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There is no talent shortage if you’re a great place to work.”

In his book, “What Were They Thinking?  Unconventional Wisdom About Management,” author Jeffrey Pfeffer devotes a chapter to “making companies more like communities.”  His premise is that a company’s human capital is the key to its success, and the key to attracting and retaining the best people is to develop a caring, community-like culture.  In a close-knit community, people form relationships . . . they help one another, support one another, and protect one another.  They celebrate and grieve together, and in general, treat one another like extended family.  But American companies, Pfeffer contends, are wary of letting their employees personal lives intrude too much into their professional lives.  So while CEOs pay lip service to the importance of employee loyalty, they see the relationship between the company and its employees as mostly transactional . . . if you do this, I’ll pay you that.  They fear it would cost too much to go beyond that and start building real, human relationships.

If you believe it’s a good idea to keep the personal lives of your people at arm’s length, you should probably stop reading here.  If not, please read below.

“There is no talent shortage if you’re a great place to work.” – Tom Peters

It’s true.  Or as business consultant Malcolm Moore has said, “People don’t leave jobs they love.”  So what are companies doing to develop more caring, community-like cultures?  Consider a few examples:

• A company holds a fund drive to collect money from employees, matched by the corporation, to help employees who are financially stressed due to an illness.  People who have been helped in this way say it’s not just the financial support, but the emotional support as well that helps them get through a tough time.
• At another company, employees get birthday cards from the company.  They also get a note, a call, or both from a senior manager if they experience a significant life event, happy or sad.
• What about a company that on a new employee’s first day of work, sends flowers to the employee’s spouse (male or female) with a note welcoming them to the “family.”  The same company invites family members to attend every major business meeting and function.
• “Road warriors” get special treatment at another company.  In recognition of the sacrifices a family makes when an employee must travel extensively, the company provides gifts and “Road Warrior Points.”
• Yet another company allows its employees time off to attend their children’s school events . . . athletic competitions, school plays, etc.

So maybe the conventional CEO wisdom cited above . . . that building a community-like culture is too expensive . . . is correct.  After all, this stuff does cost something in real dollars, time, and effort.  Besides, we’re trying to run a business here, not a Day Care Center for adults, for cryin’ out loud!

OK, then forget any altruistic motives here.  Let’s just look at this as cold-hearted, hard-nosed business people.  Where’s the ROI in this community stuff?

1. A community-like culture will create more loyalty and goodwill than a paycheck alone will ever create.
2. Loyalty and goodwill begets lower employee turnover.
3. Lower turnover means you’re spending less on recruiting and training costs.
4. Lower turnover also means more efficient operations because work is being done by experienced people rather than new trainees.
5. Loyalty and goodwill will also help you deliver better customer service.  If you don’t believe that, just ask Southwest Airlines.

Fundamentally, we’re all social creatures.  We enjoy the camaraderie and interaction that comes when we’re in a group, particularly when we feel we’re a welcome, valued member of the group.  In fact, we could argue that we are the sum total of all the “communities” we’ve ever belonged to.  Consider what might be the ultimate community, the Marine Corps.  As they say, there is no such thing as an ex-Marine.  People who served in the Corps tend to be fiercely loyal to it long after they take off the uniform.  Likewise, people feel strong bonds to the schools they attended, to their places of worship, and to charitable or civic organizations they have served.

So, will your company simply be a way station your employees pass through as they move between communities?  Or will yours be a close-knit community that makes people want to plant their flag and stay awhile?

 
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Let’s get confrontational!

To many of us, confrontation is something to be avoided.  The word conjures up something unpleasant or uncomfortable.  We imagine two people standing toe-to-toe, their faces red, the veins in their necks bulging, and screaming at one another at the tops of their lungs.  Well, if that’s the way you think of confrontation, it’s easy to understand why you’d want to avoid it.  But confrontation doesn’t have to be that way . . . in fact, it shouldn’t be that way.  Besides, when you avoid confronting an issue of some sort, it’s unlikely to just go away.  It’s more likely that it will fester and get more and more difficult to solve as time goes on.  So if it’s in your nature to avoid confrontation, please read below for some thoughts on how you might approach confrontation in a more positive, constructive way . . . a way that doesn’t involve yelling and screaming.

