CALL US NOW AT (847) 665-9134
magnify

Be the gatekeeper of your company’s culture.

During the Great Recession, hiring was not much of a problem because most companies weren’t doing any of it.  Some imposed a hiring freeze, others laid people off.  Now we have the opposite problem: companies want to hire but can’t find the people they want.  Best-selling business author Jim Collins uses the analogy of a bus.  First, he advises, you need to get the right people on the bus, the bus being your company’s culture.  That is, you want to find people who hold the values, and practice the behaviors, that will make them a good “fit” for your culture.  Then, once the right people are on the bus, you need to put them in the right seats (jobs that are a good match for their skills and interests).  So, culture first, skills second.  However, in a tough labor market, when highly skilled people are hard to find, some companies may be tempted to turn Collins’ advice around . . . skills first, culture if we’re lucky.  That’s a bad idea.  To learn why, please continue reading below.

Be the gatekeeper of your company’s culture.

 If you have a strong and vibrant culture . . . one that is built around your company’s values, norms, and practices . . . it needs to be protected.  Even a strong and vibrant culture can be infected by poor hiring standards. The time-honored axiom, “A few bad apples can spoil the whole barrel,” applies here.  If you get a few people in your midst whose behaviors and belief systems are at odds with the rest of the company, you may find your strong culture has suddenly become very fragile.

See if this sounds familiar.  You desperately need a senior programmer who is skilled in the XYZ programming language, but such people are very scarce.  You’ve looked everywhere and come up empty.  Then, when you were just about at your wits end, in walks a guy to apply for the job.  You check him out.  He’s held all the right jobs at all the right places and can demonstrate mastery of the XYZ programming language.  He’s the real deal.  Oh sure, some of his comments and behaviors during the interview process were a bit odd, but they were probably nothing to worry about . . . probably just nerves.  The truth is, you were afraid if you drilled down on some of that odd stuff, you might scare him away or find something that would disqualify him.  So you convince yourself that it will probably be OK.  Besides, you need the guy so damned bad!  You pull the trigger and hire him.  Ninety days later, you fire him, which was about 89 days too long if you ask his fellow employees.  He was a self-absorbed, arrogant jerk that nobody could stand to be around much less work with.

So, if you add up the pluses and minuses of this little adventure, what have you got?

On the plus side, you did get a guy whose skills you so desperately needed, but that’s about all.

On the minus side:

  • You’re out whatever your hiring costs were (advertising, recruiters, background checks, etc.).
  • You’re out three months’ salary.
  • He alienated so many people that he couldn’t be as productive or effective as you thought he would be.
  • He left in his wake a bunch of angry employees . . . angry at you for allowing him into the organization.
  • And you still have a critical position that needs to be filled.

The point here is you, and any of your managers who have hiring authority, hold the keys to the kingdom.  You are the gatekeepers and the rest of your organization will hold you accountable to treat that responsibility as a sacred trust.  If you make too many hiring mistakes, your people will begin to question your judgement and your leadership.  When it comes to hiring the right people, nobody bats a thousand, but you should keep your batting average as high as possible, and when you do make a mistake, own up to it and correct it as quickly as possible.

The key to hiring right is keeping the Jim Collins order of things . . . culture first, skills second.  Make a solid commitment to your role as gatekeeper and do whatever you need to do to protect the integrity of your culture.  Obviously, that will sometimes be difficult, particularly when a key position or skill is involved.  But really, it’s just a management problem.  Or more precisely, it’s an exercise in contingency planning.

Consider Tom.  For twenty years he’s been the heart, soul, and driving force of our organization

. . . don’t know what we’d do without him.  Tom gets hit by a bus.  No more Tom.  So what do we do?  We could close our doors, but that’s not an acceptable option.  So we have to figure out some other way to continue on without Tom.  Likewise, when we have a critical role to fill, lowering our hiring standards should not be an acceptable option.  Instead, we should ask ourselves, “What can we do to buy ourselves some time so we don’t feel like we have to hire the first person who walks through our door and can fog a mirror?  What can we do to continue operations at an acceptable level while we search for the right candidate to fill a critical spot?”

Your role as gatekeeper is a critical one.  Take it seriously and make a commitment to it.

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

Inc. magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. (revisited)

Every year, in its September issue, Inc. magazine publishes its “Inc. 5000” annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America.  Two years ago, when the Inc. 5000 list for 2015 came out, we extracted some of the highlights in an attempt to learn what characteristics all these entrepreneurs have in common that make them successful.  We will attempt to do the same thing here with the Inc. 5000 list for 2017, but with a focus on the people side of the equation.  So, if you’d like to learn how these top entrepreneurs hire and retain the best people, please continue reading below.

