Category: Articles

Mike Goldman Webinar

Start Your Own Performance Breakthrough!

Posted on by Mike Goldman

Gain access to my exclusive webinar: Performance Breakthrough: Applying the Four Secrets of Passionate Organizations, in which I’ll explain in depth how you can apply the Four Secrets of Passionate Organizations to your own work, company, or organization.

In the webinar, you’ll learn:

  • What the Four Secrets of Passionate Organizations are.
  • Why Passionate Organizations succeed, while others fail.
  • How you can apply the Four Secrets of Passionate Organizations to your own business.
  • Specific, actionable tactics for improving your business’ culture.

In addition to the webinar, I’ll be engaging with select attendees in a one-on-one coaching session.

The webinar will start at 1:00 PM ET on August 26th.

A recording of the webinar will be available to everyone who signs up.

Sign Up

Success In Career

How Trusting Employees Saves Time and Money

Posted on by Mike Goldman

Do you have confidence in your hiring process? If you have hired the right people—the ones with the smarts that impressed you enough to choose them—and have provided them with the tools necessary to do the job, then you need to give them the freedom to get the job done. This means trusting them enough to allow them to reach their true potential. If you believe in your hiring process, then trust your people. As Steve Jobs stated, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Realize that not trusting your employees costs you time and money. Additionally, micromanaging and being involved with every decision the team makes creates a bottleneck. Therefore, you need to come to terms with any trust issues.

Why is it so hard to trust employees? Some business leaders believe that their employees need to earn their trust before being trusted—rather than the other way around. Others are afraid to be vulnerable with their teams, while many more are fearful of sharing confidential information—the very information their teams need to be trusted to get the job done.

Allowing your team to have a greater role in the decision-making process means you need to trust them. Stop defining every step they need to take in order to get the job done. As a leader, your role should be one that focuses on defining outcomes and giving the team more responsibility for figuring out the best way to get there. Your team is working on the front lines every day, so they are probably smarter than you are when it comes to the real details of the project.

In order to have a more participatory company and to allow your people to have true ownership and impact on the bottom line, your attitude toward them needs to change. Here are some suggestions to consider.

1. Discover/communicate core ideologies.

Core ideologies are the “almost never changing” foundation of your organization and are made up of your core purpose and core values. A solid core ideology becomes the glue that holds the organization together and the driver of all strategy and people decisions.

  • Core Purpose: This is the “why” of the organization, and it is not just about making a profit. Your core purpose answers the question, “What difference are we making in the world?”

  • Core Values: This is the “how” of the organization. Core values are a non-negotiable handful of rules your organization lives by every day. These values become your organization’s attitude and should drive your organization’s behavior, who you hire, and who you promote.

The right core purpose and core values act as a set of guiding principles for the organization. This allows leaders to stop micromanaging and give more freedom to their team members.

2. Encourage more ideas from your team; be participatory instead of dictatorial.

Dictatorial Management: 

  • Your team’s effectiveness is limited by your vision and knowledge.

  • Your team will become paralyzed if you are not available to make a decision.

  • You feel ownership for all decisions.

Participatory Management:

  • Allows the team to rise higher as all team members’ talents are used to the team‘s advantage.

  • Allows the team to make effective decisions, with or without you.

  • The team feels ownership for all decisions.

How to achieve participatory management:

  • Ask for suggestions, such as: What are the five dumbest things we do? Of what should we do more? What should we stop doing?

  • Focus on ways to reward intelligent failure rather than punish for mistakes made.

  • Conduct open-forum meetings to discuss events, ideas, and issues.

  • Follow up on suggestions consistently.

3. Conduct team-driven goal setting.

Good leaders and managers set goals for their teams and create an accountability structure to manage and measure results. Exceptional leaders take that idea one step further by allowing the team to set its own goals, which will allow them to take more ownership and accountability toward their accomplishment.