Let’s get confrontational!

Confrontation gets a bad rap because it does bring up images of anger and unpleasantness.  But it shouldn’t.  According to the dictionary, to “confront” is “to come face-to-face with.”  That’s all.  It doesn’t say anything about anger or fists pounding desks or anything like that      . . .  it only says “to come face-to-face with.”  That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?  To be sure, some issues we may need to face are loaded with more emotional baggage than others, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore or avoid them.

The problem here is that if people see that the CEO avoids confronting the tough issues, they will too.  Or worse, if they see the CEO confronting issues in a way that confirms their worst fears about confrontation (red face, yelling, screaming, etc.), they will continue to avoid it.  So the answer must be for the CEO to set a positive example for how we handle confrontation around here.  Here’s what that positive example would look like:

  • The CEO does not sweep the tough issues under the rug nor does he or she allow others to do so.  If there’s an elephant in the room, let’s give it a name and talk about it.
  • The blame game is something the CEO keeps out of the room.  It doesn’t matter how we got here, and finger pointing does nothing to help us.  This is where we are and we need to focus on what we’re going to do about it.  Nothing else matters right now.
  • In a confrontational situation, the CEO needs to establish the “rules of engagement” . . . namely that we can disagree without being disagreeable.  That means we treat each other with respect and we don’t impugn our colleagues with dishonorable or unworthy motives.  We absolutely want robust, spirited debate about our tough issues, but when the debate ends, we need to be able to walk away as friends and colleagues.
  • Getting the issue or problem out in the open and talking about it is a good first step, but it’s a waste of time unless we do something about it.  Sometimes, because the issue is too scary, too complex, or too unclear, the discussion ends in an uncomfortable silence with no resolution.  Therefore, once the talking is done, the CEO must insure a path forward has been identified and responsibilities for action steps have been assigned.

When the CEO models these behaviors, they trickle down to the rest of the management team, and then to the rest of the company.  Ultimately, they become part of the company’s DNA, part of its culture.  And that sends a powerful message, not only to everyone inside the company, but also to its customers, vendors, and suppliers.  The message is, “We don’t ignore problems around here.  When we find ‘em, we face ‘em, and we fix ‘em.  We’re confrontational!”

 
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“Extraordinary companies and teams . . . “

In his book, “True Alignment,” author Edgar Papke makes the point that in genuinely great organizations, everyone . . . every executive, every manager, every employee . . . pulls together toward the same goal, the same outcome.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?  After all, without this sort of “alignment,” members of an organization can work at cross purposes to one another causing dysfunction, confusion, and inefficiencies.  Yet in too many cases, if you ask a random sampling of an organization’s members, “What’s our goal this year?,” you’ll get inconsistent answers, or maybe even radically different answers.  So how can we possibly pull together as a team if we all have different ideas about where we’re trying to go?  For more on this and some thoughts for how you get your organization “aligned,” please read below.

“Extraordinary companies and teams are those in which the what, why, and how are aligned.”     – Edgar Papke

According to Papke, high-performing organizations are aligned along three distinct but intertwined  tracks.  They have great clarity about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it.  Take a look at each of these tracks separately.

What.  You’d think at a minimum, everyone would know what we do around here, wouldn’t you?  But that’s not necessarily true.  Oh, everyone can probably tell you what product or service we provide in a very basic, superficial way, but can they tell us what outcomes our product or service provides?  It’s the old story about drills.  Nobody really wants a drill, they just want what a drill can do for them . . . make perfectly round holes.  Nobody wants a sump pump, they just want a dry basement.  Nobody wants life insurance, they just want the peace of mind it gives them.  In fact, nobody cares about the product or service any of us provide.  They only care about what our product or service can do for them.  So if you want your organization aligned on the “what” track, get everyone focused on the outcome(s) you provide.  Are we just making funny little rods of twisted steel here, or are we helping people make perfectly round holes?

