business Intuition. You might not even be able to teach other people how they can do what you do. But if you ever had to make tough decisions in times of uncertainty, it's a guaranteed fact that you have used Business Intuition.

When an employee knows how to leverage their intuition, they can start having ideas on how to become more efficient, more profitable, more helpful, more successful...in short, happier. Your job is to facilitate this process.  Give them the tools their need to use their intuition and listen to what they come up with!

Not every situation calls for Business Intuition. And not every solution acquired through intuition is immediately applicable. Most of the time, it needs some "tweaking" to make it realistic and effective. But it is the beginning of a Corporate American that we'll want to work for. Widespread use of Business Intuition is really the future of Corporate America.

Empowering employees to feel happier in their workplace by using Business Intuition is a sustainable success strategy.   

"You can give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him how to fish and  he will eat for the rest of his life."
  -Kwan Tzu

For more information on Business Intuition Coaching and Executive Corporate programs, visit www.StrategicBusinessIntuition.com.