Category: Leadership

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How Many Partners Do You Have?

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“I want to take my business to the next level. We need to grow by 40% this year and 150% over the next 3 years.  But…”

I heard this from a business owner just last week. His “but” was his concern that his staff wasn’t prepared to get it done. They didn’t follow procedures, spent time on unimportant tasks, didn’t think out of the box and looked to him for all of the important answers.  With those issues, taking his business to the next level will be difficult if not impossible.

What he needs are some partners. When I say “partners”, I don’t mean legal partners with a financial investment in the business. I mean people who have an emotional investment in the business. He needs to find ways to make people feel like owners even though they’re not. As the true owner of the business, he may never have a team that’s a passionate as him about growing the business. However, there are things he can do to dramatically increase his team’s level of ownership and passion. By doing this, he can create a team that feels ownership, even if they’re not true owners.

Here are some ways to make that happen:

1.       Conduct Joint Planning & Goal Setting – Typically, goals are set by leaders and passed down to the “rank and file”. Since the team had no hand in setting these goals, there’s never total buy-in. What’s worse, when goals aren’t met, the team blames unrealistic goals, rather than their own performance. Leaders should give their team enough information (company goals, historical performance, strategic objectives, etc.) to set their own goals. Of course, leaders should still be responsible for approving all goals; challenging those goals that are either too aggressive or not aggressive enough.

2.       Help Employees Understand the WIIFM – Most leaders try to motivate by rallying the troops around what’s important to the company. That’s important…but there’s something much more important. People are more motivated by What’s In It For Me (WIIFM). It’s not that they’re selfish, it’s just human nature.  Work with your team members to understand how they’re personally impacted by the business goals that have been set. Notice I didn’t recommend you tell them how they’re impacted. Everyone is different. You (and/or your leadership team) need to work with each team member to find their own unique “why”.

3.       Don’t Have All The Answers – Don’t let your ego get the best of you. Stop dictating decisions to your team and ask your team for advice. This doesn’t mean “management by consensus”. Ultimately, as a leader, you need to make the final decision, but it’s critical to make your team part of the process. Even if you think you know the answer, ask your team what they think first, before dictating a decision.

4.       Encourage Conflict – Does your team get along great? Do you 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…you’ve got problems. A team needs conflict to evolve. Think of it as Darwin’s theory of evolution for business. If good ideas don’t crush bad ideas, and great ideas don’t crush good ideas, a business (and its employees) will grow stagnant and die.

Implementing these ideas will certainly allow business owners to do a great deal more than just increase revenues. Having additional “partners” in a business will also increase productivity, improve morale, enhance customer loyalty, increase margins and maybe most important of all, reduce stress.

How are you cultivating partners in your business?

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How Do My Goals Contribute To The Strategy?

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Strategy and goals should influence everyone’s behavior in the organization!

The work at the top of the organization in creating strategy and goals is intended to influence behavior that drives results. Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for the primary impact of the work to remain at the senior management level. It’s kind of like having a car with an engine and no wheels. Despite the importance of driving the strategy and goals deeper into the organization, the messages as to how the strategy relates to execution typically become unclear and confusing the further down they go.

Passing goals down without creating meaning causes frustration…

The responsibility for creating clarity around what the strategy means at the business unit, team and individual levels, and for ensuring that the strategy is executed is a shared management responsibility.

There are many dynamics within fast paced changing organizations that contribute to the lack of alignment. However, the biggest obstacle appears to be “a lack of understanding.” Why is this? Repeating the company strategy is easy enough, but without translating strategy into relatable actions with those who are expected to execute at every level of the organization, has limited impact. When managers involve people and teams they lead in these discussions, SMART goals can be written that connect everyone’s contributions to the strategy. It also improves sustained commitment through the ability to measure ongoing results.

Planning backwards focuses on results…

Managers can facilitate the process by asking three questions:

  1. How does the strategy affect our unit?
  2. What must we accomplish?
  3. How will we accomplish it?

Through this process a shared language and framework for how to think and talk about alignment occurs among the team/department enabling them to match their behavior to a set of commonly understood goals and actions. To create focus on the truly critical goals to your team and the company, apply the following questions as a litmus test to each of the existing goals: 

  • What is its economic impact? – How will this goal contribute to company performance?
  • Is it aligned with the company’s strategy?
  • How will it satisfy stakeholders?
  • What is my level of passion, talent, and energy for it?
  • Do we have the resources? 