Why.  Why do we do what we do?  The answer to that question needs to stir some emotion, to give the organization a shared sense of purpose and mission.  Let’s imagine we’re assembling child car seats.  Why are we doing that?  To make money, of course, but that doesn’t really trip our emotional triggers.  What if we’re doing it to make cars safe for our kids?  Now that’s something that touches us and gives us that shared sense of mission and purpose.  Clearly, it’s easier for some businesses than others to answer the “why” question in a way that elicits an emotional response, but it can be done.  Remember, people need a paycheck, but they also want to be involved in something that’s important and has substance . . . something they can be proud to be a part of.

How.  Obviously, it’s important to know the operational details of how we deliver our products or services.  But that’s not the “how” we’re talking about here.  This is more about culture and values . . . the rules we impose upon ourselves that tell us how we will relate to our customers, and how we will relate to one another.  How do we communicate effectively with one another?  How do we decide what behaviors we tolerate and what behaviors we do not?  How will we honor our responsibilities to each other?

We’re all in business to serve the needs of our customer.  In many cases, we’re in business, not only to serve the needs of our customer, but the needs of our customer’s customer as well.  Therefore, to be in alignment:

– what we do;

– why we do what we do; and

– how we do what we do

must all align with those customer needs.  However, such alignment can’t happen unless everyone in the organization has a uniform understanding of the what, why, and how.  So good communication and leadership are key here.  We need to communicate our what, why, and how clearly, concisely, and frequently, and then as leaders, we need to be living, breathing examples of alignment.

 
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What’s the difference between a leader and a boss?

Leadership is an endlessly fascinating topic because it’s one of those things that we recognize when we see it in action, but it’s frustratingly difficult to define or quantify in terms we can all agree upon.  What does a great leader do that a not-so-great leader doesn’t do?  What does a not-so-great leader do that a great leader avoids doing?  All we know for sure is that in organizations of all kinds . . . businesses, charitable organizations, civic organizations, units of government . . . if two or more people are involved, leadership will be required to carry out whatever their mission is.  So when I heard a presentation lately devoted to leadership, I found the speaker’s central theme very interesting:
Not everyone in a position of authority is a leader (although arguably they should be), nor does a leader need to be in a position of authority to demonstrate good leadership.  Leaders can’t be appointed nor can leadership be bestowed . . . it is a life choice people make for themselves to either accept that responsibility or avoid it.

For some thoughts on what separates true leaders from people who are merely in “leadership positions,” please read below.

“People ask the difference between a leader and a boss.  The leader leads and the boss drives.”   – Theodore Roosevelt

I think we all know that good leaders can be found throughout an organization, from the very top to the very bottom and everywhere in between.  Unfortunately, non-leaders who somehow got themselves into positions of authority can often be found there as well.  So how do we sort the wheat from the chaff, the genuine leaders from the pretenders? While you might argue that leadership is somewhat situational . . . that a leader on a battlefield is not necessarily the leader you’d want in the Boardroom . . . at the 50,000 foot level, I think we can discern certain characteristics that all leaders hold in common.

Leaders are consistent.
• It’s hard to follow someone who is zig zagging all over the place.  Followers will get lost when a leader         is constantly changing direction or changing priorities.
• Leaders are also consistent in the way they maintain their composure . . . tough to have confidence in someone who “loses it” whenever there’s a  bump in the road.
• And leaders are consistent in the way they apply rules and policies . . . they don’t play favorites or         enforce rules selectively.

Leaders are dependable, trustworthy.
• They do what they say they’ll do and do it within the timeframe they commit to.
• When they are unable to deliver on a commitment, they will notify everyone affected as early as possible.

Leaders are responsible.
• They don’t try to shift blame when something under their control goes wrong.
• They don’t try to make excuses.

Leaders are unselfish.
• They always make their own interests subordinate to the “greater good” of their organization
• They never try to take or share credit for someone else’s work.
• They accept the responsibility of being guide and mentor to those in their care.
• They will be the first line of defense when their people need to be defended.  He or she will always have         their back.  He or she will always offer help when asked.

Leaders are good communicators.
• They operate by the “Doctrine of No Surprises,” up the chain of command and down.
• They listen.  They show dignity and respect to their people by taking seriously their thoughts, ideas, and         concerns.

