Posted on January 5, 2022January 31, 2023 by Tammy Whalen Blake

How diverse is your micro-business?

Redefining Success | Resorting Life Balance

how diverse is your micro-business?

How Diverse is Your Micro-Business?

The benefits of a diverse workforce are well communicated. But if the opportunity for diversity doesn’t present itself, can it be an unrealistic aim for a micro-business owner?

We have all become more familiar with the significance of diversity in the modern world. It’s a no-brainer that a diverse workforce is better for all. Diversity can promote ideas and innovation. It can restore that everyone is valued regardless of ethnicity, gender, ability or perceived position in society.

Still, it can be challenging to introduce this into a micro-business with one to ten employees. In many cases, just one employee and some infrequent freelancers. Regardless, diversity is still an area of development in micro-businesses.

If you are a large multinational, you have natural access to various opinions and perspectives. Although this doesn’t guarantee that they are sought or listened to. For micro-businesses, this can be more complicated. Working in a small shop, or running an online business in a similar part of the world, leads to a lack of unique perspectives inside your business. With that in mind, it may seem that a micro-business is at a disadvantage. If you’re running a one or ten person business, it can be challenging to be diverse. Making matters worse, many micro-business owners fall into the trap of hiring people who they like, and who are like them.

Thankfully, it is possible to renew your thought process about team diversity once you understand how good a diverse team is for your business and how simple it is to create one. However, there is one more dynamic to diversity to consider – physical and social aspects only make up a fraction of diversity. The rest lies in the diversity of thought.

What good is promoting diversity if everyone thinks the same way? The key to successfully implementing diversity is to have a team with diverse backgrounds and diverse thoughts. Only then will authentic innovation and growth be achievable.

Why diversity matters

Aside from being simply the right thing to do, growth orientated micro-business owners understand the many benefits of a diverse team and know that it’s part of business growth. A diverse team brings diverse viewpoints and perspectives to the company in terms of age, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientations, gender, gender identity, and national origin.

Among other things, these factors can help you develop new products and new services to provide to customers. The variety of your team’s backgrounds, cultures, and upbringings are a strategic advantage that you can maximise.

The advantage of diversifying your thinking

Hiring diverse employees or freelancers can benefit your business as differing world views, experiences, and skillsets expand, resulting in new ideas and opportunities. These can boost your audiences, as customers often find it more appealing to work with someone they can relate to.

Someone who has lived only in one city, one county or country won’t have the same experiences as someone who has lived abroad or travelled. Great ideas come from unique perspectives.

Thinking safe won’t change the world, but diverse thinking can. Steve Jobs once said

"those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are usually the ones that do".

Steve Jobs

Consider the impact of inventions like the iPod or the smartphone. Its businesses like this have diverse teams willing to challenge the defy the possibilities, try things new, and potentially failing before succeeding.

Attained Diversity

We each have a natural trait we are born with, with other forms of diversity attained through life events. Diversity of thoughts can come from prior work experience, things we’ve learned from schools, parents, and friends. In other cases, we have diverse thoughts from a variety of perspectives and belief systems.

Financial Performance

According to a 2017 McKinsey Report, businesses with racial and ethnic diversity teams are 33% more likely to outperform their industry peers in terms of profitability. Gartner reported that in 2022, 75% of businesses reflecting a diverse and inclusive culture would exceed their financial targets.

8 Tools to Make Diversity Work in Micro-Businesses

Micro-businesses need to embrace an appreciation of differences. Finding common ground despite our differences is a way to build team rapport. Micro-businesses must work differently under this new model. They need to attract, train, hire, manage and promote differently.

1. Vision and Mission Statement

A vision statement and mission statement can help you identify the people who believe in the same aspirations but have different views on how to achieve them. Something as simple as having an inspirational vision and mission statement for micro-businesses can work wonders for attracting diverse talent. Research by Deloitte has revealed that mission-driven businesses enjoy 30% more innovation and 40% more engagement from employees.

A vision and mission statement is a short paragraph that summarises what you do, who you do it for and why you do it. It is ideal for clients, competitors, partners and talent to see why you’re different, what you stand for and what your ultimate goals are as a business.

2. Improve your recruiting strategy

It is one thing to plan to be diverse, but if you can’t attract a more diverse team, you are setting yourself up for a lesson. Start by rethinking your hiring strategy.

Language. For example, masculine-type words like “hungry” and “dominate” are often less appealing to female applicants.
Flexibility. Employees or freelancers strive for flexibility and being able to achieve a work-life balance. Could you give them the options to be flexible?
Personality assessment. This tool will help you measure personality traits, motivations, and skills.
Expand your reach. Expand your search using third-party websites and online job boards instead of relying on the same recruiting channels. Check schools and community colleges, or Acadium short term apprenticeships.
Work with partners. Create a board of trusting peers you’ve met at networking, hire an HR freelancer to manage the hiring process or work with organisations that specialise in diversity.