Inc. magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. (revisited)

Inc. surveyed the companies on the Inc. 5000 list.  Of the companies that responded to that survey, 62% said that hiring and retaining good people was the biggest obstacle to their growth.  That’s almost double the number of respondents who cited other obstacles to growth.  So what do these respondents say they are doing to keep their rosters full of quality people?

While there are a variety of benefits the surveyed companies offer to attract and hold good employees, a number of those benefits are aimed at giving employees a degree of autonomy or self-direction.  For instance:

  • 70% of respondents allow employees to work remotely.
  • 31% offer unlimited vacation.
  • 44% offer educational stipends.

Among the surveyed companies, 66% said they actively work at achieving a work/life balance while only 34% said work/life balance is “a nice fantasy.”

And then there were a few survey questions about pay.  Almost half reported that the wage gap between their highest and lowest paid fulltime employees was in excess of $100,000.  When asked, “Who is the highest paid employee at your company?”, 28% responded “Not me.”  The top vote-getters for highest paid employee were tied at 20% . . . Head of Operations and Head of Sales.

To build and keep an innovative workforce, one respondent advised, “Hire great talent and listen to them.  Unfortunately, most companies fail here.”  Others recommended building a great company culture.  One cautioned, “When you’re growing like mad and hiring fast, it’s easy to ignore red flags and bring in someone who’s not a good fit.  Do so too often, and you can alter your company’s DNA irreparably.”  Another said, “When we have a bad culture fit, no matter how good the person is, we fire that person.  I fired my top sales guy.  His ego grew too large and he abused relationships, and we fired him.”

Respondents were asked to choose three qualities they believe are responsible for their success.  Not surprisingly, “Determination” was on top with 65% of the vote, followed by “Risk-Taking” at 57%, and “Vision” at 47%.  Strangely, “Likeability,” at only 13%, barely made it onto the list.  Yet we know customers do business with people they know, like, and trust.  We also know that employees will stay longer at a company when their boss is someone they know, like, and trust.  So you’d think “Likeability” would have fared better than a lowly 13%.  But it didn’t.  Still, not all of the respondents were quite so hard-hearted.  Asked “What is the best thing about being a founder?”, one respondent said, “Being able to provide opportunities to my employees that allow them to live the life they would like to.”  Another answered, “Being a job creator.  There is satisfaction in giving people a career.”  However, on the flip side of that, many founders agree with this one who said, “The hardest thing about being a founder is knowing that I’m responsible for the livelihood of my employees.”

Here are some other noteworthy, people-centric quotes from the respondents to Inc.’s survey:

“Focus on growing other people, not just yourself.”

“When we see somebody we like, I say, ‘Holy cow.  I don’t care if we have a job for them or not.’  We hire them.”

“Structure trumps strategy. Work super hard on the structure of whatever business you’re in so you can scale that business.”  His point being, strategies will change over time, but if you have the right structure in place, your organization will be able to adopt to those changes in strategy.

There you have it.  Bits of wisdom from Inc. magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing companies list.  We’ve tried to focus here on what these successful entrepreneurs do with the people side of their businesses . . . how they attract and keep the best.  But there’s more, much more, to learn about the challenges entrepreneurs face when their companies are experiencing very rapid growth . . . strains on their organizations that you might not guess unless you’ve been through it before.  If your company is in a fast-growth mode, or may be soon, the September 2017 issue of Inc. will be a useful primer to tell you what to expect and what to prepare for

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

“No person can get very far in this life on a 40-hour week.”

Working more hours does not make us more productive.  That seems counter-intuitive, but it’s true.  This was demonstrated by many studies conducted from the early 1900s to the 1950s.  In fact, Henry Ford, who was an early adopter of working fewer hours, reduced the work day in his plants from 10 hours to eight, and the work week from six days to five.  Twelve years of experiments had proven conclusively to him that this reduced schedule would increase total worker output while reducing production costs (by eliminating costly errors and accidents).  And so, the 40-hour week became the universal standard until the 1970s when companies began requiring their employees to work longer hours.  Apparently, those companies either didn’t know about, or didn’t believe, the productivity studies done earlier in the century.  According to a poll conducted by Gallup in 2014, 4 of 10 U.S. workers claim to work over 50 hours per week, while 2 in 10 say they work in excess of 60 hours.  To learn why long hours are a bad idea, not only for workers, but also for the companies that employ them, please continue reading below.

“No person can get very far in this life on a 40-hour week.”   ~ J.W. Marriott, Marriott Hotels

Apparently ol’ J.W. didn’t embrace the concept of work/life balance.  Most experts agree that the optimal work week (that is, the number of hours we can work before fatigue starts to impact our performance) is 40 hours.  According to a Stanford University study, output falls off dramatically at 50 hours, and goes into free fall at 55 hours.  This is particularly bad news for companies whose employees are entitled to overtime.  After 40 hours, those employees are paid time-and-a-half their regular hourly rate, yet due to the onset of fatigue, they are producing less.  So the company is paying more for less . . . a double whammy.