Where leadership is concerned, these are the BIG FIVE for me.  I’m sure we could list some other attributes we’d like to see in a leader, but these transcend the battlefield and the boardroom.  And I think we can agree that anyone exhibiting these traits is a leader. The CEO could have these attributes, but so could the janitor who has authority over nothing more than the cleaning supplies . . . vastly different stations within their organization, but still both leaders.

Nothing new here, right?  That is, these have been the fundamental tenets of leadership throughout modern times.  But maybe we need to be reminded of them from time to time, and maybe we need to make sure that we haven’t allowed a “boss” to creep into one of our leadership positions.

We’ve talked here only recently about the powerful influence managers and supervisors have over the job satisfaction of the people in their care.  If you feel that the morale, energy, and commitment of your people is very high, you can thank the leadership skills of your managers and supervisors for that.  If you feel that the morale, energy, and commitment of your people is not what you want it to be, you can thank your managers and supervisors for that too.

 
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Why can’t we ever get anything done around here?

Our last posting talked about BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) and we asked, “What’s Your New Year’s BHAG?”  But achieving a BHAG is just like keeping a New Year’s resolution: it’s all in the execution.  It’s all in the doing.  It’s one thing to dream up a BHAG, it’s quite another to put the wheels in motion and do it.  The problem is this: a small business owner will direct that something be done . . . whether it’s a BHAG, annual plan, or some other task-oriented goal   . . . but then gets distracted by ongoing customer demands and by the daily brush fires that need to be put out.  As a result, the goal, whatever it is, gets put on the shelf and forgotten.   If execution is a problem for you and your organization, please read below for some thoughts on how to turn that around.

Why can’t we ever get anything done around here?

We commonly hear business owners complain, “I ask my people to do something, and when I turn around three months later, it’s still not done.  Drives me crazy!”

So let’s be clear.  When your people aren’t doing what you ask them to do on a timely basis, it’s your fault, not theirs.  It’s your fault because you apparently have not made specific assignments, have not set reasonable deadlines, have not required appropriate status reports so that you know how the assigned tasks are progressing, and most importantly, have not given feedback on those status reports so that your people know you’re paying attention to them.  It would be nice if you could just throw down a lightning bolt and walk away with the certain knowledge your people would do your bidding, but it generally doesn’t work that way.

Here’s what really happens.

You direct your people to do something, to complete some task.  They wonder if you’re really serious about this because, after all, you tend to throw down these lightning bolts all the time and then promptly forget about them.  So they watch, and they see that you’re off in some entirely new direction with nary a glance in your rearview mirror.  Since they have their own daily fires to put out, they forget about your lightning bolt because apparently, so have you.

I wish I could tell you that there’s an easy solution to this that requires little or nothing from you, but I can’t.  If I could, I’d be sitting on a warm beach someplace drinking something with a little umbrella in it.  The truth is, your people will pay attention to the things they can see you paying attention to.  The things you ignore, they will ignore.  It’s that simple.

If you have a task or a project of some kind that is outside of your organization’s normal activity, here’s how to get it done:

1. Assign a “champion” who you can hold accountable for completing the task.  This has to be a single individual, not a team or a committee.  When more than one person is accountable, nobody’s accountable.  The champion can recruit others who are accountable to him or her, but only the champion is accountable to you.

2. Discuss the goal you want to achieve with the champion.  Make sure you agree on the outcome to be achieved, a budget (if an investment is required), and a deadline for completion, but avoid micro-managing the details of how that outcome will be achieved.  Let the champion figure that out.

3. Determine how you will get feedback from the champion on his or her progress.  If you have regular staff meetings, feedback on goals-in-progress could be a standard agenda item.  If not, you might have to schedule regular face-to-face or telephone meetings with the champion, or if you prefer, written reports.

4. Make sure your champion knows you’re paying attention to the feedback you’re getting, particularly if it’s written and not verbal.  If you sense the task is getting bogged down or heading in the wrong direction, discuss it with your champion and find out how he or she intends to get it back on track.

