“To put it bluntly, goals are for losers… goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.” – Scott Adams, Scott Adams’ Secret of Success: Failure

Matching up systems vs goals might seem odd but the truth is that you should be using one and not the other.

Let’s be honest – we’ve all set goals that we’ve never met.

From broken New Year’s resolutions to a failed career as the next big rockstar, goals have a nasty habit of not being met.

Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert thinks much the same in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

He identifies that everything wrong with goals can be solved by instead applying a regular system to complete your tasks.

I scoffed at first but then realized that I’d done precisely that to lose 70 lbs in six months and learn the piano.

That’s why today I’ll cover:

• What are goals?
• What are systems?
• Systems vs goals
  • Systems replace motivation with routine
  • Goals are hard to follow up on
  • Systems are consistently rewarding
  • Goals carry a more negative mindset
  • Systems are more realistic and flexible
• Turning goals into systems
• How to build systems

Let’s get started!

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Sometimes the full range of process management features can be overwhelming.

We here at Process Street know that we can’t please everyone. However, if you’re going to use a Process Street alternative, we’d rather tell you about them from our own accounts than throw a bunch of marketing at you.

That’s why we’re covering some common Process Street alternatives in today’s post.

To skip to a particular section, use the links below:

• Process Street (for context)
• Process Street alternatives
  • Office 365 (Microsoft Word)
  • Google Suite (Google Docs)
  • Airtable
  • Trello
  • Asana
  • LucidChart
• What’s your choice?

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“I realized I had a challenge… [people] didn’t think they needed to be trained as a leader.

I realized I had a real uphill battle because people thought leadership was a noun.”

– John C. Maxwell, John C. Maxwell Defines Leadership

Not all leaders can lead effectively.

You might be a manager in name but that won’t inherently make your team like you, respect you, or do what you tell them to.

That’s why today I’ll show you the 10 main schools of thought for the behavioral theory of leadership.

By the end of this post, you’ll be able to identify what kind of leader you are, what kind of leader you want to be, and how to bridge that gap through your behavior.

If you’d rather skip to a particular section, go ahead and use the links below:

• What is the behavioral theory of leadership?
• The 10 types of behavioral leader
• The skills and behaviors of effective leaders
• How to build your leadership style into your processes

There’s also a free process template based on Ray Dalio’s methods up for grabs, so let’s get started.
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The following is a guest post by Priscilla Tan, a freelance content marketer for SaaS and Tech companies that care about making small businesses successful. Certified by SmartBlogger, her works have been spotlighted on places like Forbes, Inc Magazine, and CNBC Make It.

Did this happen to you?

You spent brutal months building your product solely based on your gut.

In a bid to keep your head in the game, you assured yourself, repeatedly, that success is just around the corner.

And yet, when you released your product to the public… it tanked. Sure, you had a few sign-ups, but no one stuck around.

As you slumped your shoulders in defeat, you questioned yourself, what went wrong?

You tweeted for help, hoping to find comfort. And you did. In fact, your tweet even went a little viral.

Founders, developers, and marketers in the SaaS space flocked in to share similar experiences. You read every single one of them, nodding your head along to their demoralizing tales.

Then… horror struck.

It hit you: you built your product based on false assumptions. And so did they.

Just as you were about to close Twitter, you stumbled on this tweet and it straight up punched you in the gut:

And there it is, the guilty culprit of unsuccessful products: the lack of customer research.

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Can you afford to lose $185 million?

That’s what Wells Fargo had to pay in fines after failing to apply a working risk management process.

Their lack of attention to the risk and pressure that they exposed their employees to led to sales practices that were bad enough to cause 5,300 employees to be fired and the penalty fines mentioned above.

Risk is inherent in everything we do – from conventional ideas of the risks in gambling to the chance of collisions while traveling. In business, risks can come from any direction and can severely impact your output.

Whether you wake up late and get less work done because of it or someone doesn’t get their work done on time and holds up the rest of the team, you need to be able to predict, prepare for, respond to, and monitor the things that can go wrong.

That’s why our post today will examine everything you need to know to build a risk management process to make your work watertight. We’ll even throw in a free, fully-built risk management process for you to use!