A team-driven goal-setting process can work as follows:

Conduct a team planning meeting where you focus on two objectives:

  • Ensure the team understands the organizational vision and strategic goals or initiatives. If your organization does not have a vision and a set of strategic goals or initiatives, create them before moving forward.

  • Ask your team to work together over the next week to identify four to eight key metrics that will drive the team toward the accomplishment of the organizational goals (i.e., number of sales meetings, number of new clients, number of referrals, customer retention rate, etc.). For each metric, they should also work together to set team and/or individual goals.

Conduct a follow-up team planning meeting to review the metrics and goals your team has developed. Push back if you are uncomfortable with either the metrics or the specific goals. Make sure your team is aggressive, but not unrealistic. Just because your team is setting its own goals does not mean you should not provide strong guidance when necessary.

 4. Be vulnerable.

It’s okay for managers to say, “I made a mistake” or “I’m not very good at that.” Being vulnerable with your team members will dramatically increase their level of trust in you. They will also feel more comfortable sharing their vulnerabilities with you. Productive communications within your team will skyrocket.

5. Encourage arguments.

Does your team get along well? Do they always seem to agree with each other? Do you have trouble remembering your last major team conflict? This may seem strange, but if you answered “yes” to these questions, then you have problems. A team needs conflict to evolve. Think of this as Darwin’s theory of evolution for business. If good ideas do not crush bad ideas, and great ideas do not crush good ideas, a business and its employees will grow stagnant and die.

The formula for success is really very simple: Hire a great team; then give them the tools and the trust they need to do a great job.

Do You Have a Passionate Organization

Quiz: Do You Have a Passionate Organization?

Posted on by Mike Goldman

Take the Performance Breakthrough quiz to find out if your organization is passionate. You’ll learn not only how engaged your workforce is, but what you can do to solve passion problems and maintain a high level of engagement.

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Performance Breakthrough Book

Performance Breakthrough

Posted on by Mike Goldman

I’ve made a career out of unleashing the untapped potential of workforces at organizations of all sizes. An unengaged workforce costs organizations more than just money: it costs opportunity and can halt growth. If you’re a manager at an organization, it’s easy to recognize an unengaged workforce, but it can seem impossible to reengage them! I’ve written down my secrets for keeping a workforce engaged (or reengaging them!) in the newly released 2nd edition to Performance Breakthrough: The Four Secrets of Passionate Organizations.  I’m pleased to share an excerpt from the book with you here. Continue reading “Performance Breakthrough” →

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Highpoint Publishes Performance Breakthrough: The Four Secrets of Passionate Organizations, 2nd Edition

Posted on by Mike Goldman

(New York, June 1, 2015) The Gallup Organization has found that only 29 percent of employees are truly engaged in the work they do. That’s like an engine running at less than one third of its power. Now imagine a company where eight out of ten people are truly engaged. What would this mean to productivity, morale, retention, and ability to recruit top talent? The proven path to that transformation is revealed in Performance Breakthrough: The Four Secrets of Passionate Organizations, 2nd Edition (Highpoint Executive Publishing; hardcover, $24.99, 978- 0-9861585-2-0; e-book, $9.99, 978-0-9861585-0-6).

Revised and enhanced from the popular first edition by nationally recognized speaker and consultant, Mike Goldman, Performance Breakthrough 2nd Edition reveals the four secrets for creating a more passionate, productive, and profitable organization. “I’ve worked with dozens of companies over the last twenty-five years, and from large organizations such as Disney, Levi Strauss, and Polo Ralph Lauren to the local accounting firm, hotel, or plumber—the largest opportunity for improvement was helping people better realize their potential,” says Goldman. “New strategies, processes, and systems are certainly important, but people will trump them every time.”

Performance Breakthrough’s message is communicated in the form of a fictional story to help make its concepts real and easily understood, augmented by new case studies, summaries, checklists, and other tools that will help an organization of any size create positive energy, find passion, and achieve its own Performance Breakthrough.