Studies do show that we can increase hours and output, but only in short bursts.  If there’s a crisis of some kind and we need to work some extra hours to get through it, we can do that, but when long hours become the norm rather than the exception, that’s when we see the cost/benefit of long hours start to get out of whack.

Commercial truck drivers are required, by law, to make specified rest stops.  The FAA dictates how many hours commercial pilots can fly within a specified period of time.  So where public safety is concerned, there is clear recognition that there are limits on how long people can perform at optimal levels.  But in many businesses, there seems to be this idea that if we increase hours by 25%, say from 40 hours to 50, we’ll get 25% more output, and that’s simply not true.  The truth is, whether you’re a professional athlete, a factory worker, or a customer service rep,  you don’t perform as well when you’re tired as you do when you’re not tired.  Unfortunately, in many company cultures, a long work week is seen as a rite of passage that demonstrates an employee’s loyalty and commitment to the organization.  “The simple reality is that work, both mental and physical, results in fatigue that limits the cognitive and bodily resources people have to put towards their work,” said Ken Matos, senior director of research at the Families and Work Institute think tank.  “When they are not thinking clearly or moving as quickly or precisely, they must work more slowly to maintain quality and safety requirements.”

A long work week may be the result of misguided company policies, but it may also be driven by so-called “work martyrs.”  A 2015 article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “The Research is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies,” suggests people may inflict long hours on themselves due to “a mix of inner drivers, like ambition, machismo, greed, anxiety, guilt, enjoyment, pride, the pull of short-term rewards, a desire to prove we’re important, or an overdeveloped sense of duty.”  In such cases, the company will need to find ways to convince the employee that working heroic hours is not productive, not in his or her best interest, and not in the best interest of the company.

Technology also plays a role in the extended work week.  According to a Pew survey, 35% of all workers say their working hours have increased due to text messages, emails, and cell phones.  When limited to office workers only, that number rises to 47%.  In other words, people are telling us that they may be off the clock, but they’re never off duty . . . they’re always within reach of their employer.

But regardless of the source . . . company policies, personal preference, or technology . . . anything that consistently drives work weeks to levels above 40 hours is damaging to the company in terms of:

  • Employee turnover
  • Absenteeism
  • Reduced productivity
  • Re-work caused by preventable errors
  • Lost time accidents

and is damaging to the employee in terms of:

  • Stress
  • Exhaustion
  • Health issues stemming from sleep deprivation
  • Inadequate family/personal time

As compared to Mr. Marriott’s take on the 40-hour work week, I prefer that of William J.H. Boetcker (American clergyman, public speaker, and thought leader) who said, “If your business keeps you so busy that you have no time for anything else, there must be something wrong, either with you or your business.”

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

Compensation is an equity issue.

In American business, an individual’s compensation package, particularly among managers and sales people, frequently includes an incentive component.  An example might be a manager who is paid a base salary of $75,000, but is able to earn an additional $25,000 if he or she is able to achieve certain goals or outcomes.  The proposition is, “If you do this, I’ll pay you that.”  It’s a simple, straight-forward, and fair transaction, isn’t it?  Well, yes on the face of it, yet the incentive portion of a compensation package can be fraught with all sorts of misunderstandings and unintended consequences.  To learn where some of these potholes are and how to avoid them, please continue reading below.

 “Compensation is an equity issue.  People want to know that they are being compensated fairly compared to others doing similar work within the company, and to others doing similar work in other companies.  After that, it’s a non-issue.”                       ~ Richard Teerlink, former CEO of Harley-Davidson

A good place to begin is with the realization that incentive-based pay is not appropriate for all people and all jobs.  So before you start trying to design an incentive-based pay system, you need to understand what jobs respond well to such systems and what jobs do not.  While we’re not going to get into that here, you can read a previously published blog on the subject here https://rocksolidbizdevelopment.com/ourblog/motivation-toss-the-carrot-and-stick/, or see an excellent TED talk on the subject by Dan Pink here https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation .

Next, make sure incentives are based on SMART goals . . . that is, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, and Time-based.  Loosely-defined goals without appropriate metrics and deadlines are in trouble before they start.

Goals can be inappropriate if the person being incentivized has little or no direct control over them.  For instance, a company might offer its top managers an incentive if the company reaches a certain level of profitability.  However, since each manager has direct control over only his or her own department, and since no one except the CEO has direct control over all the elements that go into overall profitability, that is not likely to be a successful incentive situation.