The keys are #3 and #4.  You’ve got to find a disciplined approach to getting progress reports on assigned tasks, and you’ve got to offer a reaction to those reports so your champion knows his or her project still has your attention.  What if the feedback mechanism stops working . . . that is, meetings or written reports get skipped . . . and the boss (that would be you) doesn’t say anything about it.  If feedback gets sporadic or even stops altogether and the boss doesn’t even notice, the champion concludes his or her task is no longer important, and so it goes on the shelf and is forgotten.

The bad news is, this 4-step process does take a little more time and effort than throwing down a lightning bolt and forgetting about it.  The good news is, if you follow the four steps rigorously and with discipline, your important projects will be completed successfully, and in a timely manner.  And as a bonus, your people will learn accountability and embrace it as a part of your culture.  I’d say that’s a pretty good ROI for your investment of time and effort.

 
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What’s your New Year’s BHAG?

At the start of the year, everybody ought to have a BHAG.  For the uninitiated, that’s a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal or bee-hag.  And why does everyone need a BHAG?  Well, if you’re one of those rare businesses that blew the doors off last year and all you want to do is let the good times continue to roll, maybe you don’t need a BHAG.  But if you’re like most of us and want something better than last year, you can’t just keep doing what you’re doing.  As the saying goes, “If you just keep doing what you’re doing, you’re gonna get what you got.”  So if you want a different outcome than the one you got last year, you need to do something different.  That’s where the BHAG comes in.  But here’s the problem: the survivors of the recent Great Recession have gotten a little more risk averse than they used to be, and their bankers (or more precisely, the bank regulators) have made investing in BHAGs significantly more difficult than it was pre-recession.  So how do you carry out a legitimate BHAG with minimal risk and investment?  That’s a tough assignment, but for a few thoughts on how to do it, please read below.

What’s your New Year’s BHAG?

So called “organic growth” is generally considered to be a relatively safe strategy.   That is, you fundamentally continue to do what you’ve always done, tweeking operational efficiencies here and there while picking up a few new customers along the way.  It’s the slow-but-sure, don’t rock the boat strategy.  It’s certainly not a strategy that would embrace a BHAG.  Of course, there is a risk that a more nimble, aggressive competitor will take market share from you, but still, compared to a “let’s put the pedal to the metal and go for broke” strategy, organic growth is fairly low risk.  It can also be fairly boring.

Let’s be clear.  We can’t eliminate risk from business.  Business is risk.  The real question is, can we mitigate that risk to an acceptable level while still introducing the fun and excitement of a legitimate BHAG?  I believe we can.  Here’s how.

In general, most businesses have under-performing or under-utilized resources . . . people (knowledge, experience, unique talents), equipment and technology, intellectual property (patents, copyrights, etc.), inventory, office space, cash . . . all of it.  I’m not suggesting you look for simple cost-cutting opportunities, although that could be part of it.  I’m talking about looking at every resource available to your business and figuring out creative ways to use those resources more efficiently and effectively.
Consider some examples:

• With the help of a “lean manufacturing” expert, a machine tool company eliminates over 30% of its Cost of Goods Sold.  To be sure, part of that is cost-cutting, but most of it is creatively thinking about different, more effective ways to utilize the people, equipment, and material on the manufacturing floor.  Does reducing your Cost of Goods Sold by 30% constitute a BHAG?  You bet, and without a lot of risk or a big investment.

• With the creative help of a professional space planner, a company is able to give their offices a more open, spacious feel, and yet reduce their space by 20%.  They sublet that saved space thereby changing a cost center into a revenue center.  Worthy of BHAG status?  Absolutely!

• A distributor of auto parts completed a long overdue upgrade to its inventory control system.  The system works so well that the distributor now offers inventory management services to its customers, again transforming a cost center into a revenue center.

• A CPA firm had max’d out the billable hours of its professional staff, but was balking at putting another expensive accountant onto its already large payroll.  Instead, it did a detailed analysis of the work being done by its professional staff, looking for work that could really be done by others at lower levels.  As a result, they were able to free up enough billable time to delay adding another staff accountant for at least a year.