If you want to skip to a particular section then feel free to use the links below:

• Why you need a risk management process
• The risk management process
  • Set and align your objectives
  • Identify and document risks
  • Assess documented risks
  • Respond to risks
  • Monitor risks
• How to deploy a risk management process
• Your free risk management process template

Let’s get stuck in.

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Employee engagement is the key to having a productive team while also making them happy and motivated.

It’s also often thought to be a load of old rubbish that doesn’t exist.

I’m not about to defend how frequently some bandy about the term, to the point that it loses all meaning. It’s less of a hard factor that can be measured and more a collection of aspects that enhances your team.

However, considering that disengaged employees cost US companies $450-550 billion every year, it’s not something that can be ignored.

That’s why this post will show you what employee engagement is, why it matters, highlight 8 core strategies for how to improve employee engagement, and why communication is so vital.

If you want to skip ahead, you can do so using the links below:

• What is employee engagement?
• Why employee engagement matters
• Employee engagement strategies
  • Set clear values and goals
  • Show why their work matters
  • Communicate clearly and frequently
  • Create a solid, friendly company culture
  • Help employees with their problems
  • Give room for personal growth
  • Give recognition where it’s deserved
  • Set hard limits on work hours
• Communication is king

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Your average pitch gets examined by investors for about 3 minutes 44 seconds and (if successful) is worth around $1.3 million.

That’s more than $5800 per second.

With figures like that, you need to know how to pitch to land investors, customers, employees, prizes or whatever it is you’re aiming for.

That’s where we here at Process Street come in.

We pitched to over 2500 top SaaS professionals and investors at SaaStr Europa 2019, walking away with the grand prize from the pitch competition, the contact details of several venture capitalists, and collaboration opportunities for months to come.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. In this post I’ll show you;

• How to pitch: the basics
• What the SaaStr pitch competition was
• The pitch deck we used to win it
• The results and prizes in detail
• The lessons you can learn from our experience
• The secret technique we used to get even more out of our pitch

Let’s get stuck in.

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Ah, the days before I started using project management software.

I don’t miss them.

70+ hour weeks of pure stress and disorganized skitting from task to task, unable to focus on the things that mattered when they needed to get done. It was a lesson hard-learned but one of the most valuable I’ve ever had the misfortune of going through.

So I’ll save you the trouble and show you the best free options on offer.

You don’t need a massive budget or a lot of experience to get the most out of these apps – hence why they’re the best free project management software. Most have paid plans but all are functional with the free version and all will help you and your team organize your projects and get things done on time and to a high standard.

I’ll be covering:

1. Process Street
2. Agantty
3. Airtable
4. Asana
5. Avaza
6. Backlog
7. Bitrix24
8. FreedCamp
9. HiTask
10. KanbanFlow
11. MeisterTask
12. Paymo
13. Pivotal Tracker
14. Podio
15. TeamGantt
16. TeamWeek
17. Teamwork Projects
18. Todoist
19. Trello
20. Wrike
21. Zenkit

Enough talk – let’s get stuck in.
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Yahoo! lost $350 million to their sale price after the reveal that a security breach had caused 3 billion accounts to be compromised. They learned the hard way that if you have sensitive data you’ll also need measures to protect it.

You need an easy way to secure your processes without providing extra hoops for your team to jump through and get confused over.

That’s why we here at Process Street let you set task permissions in your checklists.

This feature lets you hide tasks from viewers with variable permission levels within your checklists. You’re left with a checklist that shows different tasks to different people based on what you think they should see.

The best thing? It solves your security and clarity issues while providing a singular location for your data to be stored, making it easy to review.

Enough dilly-dallying, let’s get to it!
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“What is employee engagement?“

I’d been explaining the ins-and-outs of my job to my family for a while but here I had to stop to give more detail. That’s when it hit me.

To most people, employee engagement is jargon.

They see it as an airy concept that doesn’t have a solid definition – it’s something that marketers point at to sell products and nothing more.

The reality couldn’t be further from that.

Employee engagement is a vital statistic which can show the overall health of a business at every level. If you can affect it, it can result in massive benefits such as a 67% lower employee turnover rate and 21% higher productivity.

It’s time to learn what employee engagement is, how to measure it, and what you can do about it.

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