As Verne Harnish, CEO, Gazelles, and author of Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) states in the book’s foreword, “Performance Breakthrough provides a framework to drive enthusiasm and engagement throughout your organization. This framework is based on simple, actionable, and inexpensive ideas, not high-level concepts. The story, case studies, and tools you’re about to learn will both motivate you to inject more passion into your organization, and provide you with specific steps to make it happen.”

Businesspeople Stacking Hands

How to Focus on Your Employees’ Strengths

Posted on by Mike Goldman

Would you rather have a well-rounded employee or a world-class employee?

When making hiring decisions, most leaders look for well-rounded individuals and create a list of skills and experiences they would like a job candidate to possess. Unfortunately, very few leaders have knowledge of the talents required for the job. Talents are habits and tendencies wired into our brains from an early age—things like leadership, flexibility, love of learning, or empathy. On the other hand, knowledge and skills are learned and mastered through experience. Continue reading “How to Focus on Your Employees’ Strengths” →

Businessman Ready To Chase His Vision

Five Ways to Celebrate Victories and Improve Your Bottom Line

Posted on by Mike Goldman

In today’s fast-paced, goals driven business world, many business leaders think that celebrating or rewarding their employees requires too much time and money. In other words, they believe they don’t have time to celebrate employee accomplishments or have fun because they have pending work and deadlines that take priority, or they think celebrating always means spending money.  Other leaders are of the mindset that their employees should just be thankful to have jobs, and there’s no reason to celebrate what they get paid to do. These leaders are missing out on the many advantages that rewarding employees offers.

Celebrating is not just about making people feel good and having fun. It’s also about generating positive energy, which improves both top line and bottom line results. Additionally, celebrating your employees leads to passionate, engaged employees, and that is a requirement to achieve consistent top and bottom line growth in any organization. Grumpy, disengaged employees alienate good customers, kill productivity, and send “A” players running to the competition.

To improve a company’s top and bottom line, it is important for leaders to change their mindset about celebrating their employees and having fun at work. They need to understand that when employees are engaged, they work harder, smarter and longer, are more creative, and refer other “A” players to the company. Also, realize that it is important to celebrate activity, not just results. By the time activity leads to results, people might be burnt out.

Therefore, if you want to have a motivated team that achieves the company’s goals, you need to find ways to measure and reward positive outcomes. Compliment and celebrate your team’s accomplishments, both big and small. Reward activity, not just financial performance. Below are a few specific ideas to help you identify productive ways to celebrate.

1. Quarterly Themes or Contests

The key to helping people remember what is most important in any given time period is to make it memorable and fun. The theme or contest can focus on revenue goals, customer service levels, safety statistics, or any key performance indicator deemed critical for the organization. The theme or contest should include the following:

  • Theme name

  • Theme scoreboard or image (visual)

  • Reward for achieving the theme goal (a reward is typically a tangible item—money, gift, etc.)

  • Theme celebration (a celebration is typically a special experience or event for achieving the theme—like a party).

 2. Above and Beyond the Call of Duty (ABCD) Award

Reward people for doing something outside of the scope of their job in order to help a client, coworker, or supplier. Nominations for this award can be made by anyone (supervisor, coworker, or subordinate). Hold an “all hands” meeting each month where the stories behind each of the nominations are told.

3. Employee Dollars

Give out fake money when an employee is caught doing something great. This money can only be redeemed for work-related privileges or gifts (time off, gift to their favorite charity, etc.).

4. Include the Family

Reward an employee by taking that person and his or her family out to lunch, dinner, or a show. Including the family adds a nice personal touch, which is greatly appreciated.

5. Thank You Notes

Show your appreciation by sending a thank you note immediately following a job well done. We spend half our waking lives at work. Shouldn’t we figure out how to make it fun and rewarding?