For a company that manages its resources well, think about Southwest Airlines.  They know that next to their people, their #1 resource is their fleet of airplanes.  Those planes only make money when they’re in the air, not a dime when they’re sitting on the ground.  So everything Southwest does . . . from the way they get people and luggage on and off an airplane to the way they prep that plane for its next flight . . . is aimed at getting an arriving flight turned around and back in the air as a departing flight just as quickly as they can.  And they do it better than anyone in the industry.

Most small business owners don’t pay as much attention as they should to maximizing the value of their critical resources . . . it’s backroom, low profile, not-very-sexy stuff.  They would much rather focus on top line sales growth because, after all, that’s where the real action and excitement is.  But the smart operators know, all the BHAGs aren’t in sales . . . they’re in resource management too.  And the better they are at the unsexy business of resource management, the more of those very sexy top line sales dollars will make it all the way to the bottom line.

 
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“In your business decisions, risk only money . . . never people or relationships.”

Business is all about relationships, isn’t it?  We need strong relationships with:

  • Employees.  We set policies and give direction, but it’s our employees who do the work and get stuff done.  We will get their best, most energetic, most creative efforts only if we’ve nurtured the right relationships with them.
  • Vendors.  If we’ve taken the time to forge strong relationships with them, when we really need them to perform for us, they will.
  • Customers.  We don’t want customers to bolt at the first bump in the road or for a few cents difference in price.  With a good relationship, they won’t.

So it behooves us to learn everything we can about building strong, lasting relationships.  Below is an idea for building relationships that you will probably find surprising . . . maybe even unorthodox . . . but if you’d like to learn about it, please read on.

“In your business decisions, risk only money . . . never people or relationships.”

  • Jack DeBoer, Businessman

Al Ritter is a friend and colleague who speaks and consults on leadership issues, and who has also published several books on leadership.  In one of those books, “The 100/0 Principle,” my friend Al takes a very counter-intuitive position.  He says that the secret to forming strong, enduring relationships is to take 100% of the responsibility for the relationship.  That’s counter-intuitive because most of us think in terms of a 50/50 relationship wherein both parties share equally in the responsibility for nurturing the relationship . . . if you trust me, I’ll trust you back;  if you treat me with dignity and respect, I’ll respond in kind;  if you’re a good friend to me, I’ll be a good friend to you.  But Al says no, if the relationship is important and you really want it to work, the way to do it is to take 100% of the responsibility for the relationship on yourself, expecting nothing in return from the other party.  Let me repeat that.  You discipline yourself to expect nothing in return.  Pretty crazy, huh?  Well, maybe not so crazy when you hear the thinking behind it.

Here’s the problem with a 50/50 relationship as my friend Al explains it.  We enter the relationship with the expectation that the other person will hold up his or her end of the bargain.  When that doesn’t happen, we feel betrayed, frustrated, disappointed, and even angry . . . not the sort of feelings on which to build a good, long-term relationship.  On the other hand, when we take responsibility for 100% of the relationship, we can avoid those negative feelings . . . there are no unrealized expectations to trigger them because we didn’t have any expectations in the first place.  

One of the keys to this is dogged persistence.  You need to continue to nurture your 100% of the relationship even when the other person doesn’t deserve it.  Be the better person.  “Kill ‘em with kindness” as the old expression goes.  Or remind yourself of the Ed Harris line from the movie, “Apollo 13” when he said, “Failure is not an option.”  This is the way we forge relationships with our children, isn’t it?  We offer them our unconditional love.  They may disappoint us or anger us from time to time, but we love them anyway.  Al would suggest this is the 100/0 principle at work.  It’s the “no strings attached” principle.  The more “strings” (expectations) you attach to the relationship, the less likely that it will flourish.

In his book, Al makes a much more powerful case for his 100/0 principle than I’ve been able to do in a few words here.  It’s not a big book, and it’s a very easy read, but it’s packed with compelling arguments that support the 100/0 principle, thoughts for how you can implement it, and stories that demonstrate the power of it.  You should read it.  Even if you think your relationship-building skills are pretty sharp, you’ll find something in “The 100/0 Principle” to make you even better.  Guaranteed.

