March 19, 2024

Blogging – Ask What's Right

Blogging - Ask What's RightWhat’s Right with this Picture?

Ask What’s Right!

Many people go around looking for what’s wrong. An approach you can take to be a successful blogger is to ask what’s right. Take a hard look around your business or at your products and services and task yourself with defining as many nice features or aspects as you can. Then write some interesting blog posts about them.

In a business, you always want to build upon your successful attributes. This is a great starting point. Most successful enterprises do this. Furthermore, if you can define your strengths in terms of benefits to your clients and potential clients then your blog posts provide real value to your readers.

I was once sent to manage a business in Ireland and the simple fact that the parent company sent me there sent an ominous sign to the employees of the Irish facility. I was often sent to operations to “help out”. “Help” could be defined in many ways and some may not have viewed my being sent to a specific location as being helpful.

When I first arrived in Ireland I felt I had a good handle on the situation but I had made many of my observation from outside the operation. If I came in as a know-it-all then I would have lost the support of at least a portion of the work force and I needed everyone to contribute to help turn things around.

I decided to conduct some research where I asked key managers to define what it was that we were doing well or even things that we were very good at doing. Looking back I think it was an important part of turning that business around. This exercise got people to realize that they had strengths and that these strengths could be built upon. It helped people to believe in themselves. It helped to build confidence. It also helped me to inform corporate headquarters what we were doing right and I was able to explain that we had a great foundation to build on.

It worked on the individual level as well. A very competent manager who reported to me was extremely good a finding things wrong. In fact, she was excellent at this! She was a very good troubleshooter. She was also quite good at being critical and in fact this was her typical management style. She was so good at this that it defined her and she had trouble thinking about how to manage in any other way. One day early in the process I asked her to (for this one day only) walk around an only discover what people were doing right. I wanted her to make a point of telling people what they were doing right when she “caught” them doing something right. This was an eye-opening exercise for this very valuable manager. It made her more effective and more valuable.

In conclusion, do not make observations as if everything is fine and dandy when things are not. However, spend some serious time observing what your business does well and build on this. When you blog let your readers know about the strengths of your business in ways that benefit them. You and your clients will be better off because of this. Don’t only ask what’s wrong also define what’s right and build off this.

One of the areas where you want to be doing things right is in the area of content marketing. If you want to learn more about content marketing then I invite you to take our full series of Content Marketing Tutorials.