You need to guard against conflicting goals.  For example, if you give your Director of Operations a goal to increase quality while giving your Chief Financial Officer a goal to reduce labor and material costs, you may have just set up both for failure.

Beware of setting goals that are too rigid.  An employee who achieves 99.9% of a goal is not going to feel very happy about being rewarded with a warm handshake and a hearty, “Nice try!”  When setting the ground rules for your incentive program, you should consider a threshold of some kind, below which nothing is paid, above which some portion of the incentive is paid.  Where the threshold should be set, and what sort of incentive should be paid above the threshold, should be established at the outset, not when the problem rears its head.  This is where your sense of fairness kicks in.

What about the opposite problem?  Let’s say someone blows the doors off whatever goal was set.  Again, your sense of fairness should rule, and how this situation will be handled should be worked out at the beginning.

Whatever incentive program you put in place, and whoever you expect to incentivize with it, you need to put a sunset provision in it . . . an expiration date, probably annually, but it could be any timeframe that makes sense to you.  There may be unintended consequences to your program that you need to address.  Or there may be changes in your marketplace or in your organization that require changes to your incentive plan.  Either way, whoever is involved in your incentive program needs to understand that it is subject to periodic review and is not an entitlement program that goes on in perpetuity.

Never lose sight of the fact that when you introduce new incentive programs or amend old ones, you’re impacting peoples’ livelihoods.  That’s serious business . . . scary business.  People are naturally fearful when their earning power could be disrupted, so be patient, take the time to carefully explain the necessity for the program you propose as well as the benefits it will carry for them and for the company.  If you have earned the trust and respect of the people included in your incentive program, they will accept that changes are necessary and give you credit for having pure motives.  They may not like the changes, but they will do their best to understand and accept them.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of everything you need to consider when putting together an incentive program for appropriate individuals in your company.  But it is intended to demonstrate that there’s a lot to think about.  Incentive programs, when thoughtfully conceived, thoroughly explained, and smoothly launched, can be powerful motivators, and not incidentally, a fair way to share the wealth with the people who are helping you to build your business.

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

“We really view each (telephone call) as an opportunity to build the Zappos brand.”

Whatever happened to customer service?  Everybody pays lip service to it, but very few actually deliver it.  More and more often, when you go to a company’s website looking for a phone number, you will be disappointed to find there isn’t one.  Apparently, they don’t want to talk to their customers.  Instead, they provide a little email form that you can complete with the promise that they will respond promptly.  Of course, they don’t respond promptly.  In fact, they often don’t respond at all.  Contrast that with the experience you get when you call Zappos (*), the online retailer.  When it comes to customer service, Zappos is generally ranked right up there at the top with companies like Nordstrom and Ritz Carlton Hotels.  Unlike some other online retailers, Zappos does want to talk to its customers . . . as often as possible.  So to achieve the level of customer contact it wants, Zappos maintains a full service, 24/7, inbound call center, but it’s very unique in the way it operates.  Even if you don’t run a call center but would like the telephone traffic you do have to be more effective and customer-friendly, you can take a few tips from Zappos.  To learn what makes the Zappos call center different from others, and to learn how Zappos uses it to cement a commitment to customer service, please continue reading below.

“We really view each (telephone call) as an opportunity to build the Zappos brand.”         ~Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO 

 There are a number of things that separate the Zappos call center from other call center operations:

  1. Call center employees don’t work from scripts and they don’t upsell. The company recognizes that each caller is unique and deserves a genuine, person-to-person conversation, not a canned, one-size-fits-all script.  “We trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer,” says CEO Tony Hsieh.  “We want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection with the customer.”
  2. Calls are not timed. At many call centers, employees are evaluated according to how many calls they can “clear” within a specified period of time.  Not at Zappos.  Employees there are instructed to take as much time as they need to give the caller a positive, WOW experience.  They work with one simple imperative: no matter how long it takes, whatever question a caller has, make sure it’s fully and completely answered, and whatever problem the caller has, make sure it’s solved.  Zappos doesn’t even care if the question answered or the problem solved results in a sale.  It’s all about delivering a great customer experience.
  3. Call centers are not an expense to be minimized. Look at each call as an investment in your customer service brand.    At Zappos, the strategy is to build the brand through word-of-mouth and through the repeat business from a loyal customer base.  To achieve that, rather than pouring a lot of money into traditional advertising mediums, they pour that same amount of money into their various customer service initiatives (such as their call center).

You may not have or need a call center like Zappos, but maybe you do have a help desk or technical support function or dispatch activities that depend on telephone communication.  Or maybe you have “internal customers” who are in the field, such as sales people or technicians, who need to call in periodically for whatever support they need.  Or maybe you’re a virtual company with no “land lines” at all and with cell phone-toting employees scattered around the country.  In all of those cases, telephone traffic, both inbound and outbound, is connecting your company to its employees, customers, and suppliers.