3. Hiring

When training new hires, the onboarding process should emphasise the core values and how the employee upholds those values. If the owner of the micro-business doesn’t behave against those values, the team dynamic will fail. Start within your leadership style first before hiring.

Great micro-business owners push teams to new heights of creativity and encourage task-focused outcomes.

4. Feeling valued and expressing vulnerability

Most importantly, the micro-business needs to cultivate an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing their views and genuine selves. These teams can challenge business strategy, products and preconceived ideas with unique and different viewpoints.

As much as the business feels like it is your baby, micro-business owners don’t need to control every decision. Allow your team to shine and maximise their perspectives. Trust the process of learning from each other.

You should also be aware that diversity can lead to conflicts among your team, so you have to prepare for this eventuality. For example, creatives are more likely to associate with other creatives and technical people tend to communicate better with other technical experience. Another conflict can be between age differences or socioeconomic backgrounds might weaken open conversations and team morale.

Vulnerability and feeling valued will ensure no one is left out and that team members work better together. You may not always agree, but strong relationships will help overcome the disagreements, allowing the team to reveal the best action plans.

5. Celebrate team differences.

Run regular diversity awareness training and events or mix it into the monthly/quarterly team meetings. You could add a thank you email to the end of week sign off whereby each member sends a thank you to a team member for the efforts and why they appreciated it.

6. Active listening

“This is the way it’s always been done” is the business growth killer mentality. Avoid team members feeling undermined, overlooked, and dismissed.

You can keep it simple by talking with your team over breaks or video calls, giving them the space to express themselves without any preconceived biases or assumptions. You could host a meeting that encourages everyone to speak up or run a team survey.

The key here is to listen to understand and not to respond. Listening to your team will ignite a beautiful relationship – take advantage of this leadership skill.

7. Reflect, rethink, reboot

Plan time in the diary to reflect on what worked and what can be improved. The most straightforward method is gathering feedback from your team such as an online survey. Equally, acknowledge those who no longer work with you to see what areas need to be improved.

8. Teams aren’t just employees

Go To Yellow was built with one person and grew to 9. All of which were freelancers and apprentices or skill swaps with other micro-business owners. Everyone was treated as an employee.

We also found diversity in an advisory board, in mentors from business-led programs and focus groups. The latter is what led us to create The Yellow Mastermind service.

The Yellow Mastermind solves business growth

At The Yellow Mastermind, we have six diverse micro-business owners per team, working together to build a reciprocal relationship without the increase in payroll.

When I’m forming The Yellow Mastermind Team, I look to achieve diversity in three key ways:

All members of The Yellow Mastermind Team come from different sectors and are non-competing – this ensures openness and trust within the group.
The Yellow Mastermind Team are created with all genders, cultural and neurodiversity – this makes for a much better dynamic in the room and improved insight.
Different sized micro-businesses working together – they often bring different solutions to solving the same problems.

Suppose you get a team of people who provide this diversity and are all the decision-makers within their respective micro-business. The quality of thinking and insight is more significant than in a networking group or a group of people who look and think the same. Too often, networking groups drift into a situation where they hear their thoughts echoed around the room and struggle to break through their current growth, geography, product/service diversity.

If you want to grow your business, understand your customers, clients and suppliers but don't have diverse thinking, consider a new approach to business by joining The Yellow Mastermind.

Tammy, Founder at Go To Yellow. Tweet

Tammy Whalen Blake

Founder of go to yellow
Personal Development Coach

Hear what others have to say...

client success stories

I was privileged enough to receive Tammy’s incredible personal development coaching and the experience was amazing. Tammy’s knowledge & skills clearly shine through when working with her. Tammy’s energy and approach in which she delivers the sessions are perfect and I feel much clearer on the areas of my life my focus is now on and the ways in which I will achieve the improvement I am after.

I reached out to Tammy as I was struggling to find clarity in my vision of the future. Tammy's process was brilliant, we worked a lot on my values, and from this work my vision and mission has naturally fallen into place. It was an enlightening process. Tammy is quick thinking, insightful and challenging and suits the way I think. I'm looking forward to our future of working together and I fully recommend her to any of you who feel a little lost on their journey.

The value add for me, so far, is that Tammy doesn’t just talk about the tools but actually shows you how to use those tools to help you make refinements.For example, I was struggling with continuously carrying over uncompleted actions from one week to the next. This left me feeling frustrated and pessimistic about my ability to get things done. Within the first coaching session Tammy coached me how to set smaller and realistic goals. Within 2 days I’ve achieved progress.Whereas I struggled for a whole month, previously, to even make a start.