 
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How does your leadership style make people feel?

Bruna Martinuzzi is a consultant who specializes in teaching leadership and presentation skills.  She is also the author of two books, and while I have not read either book, I have read an article she published recently with the rather long-winded title, “If your leadership aura could use some polishing, try these 7 tips for creating executive presence with employees and customers alike.”  In that article, she suggests a very compelling way to gauge the effectiveness of your leadership style.  To learn more about the measurement she recommends, please read below.

How does your leadership style make people feel?

Research by the Gallup organization has shown that the number one factor determining whether or not someone is “engaged” (productive, energized, supportive, happy, etc.) at work is his or her immediate supervisor.  No surprise there, right?  If your relationship with your boss is positive, mutually supportive, and mutually respectful, chances are you’re a happy camper and you probably whistle on your way to work every day.  Conversely, if you worship the quicksand your boss walks on, you probably dread going to work every day, and the chances of you being a happy camper are slim to none.  Which brings us to Bruna Martinuzzi’s take on how you know if your leadership style is effective.

She said, “Ask yourself this: When people walk away from having interacted with you, do they feel better about themselves, or worse?”

Actually, she said that in the context of how well a leader communicates, but I think it works equally well for all aspects of leadership.  Consider these situations from an employee’s perspective:

• When the boss is “explaining” something to me, is it a positive, learning experience?  Or do I feel disrespected and talked down to?

• When the boss and I disagree about something, do I feel my point of view got a fair hearing, or was it largely ignored?

• When I make suggestions for improving the way we do things, does my boss take my ideas seriously, or are my ideas dismissed out of hand?

• When I perform at a level that’s above what’s expected of me, does my boss notice, or are my efforts ignored?

These are only a few of the routine, daily interactions that can occur between a supervisor and a subordinate.  There are many more.  But the point is, if you follow Ms. Martinuzzi’s thinking, each of these little interactions is an opportunity to make someone feel good about themselves, and those opportunities should not be wasted.  Remember, it’s your relationship with your subordinates that will determine whether they really throw themselves into supporting the company’s goals, or they just put in their time and collect a paycheck.

None of this is to say you shouldn’t correct people when they step out of line, or that you always need to agree with them.  Even when they disagree with you, people will feel good about themselves if they get your full, undivided attention, and if the interaction is handled with dignity and respect.  And do you know what else?  If you make a concentrated effort to make people feel good about themselves, you’ll feel pretty darn good about yourself too.

 
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What is your employee disaster plan?

As we’ve said here before, there are two keys to developing an outstanding workforce.  First, you have to get the right people on the bus.  That is, you have to hire people who have the right attitudes, behaviors, and values to fit well within your organization.  As the bus driver, you can’t let just anybody onto your bus.  You have to admit only those who will get along well with the people already on the bus.  Second, you have to get them seated in the right seat (job).  Ideally, you put them in a job for which they have both talent and passion.  Right bus, right seat.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?  So why do we have so many wrong bus/wrong seat people running around?  Probably because we don’t have an employee disaster plan in place.  For more on this, please read below.

What is your employee disaster plan?

If you’ve got wrong bus/wrong seat people on board, it’s possible you have a flawed hiring process that fails to separate the people you want on your bus from those you don’t.  But it’s far more likely that you allowed some wrong bus/wrong seat people to come aboard because you were desperate to fill their positions.  You probably wanted to take the time to find Mr. or Ms. Right, but time was the one thing you didn’t have.  Therefore, what’s needed here is an employee disaster plan to give you some breathing room so you don’t feel compelled to hire the first person who walks through your door and can fog a mirror.

Any unexpected vacancy can be disruptive.  If a particular job wasn’t necessary, you wouldn’t have hired someone to do it, right?  But when a key player leaves your organization, the disruption can be severe.  So the first step in your employee disaster plan is to identify those people who, if they handed in their two-week notice tomorrow, would really create a disastrous situation.  If your company is large enough, you may have some redundancy built into your system where the key players have a number two guy who is just waiting for a shot at the top spot.  But smaller companies can rarely afford such a deep talent pool.  So what’s a small company to do?