Leadership

The Four Secrets of Passionate Leaders

Posted on by Mike Goldman

One of the biggest challenges today’s business leaders face when striving to take their organization to the next level is finding ways to inject more passion into their teams while maintaining a consistent level of passion themselves. Injecting passion into an organization is difficult and fleeting at the best of times, but in the midst of the frustrations and disappointments that come with striving to grow your business, it is even more challenging.

As a leader, a decrease in your level of passion can start a vicious cycle, especially when faced with sluggish organizational growth.  Few business leaders have the recipe for successfully inspiring a team’s passion, much less maintaining it. Some may even be missing the key ingredients. As a result, their efforts fall short. To take your organization to the next level, you need the right people, strategies and execution habits to achieve record-breaking business growth that boosts the bottom line.

To be a passionate leader, embrace these four secrets:

1. Surround yourself with the right people.

  • Discover your organization’s core values – Core values are a non-negotiable handful of rules your organization lives by every day. These values become your organization’s attitude and should drive your organization’s behavior, who you hire, and who you promote.

  • Hire “A” players – Kip Tindell of The Container Store believes one “A” player is as productive as three mediocre players. Use a proven hiring process like Topgrading to ensure you are hiring a high percentage of “A” players.

  • Take action on your “C” players – There are only two options for “C” players. Take advantage of their strengths by moving them somewhere else within your organization where they can be “A” players, or move them out of your organization.

  • Build your external team – It’s important to have people outside of your organization who can be a sounding board for ideas, pat you on the back, or kick you in the ass. Your external team should include a mastermind group, advisory board, and a coach.

2. Keep your eye on your purpose and vision.

  • Discover your purpose – If you are a successful leader, you are probably very goal focused. Balance the scale by defining a life’s purpose that focuses on service to others. While goals won’t be achieved every day, you can live your purpose every day. Read The Rhythm of Life  by Matthew Kelly for more information on creating your life’s purpose.

  • Create a personal vision – Another way to take your focus off the day-to-day struggles is to create a three-year vision for your life. Write it as if you are already there and thankful for all that has happened. Dividing them into the following sections helps keep the focus: Finance, Career, Family, Social, Physical, Mental and Spiritual.

  • Create an organizational vision – Create three to five year goals and a ten to fifteen year BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal). Read Collins and Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.

3. Implement a consistent execution process.

  • Identify a small number of priorities – If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Create three to five priorities for your organization for the quarter and the year. Review the priorities weekly and update them quarterly.

  • Keep score – Use sports as a model and know the score. At the end of every day, your team members should be able to answer the question, “How did you do today?” with one or more key metrics.

  • Create a meeting rhythm – Keep your organization cohesive and aligned through consistent communication. It will also speed decision-making. For great meeting rhythm models, read Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish or Death By Meeting by Patrick Lencioni.

4. Work on your attitude every day.

  • Look down – Though having a long-term vision is critical, it is also important to focus on your short-term progress and goals. It is like pedaling a bicycle up a big hill. If you keep your eye on the top of the hill, you may get discouraged before you reach the top. If you keep your eye on the road and see the progress you are making, it will encourage you to keep going.

  • Tell yourself a positive story – When things are uncertain—as they very often are for business leaders—it’s easy to tell yourself a negative story, such as, “That prospect isn’t calling back because they lost interest in our services.” These negative stories can spiral out of control and have a major impact on your level of passion. Make a habit of telling yourself a positive, productive story instead. This doesn’t mean being blind to things that may be going wrong. This brings focus on the productive actions you can take instead of on the frustration and paralysis.

Have an empowering attitude “recipe” – We all have a healthy recipe for feeling good. It might be a specific piece of music, a long walk, meditation, talking to a friend, exercise, or a positive book. For me, a long walk and AC/DC’s Back in Black does it every time!

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What’s Your Meeting Rhythm?

Posted on by Mike Goldman

In my work with growth-minded, mid-market companies, I’ve found that most company dysfunctions sprout from a lack of communication and alignment amongst the leadership team.