In the Zappos world, each of those calls represents an opportunity to build or strengthen a relationship.  Following a call from an employee, does that employee feel a stronger bond with the company?  Following a call from a customer, does that customer feel so well-served that he or she wouldn’t even think about going to a competitor?  Following a call from a vendor, would that vendor do whatever it takes to help us when we need it?

Telephones have been with us for over 100 years, and even though the telephones of today are mobile computing devices, they still connect people in a personal way that texting and email and voicemail cannot match.  According to Tony Hsieh, “As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there.”  We should do whatever we can to leverage the personal touch those branding devices allow us to deliver.    What would it look like if everyone in your company was treating every telephone conversation as an opportunity to strengthen your brand as a good place to work and a good place to do business?

 

(*) Zappos achieved $1 billion in annual gross merchandise sales in under 10 years, was named one of the “Best Companies to Work For” by Fortune magazine in 2009 (and would continue to make regular appearances on that list), and in that same year, was purchased by Amazon in a deal valued at $1.2 billion.  However, it continues to. be run under its own brand, with its own culture, and its own unique way of doing business.

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

Work on your business, not in it.

According to the IRS, there are 18.1 million businesses in this country, but only 100,000 that employ 100 or more people.  So of the 18.1 million businesses in this country, 18 million of them are small businesses.  In addition, more than a million businesses are started here each year, but 800,000 of them will be gone within five years . . . the so-called “red zone.”  Of the remaining 200,000 new businesses that do survive the “red zone,” 80% will never see their tenth anniversary.  That means that of the one million plus businesses started here each year, less than 4% will last beyond 10 years.  Why?  Those failed entrepreneurs will tell you that their companies tanked because of a poor economy, a bad partnership, the high cost of energy, or unfair competition from third world countries.  Not true.  To learn what really doomed, and continues to doom, all those startups, please continue reading below.

Work on your business, not in it.

It’s a trite and hackneyed phrase that’s been used routinely in business books and business periodicals for many years.  Michael Gerber generally gets credit for popularizing the concept in his book, The E-Myth.  Basically, the phrase is supposed to conjure up an image of a business owner who is so caught up in the daily grind of the business, that he or she has no time to step back and figure out how to make the business grow and prosper.

 

For a business to be successful, it is critically important for the owner to have a clear vision for where the business can go and what it can become.  Yet most would-be entrepreneurs start their business without any such vision.  Their vision is to continue doing what they’ve been doing, but do it on their own terms and take home a bigger paycheck.  Essentially, rather than creating a business, they’re creating a job for themselves.  So they continue to do their job, day in and day out, week after week, month after month, year after year, and figure if they just hang in there and do their job well (as they always have), it’ll all work out somehow and they will be successful.

Perhaps you know the story of Ray Kroc who built McDonald’s into the restaurant behemoth it is today.  He stumbled across the McDonald brothers who ran a couple of hamburger stands in California and who had developed an efficient process for churning out inexpensive hamburgers, French fries, and milk shakes.  The brothers’ vision was just to continue doing what they were doing, flipping hamburgers and keeping satisfied customers coming back for more.  But Kroc had a different vision . . . a vision of franchising the McDonald brothers’ concept into hundreds and thousands of restaurants all across the country.  So he bought the franchise rights from the McDonald brothers and opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Ray Kroc had no interest in selling hamburgers . . . he probably never flipped one in his entire life.  He wanted to sell franchises.  So his customers were existing and prospective franchisees, not the burger-consuming public.  He was selling a turnkey system for running a successful fast food business, and his customers were would-be entrepreneurs who wanted to run their own show, but who needed the sort of “how to” guidance that Kroc offered.

The McDonald brothers’ vision was activity-based . . . just keep making and selling hamburgers, and keep doing that as long as possible.  Ray Kroc’s vision was to build a business, based on a franchise model that could be replicated again and again, anywhere in the country.  While the McDonald brothers were working in their business, Ray Kroc was working on his, making his vision a reality.

One definition of a “real” business is a business that runs smoothly and profitably whether the owner is on the premises or not.  And that’s why so many startups fail.  When the founder fails to make the business more than just a job for himself, and when the business depends on him to be there every day, doing his thing (whatever that is), it’s a boat that can be capsized by any little ripple that comes along.

So, if you have a vision for your business that includes it being less and less dependent on you personally as time goes on, and if you have a well-conceived plan to carry out that vision, you have a good chance to be in the 4% of businesses that grow to maturity.  If you’re hands-on every day, just doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it and hoping something good will come of it, you’re probably not going to join the 4% club.