Tammy has guided me through understanding my values, priorities and mission in life and has really helped me to re-evaluate what I am aiming for and the direction I would like to take my business in. This has, in turn, helped to shape the services I offer and the shape of my ideal customer. Tammy is incredibly patient and skillfully guides you through her carefully planned workbooks to allow you to reach your own decisions and really understand the direction you want your life to travel in - both professionally and personally.

I'm so glad I participated in the Unleash The Best of You course, I cannot believe how much I have transformed in only 12 weeks. The confidence, clarity and focus I have as a result, are testament to the skill, thought and structure of the sessions Tammy has designed. I'm excited about my future and have made real connections with the other participants, the sense of support and non judgemental peers, helped us all to grow and open up, to achieve the best results. Wherever you are on your journey, I would highly recommend you join and commit to this course, you will see your potential unleashed. Thanks Tammy

It's Your Turn

Posted on August 9, 2021January 31, 2023 by Tammy Whalen Blake

Vanquish Procrastination

Redefining Success | Resorting Life Balance

Vanquish procrastination

#5 Vanquish Procrastination

So, you’ve got a writing task or two that’s needing to be done, and well, em… you’ve got more than enough time to get them completed.

But, for some reason, this time seems to slip away, completely undetected and under the radar, until boom, you’re ferociously working at the speed of light with a few hours left.

And what’s more, it doesn’t happen now and again completely out of the blue. It’s a regular occurrence, popping its carefree head up too often.

Let me introduce you to the little old jiminy cricket that is procrastination…

What is procrastination?

Think of Procasti-Nation (procrastination) as the world we live in, and as you journey through, there are many regular stop-offs.

You might visit places like:

Snooze-Land
Rush-Zone
Perfection-Avenue
Consumption-Alley
Fear-City
Snack-District

Sound familiar?

Maybe not right now, but as you dive deeper, you will realise you’ve probably been on a 1st class ticket to more than one of these destinations many times.

Procrastination is when we choose to delay something important to a later date down the line favouring something else that’s easy and fun, providing instant gratification.

It’s the opposite of motivation, or willingness to work.

Procrastination is the reason why many people find themselves scrabbling around at the last minute to meet deadlines after continuously making bad decisions whenever they had enough time to start with.

It lives entirely in the present moment, has no memory of the past and has no knowledge of the future.

Many people think that procrastination is a form of laziness, and while this can be true, often it’s not.

It’s not uncommon to find someone with high procrastination tendencies putting off writing their assignment instead of tidying their room.

Now you wouldn’t say cleaning your room is lazy, would you?

This is procrastination at its finest. Doing something completely unrelated to the task at hand, so you don’t have to do what actually needs doing.

Why do we procrastinate?

We procrastinate because it gives our minds some free time, a break from the tedious monotony of that dreaded task that needs doing.

It acts as relief and makes us happy in the short term.

It answers the fears and doubts we might have about not being able to complete our work.

Procrastination is the ultimate scapegoat.

We do it because it’s usually always easy and convenient.

Procrastination offers the opposite to the struggles of focus and hard work, and happens for many reasons:

Lack of defined goals
Feeling overwhelmed
Lack of foresight into the future
Accountability
Habits
Mindset blocks
Lack of planning

Overall, we procrastinate because our motivation gets hindered by factors such as exhaustion and rewards that seem too far away at present. Fear of failure and anxiety take over and cause our minds to search for the quick fix solution.

Now you’re probably asking what causes all of this procrastination?

What causes procrastination?

What are the 4 types of procrastination?

#1. The anxious

Taking on work or specific tasks usually comes with a degree of anxiety or stress. But, it’s how you deal with this anxiety that determines the outcome for you.

It’s one thing to meet this work head-on, but it’s also a lot easier to take the nearest cab to ‘Fear-City.’

“Let’s go there and keep worrying; that way, we’ll never have to take action and get the work done”, might be what you are telling yourself amidst all these fears.

Many people get so wrapped up in doubts about their abilities and how to manage their workload that it often leads to no free time, and you betcha — procrastination!

#2. The fun

This type of procrastinator wants to do anything but the task at hand. They would rather be doing all the fun stuff and not the boring work.

I mean, sometimes it’s hard to argue with the option of going to the beach, or writing that 3000 word essay…

#3. The “plenty of time”

If you’re set a project deadline for a long way off, it can be difficult to kick yourself into gear and make a start.

This is where it’s all too easy to find yourself pulling up the handbrake and spending too much time in ‘Snack-District.’

Taking a little time out here and there will surely not have any dwindling effect on the overall project, right?

Wrong!

This makes it very easy for procrastination to sink in, and you know what comes next.