Here are some symptoms of the problem to better describe what I mean:

  • Frustration with the lack of follow-through on company and individual commitments
  • Key decisions are discussed again and again with no resolution
  • Lack of trust amongst the leadership team…flowing down through the organization
  • Low employee engagement…starting with the leadership team
  • Lost productivity and opportunity due to lack of agreement as to the top 1-3 priorities for the quarter and year
  • Leaders spend more time putting out fires than defining and communicating company strategy
  • Excessive micro-managing by the CEO and key leaders

The problems spiral downward as leaders feel like they have less time for MEETINGS (often said like a dirty word) because they’re putting out fires.

I often hear “we don’t need more meetings, we talk all the time”. What these leaders don’t understand is that by implementing the RIGHT MEETINGS, with the RIGHT AGENDAS facilitated in the RIGHT WAY will actually save them time and increase productivity throughout the organization.

The right MEETING RHYTHMS will enable:

  • Increased productivity as everyone is aligned on the top priorities
  • Quicker decisions as the leadership team becomes aware of challenges faster and reacts to them faster as well
  • Increased accountability throughout the organization
  • Improved trust and collaboration

While all organizations are unique, I’ve found the meeting rhythm below is a great starting point.

Meeting Rhythm Summary

Annual Planning
Purpose:

  • This is where the old plan is assessed, the current realities are tested, and the new plan is formulated

Duration:

  • 2 Day Off-Site

Agenda:

  • Review results from the previous year and quarter
  • Check in on company’s cultural health and team performance
  • Review and adjust strategic thinking
  • Review and adjust 3-5 year plan
  • Conduct exercises to improve people, strategy, execution or cash
  • Participate in executive education to keep you sharp and new ideas flowing to grow the business
  • Plan your next successful year and quarter

Quarterly Planning
Purpose:

  • Emphasis is on reviewing and re-setting Priorities and Goals (Rocks) for the next 13-Week Meeting Rhythm Cycle for the entire organization.

Duration:

  • 1 Day

Agenda:

  • Review results from the previous quarter
  • Check in on company’s cultural health and team performance
  • Participate in executive education to keep you sharp and new ideas flowing to grow the business
  • Collaborate on strategic opportunity
  • Plan your next successful quarter

Monthly Meeting
Purpose:

  • These serve as directed review and education opportunities.

Duration:

  • ½ Day

Agenda:

  • Review progress on quarterly priorities
  • Discuss the numbers (KPI Dashboard)
  • Mid-course (quarter) adjustments
  • Collaborate on strategic opportunity
  • Participate in executive education to keep you sharp and new ideas flowing to grow the business

Weekly Meeting
Purpose:

  • These serve as a Status and Update Session for the entire team at either the executive or the departmental levels. More time is spent dealing with deeper detail and examination/education on an operational/tactical level.

Duration:

  • 1 hour

Agenda:

  • Status – Last week’s results and impediments
  • Individual accountability – priorities and KPIs
  • Chief executive commentary, guidance and inspiration

Daily Huddle
Purpose:

  • These stand-up meeting serves as daily synchronization for the entire team, at the executive and departmental levels. Information is shared either up or down the reporting chain. These sessions are designed to expose issues that need resolution, yet not necessarily resolve them on the spot.

Duration:

  • 7-12 minutes

Agenda:

  • Good news
  • Daily metric, Top Priority for the day
  • Where are you stuck?
  • Word or thought for the day

A few last thoughts:

  • If you’re annual planning meeting is not as productive as it should be, it’s because you’re not having effective quarterly meetings
  • If you’re quarterly meetings are not as productive as they should be, it’s because you’re not having effective monthly meetings
  • If you’re monthly meetings are not as productive as they should be, it’s because you’re not having effective weekly meetings
  • If you’re weekly meetings are not as productive as they should be, it’s because you’re not having effective daily huddles

I know this seems like a lot of meetings, but it’s exactly what your organization needs. Try the daily huddles and weekly meetings for 30 days before you give up. I promise it will save you time and speed your decision-making.