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

“Without execution, ‘vision’ is just another word for hallucination.”

“Which is easier, strategy (planning) or execution?”  Ask any chief executive that question, and he or she will always answer, “Execution!”  Putting together a good strategic plan has its own challenges, but the real trick is making that plan happen.  And the reason for that is simple:  executing a strategic plan is important but not urgent . . . it’s a long-term activity that unfolds over the course of months or even years.  Our days tend to get eaten up by urgent matters such as dealing with customer issues, making deadlines, solving operational problems, etc.  So if we don’t get around to working on the plan today, we can always put it off until tomorrow or the next day.  In short, the urgent will always trump the important.  For some thoughts on how you get around this dilemma and execute on your plans, please continue reading below.

“Without execution, ‘vision’ is just another word for hallucination.”   ~ Mark Hurd

In a YouTube video, Chris McChesney, a representative of the FranklinCovey organization, discusses the “Four Disciplines of Execution.”

  1. Set SMART goals . . . goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, and Time-based. Vague goals that don’t include measurements or deadlines are doomed from the start.  And don’t assign too many goals.  According to McChesney, if you set two or three goals, you will achieve two or three of them.  If you set four to ten goals, you will achieve one or two of them.  If you set more than 10, it’s unlikely you will achieve any of them.  It’s the Law of Diminishing Returns.  When people are struggling to carry out their regular daily responsibilities and work on long-term goals, setting too many goals only discourages them.
  2. Provide interim measurements so that everyone involved in achieving a particular goal always knows where they are with respect to the goal . . . ahead, behind, or on schedule. We need to pace ourselves in order to deliver the results we want on time, but we can only do that if we have some sort of interim measurement to guide us.
  3. Keep a scoreboard. While achieving important company goals is serious stuff, there’s no reason we can’t introduce some elements of a game by posting our progress on a scoreboard.  McChesney recommends that a scoreboard include several elements, especially:
  • You should be able to tell at a glance how you’re doing.
  • Make it large enough and post it in a convenient location so people involved in a goal can see their “score” easily and often.
  1. Hold regular accountability sessions. Discipline yourself to hold them on a regularly scheduled basis . . . daily, weekly, or monthly, whatever you think is appropriate.  These sessions should be a time for people to discuss any challenges they may be facing with respect to their goals and remedial actions they are taking if they are behind on their goals.

Ideally, execution of a plan should trickle down to everyone in the organization.  Once the overall company goals have been set, each department should set its own goals to support the company goals, then teams within a department should set goals to support the departmental goals, and finally, each member of a team should have individual goals to support the team goals.  In this way, planning and execution become a part of the corporate conversation and part of the company culture.

Company Goals

↓

Department Goals

↓

Team Goals

↓

Individual Goals

 

The whole idea is to set a limited number of high-impact goals, provide tools for tracking our progress toward those goals, and then to keep execution of those goals highly visible with scoreboards, accountability sessions, and companywide participation.  And with high visibility, the important (executing our plans) is less likely to get pushed aside by the urgent.

If you would like to see Chris McChesney’s presentation, please paste the link below into your browser

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qynXCJZ2xQI&feature=youtu.be

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have when trying to change others.”

While researching their best-selling book, “First, Break All the Rules,” co-authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman interviewed over 80,000 managers in more than 400 companies. They wanted to learn what separates managers who are truly great from those who are just adequate.  Surprisingly, among the great managers, Buckingham and Coffman found more differences than similarities.  However, they did find one common belief that was held by all the great managers: “People don’t change that much.”  This common belief led the great managers to behave very consistently in four critical roles.  To learn more about those critical roles, please continue reading below.

“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have when trying to change others.”                  ~ Jacob M. Braude

Great managers accept that nobody is good at everything . . . everyone has both strengths and weaknesses. They also recognize that trying shore up people’s weaknesses is a fool’s errand, so they don’t waste their time trying.  Instead, they focus on people’s strengths and try to make them better at what they already do well.

This idea that you should work on developing people’s strengths rather than trying to correct their weaknesses led Buckingham and Coffman to the “Four Keys” of great managers. These are the four key roles that distinguish great managers from their not-so-great counterparts.

Hiring.  Great managers hire for talent, not simply for knowledge, experience, and skills.  NOTE:  Buckingham and Coffman make a distinction between talent and skill.  Skills can be taught, talents cannot.  You can teach someone to run a piece of machinery or to handle bookkeeping tasks, but you can’t teach someone to run a 50-yard dash in record time.  Knowledge, experience, and skills are important, but those can all be developed on the job.  So great managers focus their attention on whether or not an applicant already has the talent he or she will need to be successful in a particular job because, as we’ve said, you can’t teach talent.