Yea, the handbrake is getting nearly yanked off as you zoom for ‘Rush-Zone’ and that dreaded deadline in a few days.

#4. The perfectionist

Have you ever given something so much thought because you wanted it to be perfect that you overthink the entire situation and never end up doing what it is you set out to do in the first place?

This is slamming your foot hard on the gas and steering straight for ‘Perfection-Alley’ — in a nutshell.

Some people strive for perfection every time, which really isn’t possible.

Not only will it drive you completely bonkers in the process, but it will lead you into the deepest, darkest caverns of procrastination imaginable.

Effects of procrastination

Procrastination can have many different negative effects on us.

In fact, one study conducted by APA (american physiological association) indicates that 94% of people said procrastination harmed their happiness, and 18% said it had an extremely negative impact.

In the beginning, it might seem like closing that assignment down to go on YouTube is harmless. But over a prolonged period, this seemingly harmless act can spiral out of control quite quickly.

And before you know it, you’re down the rabbit hole every time you need to be doing something productive.

The feelings we get from procrastination can be as such:

Guilt
Anger
Dread
Anxiety
Hatred

All these emotions are usually experienced by a person when it’s too late. They’ve put the thing off for too long, and now they see no way out.

Can you see how procrastination can be severely damaging to your mental state and wellbeing?

Is procrastination a mental illness?

It’s understandable why many people might think of procrastination as being a mental illness. But it’s not.

Procrastination is a bad habit usually formed over years of leaving tasks to the last minute before completion.

Yet, it’s important to understand that, while they’re not caused by procrastination, anxiety and depression can get worse through this habit.

Procrastination is a symptom, not a disorder. And you should look at what’s causing it in the first place?

Suppose depression is causing a severe lack of motivation and energy, and in turn, you are procrastinating a lot because of this. In that case, you need to tackle it before anything else!

ADHD and procrastination are also closely linked, but this is more to do with the fact that people with ADHD have a problem concentrating to begin with.

Naturally, with concentration issues, this leads to procrastination.

How to overcome procrastination

We can take a few different measures to focus your mind, overcome procrastination, and get motivation back where it needs to be.

Create Timelines

Creating timelines is a great way to overcome procrastination.

Having something to use that will keep you accountable is great for motivation and a get-it-done attitude.

Timelines prevent us from racing into ‘Snooze-Land.’

I mean, when some things must be completed by a specific date, and it’s written down in front of us in black and white, there’s not much time for being lazy and sleeping.

When structuring these, avoid going too big and risk stretching out your time, giving procrastination a big heads up.

But also, be sure not to go too small either, so you don’t risk setting an unrealistic time to get the work done and cause more stress.

Set Smaller Goals

When you set goals that you are more than capable of, you set yourself up to succeed.

You see, goals that you know are achievable get done.

If you set unrealistic goals, what are the chances of you going through with them?

It’s better to meet your goals even if they aren’t as great as you would have liked for the time being than not to meet any of them at all.

Reward Yourself

It would help if you got into the habit of rewarding yourself for small wins along the way.

Too many of us undeservedly reward ourselves nowadays and not only does this mess with our procrastination habits, but it also creates a false sense of accomplishment.

Create an excellent environment

Distractions play a big role in the procrastinator’s life, especially digital devices. With everything being one click of a button now, it’s no wonder procrastination is so easy these days.

Simply turning off notifications on your phone or putting it on airplane mode will help tremendously when battling procrastination.

Keeping everything clean and tidy at your workstation is another excellent way to have an ideal environment and help you out.

Your focus and mental clarity will be a lot better when not having to worry about whats were.

Have brain breaks

Have you ever sat down for a good 5 hours of working? Seems almost impossible at times. But what if you broke those 5 hours down into 45 min sessions with a 15 min break between.

This seems far less daunting than the initial 5 hours, and it will also help you keep contraction better.

Create a vision statement to help you stay on track

Now that we have identified what procrastination is and how it can detract from your daily productivity, this is an excellent opportunity for you to put a framework in place for going forward.

Your vision statements should include health, career, wealth, family, friends, personal growth, physical environment, health and romance aspirations ten years from now.

Notice when procrastination shows up and how it can impact your ten-year vision.

If you feel like you’re going around in circles, you’re not sure where to start, or maybe you’ve created your vision statement but would just like a second opinion from an expert. A coaching session is a great way to find clarity and talk over your goals.

"You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”

Zig Ziglar

Need further help with setting your goals and being accountable? Get in touch. We have coaching services starting from £39 per month that will help you set compelling goals and achieve them with coaching techniques and a supportive community cheering you on.

Book a 30-minute call with me, Tammy Whalen Blake, to enrol you on the best program for your personal development.