Why Creating a Business is an Exercise in Personal Growth

Why Creating a Business is an Exercise in Personal Growth

The lifestyle that comes from running an online business is great and you get to work from home each day, set your own hours, and enjoy abundant income. When we think about income generation, we immediately think of the web.

Building an online business is an exercise in personal development. Running online business tests you in many ways — your self-discipline, your intelligence, your communication skills, your focus, etc. If you’re lacking in any of these areas, your business results will reflect it.

The real world of business can be unforgiving. Success is rewarded and mistakes are punished. The benefit is that it keeps you honest. You can’t settle for weakness, laziness, and bad ideas, or your business will fail. There’s a huge chasm between an idea that sounds good and an idea that actually gets implemented and succeeds under real-world conditions. Anyone can come up with good ideas, but most people can’t successfully implement them.

Organization, communication and practice

Within an organization, there are work groups and teams. Teams develop their own hierarchy and their own ways of processing information to achieve their goals. A team has a structure that allows it to work efficiently and to help each team member to understand his role within the group. Understanding the organization of effective teams can help you to build productive teams of your own.

To build a successful online project and a team, you will need following things:

leadership

Leader

A team leader can be an active participant in team decision-making, or s/he can be an administrator who abides by the rules and guidelines set forth by a consensus among team members. The role of the leader depends on the responsibilities s/he has within the team, but an effective team has someone in charge to help maintain order and move the team forward into reaching certain goals.

Specialties

Each member of a team has a specialty that he can use to contribute to achieving team goals. The organizational structure of the team is based on the effective use of team resources to meet company demands. The segmentation of the group into areas of expertise is what allows the team to process information and develop effective solutions to issues.

Quality Control

Every team has a person, or group of people, which are responsible for making sure that the work generated by the team is up to its standards. Work is not released to public from the team for company consumption until it has passed the criteria of the quality-control structure put in place by the team.

Conflict Resolution

To remain effective, a good team has a process in place for internal conflict resolution. It may be the team leader who decides the outcome of a conflict, with the team members agreeing to abide by his decision. Alternatively, conflict may be resolved in a team meeting. Regardless, in order to prevent internal conflict from affecting productivity, the organizational structure of a team must include a detailed, comprehensive process for conflict resolution.

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Dr. Liz Musil

I'm a shadow ally to creatives, entrepreneurs, coaches, and teachers. I create actionable content to help anyone interested in growing a sustainable, profitable virtual enterprise. My videos, articles, eBooks and courses are about business, design, entrepreneurship, and technology. What is super-satisfying to me is achieving (and helping others achieve) self-reliance and financial independence.

An online entrepreneur since 2002, I work as a coach, consultant, designer, web developer, author, and professor. I teach entrepreneurship, leadership, and design at the university level and have completed research studies on virtual leadership.

I work out of my seaside villa located on a peninsula outside of Los Angeles, with my rescue dog, Zoe.