Setting expectations.  Great managers are focused on outcomes, not on the way a person must achieve those outcomes.  Not-so-great managers cling the flawed theory that there is one, and only one, best way to perform a particular task and that their job is to make sure people are following each and every step of the process laid out for them without deviating or cutting any corners.  More enlightened managers, recognizing that there is always more than one way to skin a cat, give their people leeway to do it “their way” . . . as long as the expected outcome is achieved.

Motivating.  Not-so-great managers are committed to “fixing” the weaknesses they perceive in their people.  In the view of Buckingham and Coffman, great managers let their people “become more of who they already are.”  Think about it.  Would you be more motivated by a manager who encourages you to grow and develop in a role where you can excel?  Or by a manager who wants to make you better in an activity for which you have no talent, interest, or passion?

Developing.  There’s an old saying that, “When you promote your best salesperson to sales manager, you lose a good salesperson and gain a lousy sales manager.”  That saying recognizes that selling and managing are very different activities, and that just because you’re good at one doesn’t mean you’ll be good at the other.  So in developing people, great managers focus, not just on the next rung of the ladder, but on where an individual’s strengths and talents can be put to the highest and best use.

Above all, great managers recognize that each individual is unique . . . a unique blend of knowledge, experience, skills, talents, and behaviors. So to get the best from people, a one-size-fits-all management approach will not work.  Instead, great managers customize their approach to each individual in a way designed to identify that individual’s unique strengths and abilities, and then to put those strengths and abilities to the best use possible.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? It is.  But that’s why only the great managers do it.

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

That’s your competitive advantage? Really? You sure about that?

We have talked about ”competitive advantage” here before, but it’s been awhile and it’s an important concept that bears repeating.

Jaynie Smith is a consultant, best-selling author, and keynote speaker. She is also CEO of her company, Smart Advantage, Inc.  I heard her speak about competitive advantage before a group of a dozen or so CEOs.  To start her presentation, she said, “Your customers have choices.  They could do business with others, but they have chosen to do business with you.”  Then she asked, “Why?”  She went around the room asking each CEO for the reason his customers did business with his company instead of his competitors . . . essentially asking each for his company’s competitive advantage.  To learn what those CEOs said and how Jaynie Smith reacted to their answers, please continue reading below

That’s your competitive advantage? Really?  You sure about that?

Jaynie Smith posted the answers to her question, “Why do your customers choose to do business with you?” on a white board. The answers were somewhat predictable:

  • Our low price
  • Our 99.9% on-time delivery
  • Our strong relationships
  • Our outstanding quality
  • Our world-class customer service
  • Etc., etc., etc.

Then she asked, “If I had all your competitors in a room and asked them the same question, what do you suppose their white board would look like?” The assembled CEOs had to admit, “Yeah, it would look just like ours.”  The point was, a competitive price, good quality, on-time delivery, etc. are just the minimum requirements to get in the game, but they are not the competitive advantages that will truly differentiate you from everyone else.  So how do you figure out your true competitive advantage?  How do you learn what you do (or don’t do) that causes your customers to choose you over your competitors?

Jaynie Smith’s answer, “You ask ‘em.”

That’s right, you ask them. You don’t do a telephone survey and you don’t do a postcard “customer satisfaction survey.”  You sit down, face-to-face with whoever is making the buying decision, and you interview them.  You acknowledge that they could have chosen others, and ask them point blank, “Why us?”  And this should not be an activity you delegate to the salesperson on the account . . . the relationship there may be such that the account is going to say what he or she thinks you want to hear, not the unvarnished truth.  Find others in your organization who are capable of conducting a good interview and who are more likely to elicit candid responses.  If that’s not an option, you may have to hire an outside marketer who can conduct the interviews on your behalf.

Many CEOs will argue that they’ve been in business for umpteen years, that they know their customers very well, and that they know exactly why their customers have chosen them to do business with. Not so says Jaynie Smith.

When she is hired to do the customer survey work, she first interviews all her client’s customer-facing people (marketing people, sales people, customer service people, etc.), and she asks them why they believe their customers choose them over others. Then, when she completes her interviews with her client’s customers, she compares what the client told her (about why customers do business with them) vs. what the customers themselves told her.  She says there’s a disconnect 100% of the time . . . sometimes subtle, sometimes stark, but always a disconnect of some kind.  For instance, she may say to a customer, “I understand you do business with my client  because of their on-time delivery.”  And the customer may respond, “No!  We buy from them because they’re the only ones who have the product in the color we want.  And to be honest, their on-time delivery ain’t that great.”

Out of this customer survey research, you will get two extraordinarily valuable pieces of information:

  1. You will learn what need you satisfy for your customers that your competitors do not. With that knowledge you can focus on ways satisfy that need even more effectively and make it even more difficult for your competitors to unseat you.
  2. When you understand your real competitive advantage, you can more efficiently and effectively target new customers in your marketplace that have the same need as your existing customers.

