You start a business, and your business becomes successful, and your business grows.

At some point you must take the next step and you must hire employees and then suddenly you go from being a business owner to being, almost overnight, a leader and manager. This creates some challenges.

Here are seven daily practices that managers need to stop doing now. Ask yourself: Are you doing any of these? Because it can affect your team, your effectiveness, and the revenue of your company.

1. Not Being Careful Enough in Hiring

There’s no question in my mind that the quality of your organization is in direct correlation to the quality of the people that you hire. As a consultant and a professional speaker, I see many people who do not have a comprehensive and selective interviewing process.

People get in a hurry to fill a position. Be very careful to have an interview process which includes multiple interviews with multiple people and be very careful about the criteria you use to decide who to hire.

2. Only Telling People When They Do Something Wrong

When I was a Vice President in corporate America, every time I would meet with someone, they would ask me what was wrong. I would then explain to them that nothing was wrong, that I just wanted to talk.

I realized that their only context with management was having conversations when they were in trouble, never when they were doing something right. It is critically important to give people feedback on what they’re doing well, (maybe more important) just as much as what they’re doing that needs to be improved.

3. Not Providing Proper Training and Orientation for Employees

Every one of us at some point has gone to work for a company and when we started, we were basically told to follow someone else around for a week and they would “show us the ropes”. Far too often we throw people from the frying pan into the fire and expect them to succeed.

Look. I know you are super busy, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Invest the time with every new employee–give them an eight-week orientation calendar that outlines what they’re going to be doing in the first two months.

4. Not Finding Out About People’s Goals and Objectives

I believe every employee in the company should sit down and have a discussion with their manager once a year to find out what their goals are short-term, midterm, and long-term.

Everyone in the organization should have an individual development plan designed by them and their manager to help them get what they want to go in terms of their career.

It is a great way to build morale.

5. Not Treating People with Respect

Everyone in the organization from the lowest level employee and up deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. The old ways of the yelling screaming boss are over, and we need to treat people as valued team members and not just as front-line employees.

Let’s forget the word “boss” and “subordinate”. No one is subordinate to anyone else. When you give respect to get it back tenfold and you build a team of people that are loyal to you.

6. Not Defining Your Company Culture

I believe that company cultures either happen by accident or are created by the leader of the organization. So, the question is: Do you have a mission and vision statement? Do you have a list of values? Does everyone know them? Do you talk about them with the team?

Do you know what you stand for as a company? Does your team?

7. Lack of Communication

Unfortunately, many employees often say that they find out what is happening in the company on the Internet before they hear about it themselves.

I believe that it is your job and your management team’s job to communicate with employees on a regular and consistent basis to let them know what is going on in the company, where you are headed and what the goals and objectives are. One way of doing this is to have regularly scheduled employee meetings to keep everybody informed.

I challenge you to review this list and decide where your strengths are and where you need to improve and then make a list and get started today. I guarantee you will massively improve morale and productivity if you do them all well.