If people in the organization don’t understand how the company is supposed to be different and what opportunities they are to pursue, how can they make the tough choices that they have to make every day? (Porter, 1980)

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DON’T Use Business Metrics…At Your Own Peril

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They say what you don’t know won’t hurt you, but nothing could be further from the truth when you run a small business. If you operate based on “gut instinct,” or you make assumptions on how your business is performing without knowing the facts, you can run into problems quickly. Fortunately, there is a simple solution. By monitoring a few key business metrics, you can quickly gain a handle on your business and start on the path to improving your profitability.

Business Metrics
Business metrics, or measurements of business activity, have long been seen as the exclusive tool of the pure number cruncher, the bookkeeper, and the statistician. That’s no longer the case. In today’s increasingly flooded marketplace, the mantra must be: “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” By defining the metrics that are important to your business and monitoring them closely, you gain three key benefits:

– Focus. Defining the metrics that are most important to your business allows you to tune out everything that isn’t related to those key measurements. As a result, you’ll find that you and your business are much more efficient.

– Better Vision. Companies that monitor metrics can spot threats and opportunities faster than companies that don’t. Your metrics will give you keen insights into what’s happening within the four walls of your business as well as overall trends in your industry.

– Better Decisions. Metrics provide a framework for making business decisions. With the numbers in black and white, you can make well-reasoned decisions on how to proceed. If it improves your key metrics, consider it. If not, move on.

Implementing Metrics
Getting started with metrics is easier than you might think. Many small business owners don’t understand how simple it can be to collect and analyze these important numbers. A simple seven-step process gets you started.
1. Define Your Goals. Make a list of business goals. Goals might include sales objectives, target profit margins, or success at signing up new customers.
2. Define the Metrics. For each business goal on your list, write down a metric that will help you track your progress to success. For example, if your goal is signing up new customers, your metric might involve stating the number of meetings you will have per week with perspective customers.
3. Benchmark Current Status. Now that you established your metrics, you need to measure them. You must determine exactly how your business is doing, even if the truth is hard to swallow. By establishing the current value of each metric, you will be able to track your improvements in the future.
4. Put in Place a System to Monitor and Report Metrics. You may need to add new business processes that will help you calculate and report your metrics. For example, is the number of your customers who view your customer service as being “excellent,” then you may want to survey your customers every month and ask them how you are doing.
5. Communicate Metrics with Employees. Once you’ve defined the key metrics that are important to your business, be sure to let your staff know. Then, everyone can make decisions that help improve the metrics.
6. Review the Metrics and Make Decisions. With your metrics in place, you have greater insight into which strategies work and which don’t. Review the metrics and take steps to improve your results.
7. Promote Successes. When your metrics improve, let your staff know and reward everybody that helped make things better.

Effective use of business metrics can have a profound impact on your business. As you gain a better understanding of your business and move closer to achieving important goals, your day-to-day work will become easier and your staff will be more accountable to the metrics that matter. You’ll make better decisions, based on data, and you will have a powerful new tool for managing your business.

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The Recipe For Mediocre

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I hope you had a great  Thanksgiving!

With the New Year coming up, I bet you’re starting to think about new goals for your business. I would also bet that your goal is not to be mediocre in 2011.

I’ve just made a short video that will change your perpective on what makes us great vs. mediocre.
In this video, you’ll learn:
  • What most of us spend 80% of our time doing and how it keeps us from being great.
  • The real meaning of “well rounded”
  • How to create an extraordinary team
Be sure to watch the video right now. Just click here or on the image below). It’ll only take you about 2 minutes and it will dramatically improve your business and your life.

After you watch the video, be sure to check out the tools (team coaching, individual coaching and products) I have available to help you take the next step.

Break through and make it happen!

Mike
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The Golden Rule Doesn’t Work Part 2

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In our last video, we challenged your long held beliefs about the Golden Rule. We talked about treating people the way THEY wanted to be treated instead of how WE wanted to be treated.

The challenge is in finding out how other people want to be treated. Most of us don’t have a clue.

In this video, you’ll learn  
  • Why asking someone how they want to be treated almost never works
  • How do use behavioral interviewing as a leadership tool
Be sure to watch the video right now. Just click here or on the image below). It’ll only take you about 2 minutes and it will dramatically improve your business and your life.
 
After you watch the video, be sure to check out the tools (coaching and products) I have available to help you take the next step.
 
Break through and make it happen!
 
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Argh! Do I have to go to another meeting today?