So. Do you really know what your competitive advantage is?  If you haven’t asked your customers, you probably don’t.

 
Tags:
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn

“Don’t do interviews. Interviews are boring. Make it a conversation.”

Brendan Reid, a business writer, author, and coach, points out that strong interviewing skills are critical to the success of any hiring manager. Obviously, bringing people on board who have the right skills, knowledge, experience, and temperament will have enormous benefit to the hiring manager and to the company. Yet few companies, except the very largest, provide any training for their managers on how to conduct an effective interview, so it’s not surprising that most are not very good at it. That’s puzzling, because when you’re trying to decide if a particular candidate is a good fit for the job you want to fill, you will have some information about him from a resume and some information about her from personal references, but the real gold is in the interview. And yet the people conducting the interview are not trained to mine that gold effectively. If you have concerns that your interviewing skills are not what they ought to be, please continue reading below for some tips on how to improve.

 “Don’t do interviews. Interviews are boring. Make it a conversation.”        ~ Jack Paar

This is not intended to be a complete, definitive guide to conducting effective interviews. However, there are some tips here, that if followed, will greatly improve your skill as an interviewer.

  • First, prepare for the interview just as you would for any important meeting or sales presentation. Study the candidate’s resume. Think carefully about what information you want to get from the candidate and how to structure questions that will yield that information. Write your questions down so you don’t forget any of them. Over the years, I’ve seen far too many interviewers walk into an interview without any preparation and say to themselves, “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.” Don’t make that mistake. It’s a recipe for a bad hire.
  • We hire for skills and fire for behaviors, don’t we? So you certainly want to determine whether or not the candidate has the right skills for the job, but beyond that, you want to know if he or she has the right behaviors and the right personality to be successful in your organization. A candidate for a job may have the highest skill levels available for that job, but if nobody can stand to work with him or her, all those great skills won’t help you very much.
  • At the beginning of the interview, do whatever you can to make the candidate feel comfortable, relaxed, and at ease. I know some interviewers want to do just the opposite to “see how they act under pressure.”   I disagree. Just being in an interview situation puts stress on a candidate. If you put someone under even more pressure, their guard will go up, and you will probably not get the natural, unfiltered, unfettered answers to your questions that you really want.
  • Avoid conducting the interview from behind your desk.   It sets up a superior/subordinate atmosphere which is not helpful to the interview. Find someplace to talk where you can sit comfortably as equals. If necessary, find a quiet booth in a coffee shop and conduct the interview there.
  • Pay attention to visual cues. Does the candidate seem self-assured or withdrawn? Does he or she make good eye contact? Is he or she dressed appropriately?
  • Use your prepared questions, not as a rigid script, but as a sort of template for the interview. As Jack Paar (old time late night talk show host) said, “Make it a conversation.” If a candidate answers a question in a way that’s interesting or unexpected, don’t just ignore it and move on to your next question. Dig a little deeper and ask a follow-up question.
  • Do not ask hypothetical questions, i.e., “What would you do if . . . ?” Instead, ask questions that force a candidate to draw on his or her own actual experience, i.e., “Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a really angry customer. How did you handle that?
  • Listen intently to what the candidate is saying. Too often, inexperienced interviewers will be mentally preparing their next question and not really listening to how the candidate is answering the previous question. Remember, the objective of the interview is not to get through some sort of question checklist . . . it’s to gather information which you can’t do if you’re not listening.
  • You also can’t gather information if you’re the one doing all the talking. If you’re talking more than one-third of the time, you’re talking too much. In other words, the candidate should be talking at least twice as much as you . . . more if you can manage it. Your questions should be open-ended . . . that is, questions that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” And as noted earlier, use follow-up questions when it’s appropriate. Do whatever it takes, but keep the candidate talking. Make it a conversation.
  • Don’t let the candidate hijack the interview or push you beyond your one-third time limit, but do offer to answer any questions the candidate may have about you or about the company. The types of questions a candidate asks can be very revealing. If the questions you hear are mostly about pay and benefits, you are most likely dealing with a nine-to-fiver. If the questions you hear are more operational and strategic in nature, you may be dealing with someone who is interested in more than just a paycheck.

In summary, prepare, prepare, prepare. Pay attention to personality traits and behaviors, not just to skills. Shut up and listen. And above all, make it a conversation. Make it a structured conversation that will yield the information you want, but still, a conversation.

 
Tags: , ,
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn
© Copyright 2023-2024, Rock Solid Business Development, Inc. • 601 Estes Ave, Suite 200, Schaumburg, IL 60193 • (847) 665-9134