First, make a commitment to yourself that you will hold out for the right bus/right seat person, however long it takes.  Building and maintaining the right team is a long-term commitment, so don’t let a short-term emergency derail it.  How you do that will vary from position to position.  These days there are temp services for just about everything, so if you believe that could be your stop gap measure for a particular position, do the research now to figure out what temp services provide the sort of people you would need.  Or maybe you figure out a way to break up the job and ask others in your organization to share the load until you can find a permanent replacement.  Or if it’s within your own skill set, maybe you step into the job yourself until a replacement can be found.  And there are probably a dozen other solutions you can think of that would work temporarily to buy you some time to conduct a thorough, thoughtful search for Mr. or Ms. Right.

I’m not suggesting that an employee disaster plan will allow you take the loss of a key employee without missing a beat.  On the contrary, the ways you plan to manage through a key vacancy will be messy, disruptive, and in some cases, expensive, but at least will will have a plan and it will buy you the time you need.  And as messy disruptive, and expensive as your plan may be, it won’t be nearly as messy, disruptive, and expensive as it will be if you panic and allow Mr. or Ms. Wrong board your bus.  If a job is too important to be left vacant for awhile, then clearly it’s too important to be given to the wrong person.

 

 
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“Profits Aren’t Everything. They’re the Only Thing.”

Legendary coach Vince Lombardi admonishes us, “Winning isn’t the most important thing.  It’s the only thing.”  Now George Cloutier, CEO of American Management Services, has taken a page from Lombardi’s playbook with his own book titled, “Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing.”   As hard-headed business  people, it’s pretty difficult for us to argue with his point of view, isn’t it?  Isn’t it?  Well, maybe not . . . at least from my point of view, there is some room to disagree.  For more on profits and profitability, please read below.

“Profits Aren’t Everything.  They’re the Only Thing.”

Cloutier’s company specializes in turning around troubled or failing companies, so you can see why he’d feel that way.  His clients have to get profitable real quick or they simply go away.  And after all, as business people, even if our businesses are healthy, we’re all about making profits, aren’t we?  So why do I find the title of Cloutier’s book disturbing?  Furthermore, it disturbs me that I’m disturbed.  Does that make sense?  I mean, I think I’m as capitalistic as the next guy.  For cryin’ out loud, the tagline on my business card even says, “Helping small business owners to grow profitably.”  So why does Cloutier’s premise bum me out?

I guess what troubles me about Cloutier’s title is the word “only.”  Of course, if you simply drop out that word, the title doesn’t make much sense, but still the word bothers me.  Not that profits aren’t important, clearly they are.  Without them, we can’t stay in business.  Still, when you say profits are “the only thing,” you give our profession a certain Scrooge-like image . . . like we’d probably sell our mothers and our first born for a few more bucks on the bottom line.  It says we could be in any kind of shady business using unscrupulous and unethical practices, but as long as we’re turning a profit, it’s OK.  I know lots of business people (and you do too) who fervently believe that their product or service provides a positive benefit to society.  Sure, they recognize that they have to be profitable if they want to continue to deliver that benefit, but the profit motive isn’t what propels them out of bed every morning.

The other aspect I don’t like about profits being “the only thing” is that it necessarily points us toward short-term thinking.  This is most evident in the wonderful world of publicly held companies where if we miss our earnings target by just a few pennies, our stock gets hammered by the Wall Street analysts.  So if I’m the CEO of one of those companies and I want to avoid the Wall Street hammer, what do I do?  Well, I put off needed upgrades to our plant and equipment, or I scale back spending on R&D, or I freeze all training expenses . . . all of which will make my company less competitive in the long term, but hey!  We’ll make our numbers this quarter and that’s all that counts.  Pretty dumb, huh?  But if we focus on profits to the exclusion of everything else, that’s what can happen.

Again, profits are vital to the health of our business and our profitability needs to be a key focus, but not the “only” focus.  To focus solely on profits can lead to inappropriate business practices and endanger our long-term future.  In my view, that’s not a path any of us should want to walk.

 

 
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