There is a difference between being comfortable and being in apathy.It is very comfortable to have a smooth running organization when you have a team that knows what to do and does it. It is comfortable to have this group take care of your company and make it expand, and all you have to do is take care of
team. It is comfortable when staff will actually handle discipline problems of other staff members and not give it to you to handle. It is, of course, very comfortable to have a consistent flow of new customers into your office and not have to worry about it week to week.
What is apathy?
Perhaps apathy is excuses — thinking that things can’t change, considering that “this is pretty good” and “I just want everybody to be happy,” but recognizing that they are not. Apathy can be present when there are situations going on in office that aren’t going well and you choose to ignore it and hope it will go away. Apathy can be mere excuses and explanations as to why a situation or problem exists.
Sometimes, as business owners, we can fall into such apathy that we don’t actually use any tools to evaluate whether organization is expanding or not. We wait until accountant reconciles books and tells us whether we did well or poorly. That’s truly apathy.
Apathy can also be a lack of planning, “just come to work and see what happens” attitude. Some business owners at one point in time used to keep a “to-do” list, now they don’t even bother. They just wait until they come into office and one of staff members gives them first order of day, in other words, they take orders from their staff. That’s truly apathy.
Some business owners are doing all right and they are making good money, but they are not taking care of their staff. They may have lack of emotion or caring or a general apathy towards their staff.
Whatever your financial goals are, you probably need to triple them, because it’s important to take care of team that takes care of you. When you recognize what good staff members can do for your organization and you actually exchange with them for that good work, it tells those staff members how much you truly care about them.
When you accept excuses for low productivity, you as a business owner go more and more into apathy. And so does your team. But on other hand, improving employees’ ability to handle their jobs well, giving staff real, obtainable production demands and getting them to achieve these targets regardless of “excuses” is certainly not apathy. It is ability to make things happen as an executive.
Many business owners are not satisfied in some way about volume of new customers into their business, but most are not doing anything about it. Now that’s truly apathy! Sometimes we look around at other businesses that are doing well and blame them for our lack of success. That is slightly better than apathy – at least there is some emotion, but practice owner still hasn’t done anything about it.
What we are talking about here, plain and simple, is how to shift from being effect of your referral sources to being causative over that relationship. In other words, in regards to new customers, instead of “look at me and recognize how hard it is for me to get new customers,” you can shift to “I know how to drive new business in door.” One is apathy and other is causative. It is first and foremost a shift in viewpoint.