GET YOUR CALENDAR OUT AND SET YOUR MEETING RHYTHM NOW!!

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A Better Way to Measure Employee Happiness

Posted on by Mike Goldman

By Verne Harnish & Mike Goldman

Successful leaders know they need to balance the needs of employees, customers, and shareholders to build a thriving company. Many firms excel at tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like profits, as well as customer feedback on a weekly or daily basis, but they fall flat when it comes to monitoring employees’ morale—and it shows. New research by Gallup found that 52% of American workers are not engaged in their work, while another 18% are “actively disengaged.”

Many CEOs think that they can keep an eye on morale with annual employee survey, but that is like driving your car by only looking in the rearview mirror.  By the time you get the results, most of the “accidents” have already happened: Grumpy employees have alienated good customers, incompetent managers have killed productivity, and the best talent has left for the competition.  You need to measure employee happiness daily or weekly.

NEW ANALYTICS TOOLS

There are some cutting edge tools to help. Apple and Rackspace use the employee Net Promoter System (eNPS), a metric that is picking up traction, as Fred Reichheld, the intellectual father of NPS, mentions in his book The Ultimate Question 2.0. He has launched a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool that will make it possible for team leaders to drive weekly conversations about progress toward goals, constraints and priorities for keeping customers happy. It is now in beta testing. Stay tuned.

While the well-known NPS tracks customer loyalty, the eNPS measures employees’ happiness, asking them in a confidential survey: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend your workplace to a friend or family member?” Employees have room to comment, providing qualitative data, too.

Be prepared: The scores you get from your team are likely to be lower than you get from your customers on the traditional NPS. Employees tend to be tough critics—but if you’re willing to listen, they will tell you what you need to hear. At the same time, don’t obsess about your scores. The qualitative data is important, too.

Atlassian, an Australian software company, created an internal app called MoodApp (I love the name!) for iPads and scattered them throughout their headquarters, including one to the side of the elevator. On their way out, employees answer questions like “How are you feeling today?” and “Do you think Atlassian is a fun place to work?” A question about how much feedback people get from their managers uncovered deficits and triggered leadership development training to improve the situation.

Choosing a tool that will allow you to measure morale on your team daily, weekly or at other frequent intervals will help you keep levels of engagement high. TINYPulse, a cloud-based tool that sends out weekly survey emails, captures anonymous feedback from employees and offers tools to help management to visualize and analyze the data.  When answering a “question of the week,” employees have space to add comments and suggestions.

One handy feature of TINYPulse is the ability to customize the questions you ask. One company I know lets employees come up with the weekly question–a technique that is worth considering.

TINYPulse also allows you to comment directly on suggestions and initiate a private, forum-like dialogue with the employee.  Just make sure that you use the system in a way that does not violate employees’ anonymity, or they won’t want to use it anymore.

TALK WITH EMPLOYEES WEEKLY

New technologies are no substitute for meaningful conversations with your team. Senior leaders should formally visit with one employee each week and ask three simple questions: “What do we need to start doing, stop doing and keep doing?”

Then take a few minutes at the weekly management meeting to share what you’ve learned. This qualitative data, collected weekly, will give the senior team a real sense of what’s working and not working among the employees as patterns emerge over weeks and months of conversations.

Add to this feedback by looking at some KPIs such as absenteeism, attrition or tenure with the company, knowledge-sharing activities, training hours, or the number of kudos people give each other.

RESPOND TO FEEDBACK QUICKLY

Make sure that you have the management bandwidth to quickly respond to feedback. Gathering data is useless if you don’t act on it. Nothing is more frustrating than being asked your opinion and then seeing it ignored.

People, your most valuable asset, are intangible in accounting terms. Measuring their happiness is a way of making them tangible. It will be some time until this type of metric will appear on a balance sheet, but that doesn’t mean you should not pay attention to these measures. They’re some of the best leading indicators of a company´s overall health and value.