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Which of these situations has happened to you?

  • In your last meeting, did you walk out without a clear idea of what you were supposed to do?
  • Have you looked around a meeting and wondered why all those people were invited?
  • Have you calculated how much money your organization is “spending” waiting for meetings to start?

We all know that business can’t operate without meetings – meetings to plan, meetings for updates, meetings to keep communication lines open.   However, effectively-run meetings are often hard to find in the workplace.  A survey by Hofstra University projected that over $40 billion is wasted on mismanaged meetings every year.   Since there are between 11 million and 33 million meetings conducted in the United States every day, the business of meetings is critical to everyone’s continued success.

As a result of discussions with a cross-section of employees and organizations, we’ve put together a Top Five list of tips for effective meetings. 

Tip #1:  Communicate the goal and the agenda for the meeting.  Publicize that goal when you schedule the meeting, and then evaluate every topic against that goal – if the discussion doesn’t support the goal, then it shouldn’t be in the agenda.   At Intel Corporation, they keep a poster in every meeting room that says “Do you know the purpose of this meeting?”  How many meetings actually include a firm agenda that is published in advance to all the attendees?  An agenda should clearly state the topics, an approximate length for discussion, the “owner” of each topic, and action steps for each topic. 

Tip #2:  Identify the meeting participants.  Recent research shows that after the first seven participants, every additional person lowers the productivity of the group in a meeting.   Wow!  Consider your own meetings – how many do you go to that have more than seven participants?  Consider who really needs to attend based on the agenda.  Also, remember that the more people invited to the meeting, the longer the meeting will take.

Tip #3:  Establish the ground rules for the meeting.  Some typical items to include in the ground rules are when agendas are due to participants, the use of technology in a meeting, and start and end times.  Designate a time keeper who is not the meeting organizer.  One of the biggest time wasters is meetings that don’t start and end on time – wouldn’t you agree? 

Tip #4:  Use a Parking Lot.   A Parking Lot is a place to put topics that fall outside the meeting agenda – or that should be postponed for later.   Some meeting organizers use visual Parking Lots – such as a piece of large paper posted on the wall where ideas can be posted during meetings so they don’t get lost.  Some meeting organizers simply record parking lot ideas on a pad of paper – or assign someone to capture them and send the list out for inclusion in future meeting agendas.  The disciplined use of a “parking lot” will keep your meetings on track and on agenda.

Tip #5:  Set Clear Action Items.  Establish what is next, how will it be done, who is responsible, and deadline details before you leave the meeting.   How do you hold people accountable in your meetings?  Even if you are not the meeting organizer, you can still push for accountability – remind the host to set clear next steps and timelines.

Bonus Tip:  Evaluate Your Meetings.   Periodically, take the time to review the regular meetings in your organization.  Do they all still have a clear purpose?  Are they the right length?   Are the right people attending?  What needs to change in order to make your meetings more effective?

As a final thought, consider this quote from Patrick Lencioni’s book, Death by Meeting, “Most executives I know spend hours sending email, leaving voice mail, and roaming the halls to clarify issues that should have been made clear during a meeting in the first place … I have no doubt that sneaker time is the most subtle, dangerous, and underestimated black hole in corporate America.” 

What is your biggest meeting challenge?  We want to hear from you.  Write to us and share your stories and your ideas.   And if you want to dive deeper into this topic – and especially how to make your meetings more effective even when you are not in charge of them, email us at mgoldman@pb-coach.com.

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Moments of Truth In The Customer Experience

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Nancy complains, “Why can’t they get their act together? This is so frustrating. The first person I talked to wasn’t even nice. The second person was much nicer but couldn’t make a decision. I got sent to a technician and got lost in their phone system. It turns out they don’t have the fix I need. Then when I try to return what I bought, it sounds like the person in accounting doesn’t even know what to do to give me a credit.”

Has this ever happened to you? Not a pleasant customer experience.

Each organization’s moments of truth are when it touches each customer. Is the customer experience delightful, positive and successful? The whole point of all the company’s strategizing, structuring, systematizing, training, employment practices, service/product creation and testing, marketing and sales efforts, is to get that customer to buy and to buy multiple times. Most of us have heard that it takes 5 times as much money to get a new customer as a repeat customer. Also, we’ve heard that raising customer loyalty by 5% can increase profitability from 25-100%. So creating that positive customer experience (first time and every time) is the focus of everything we do when we build a business. Whether or not we’re thinking about ‘total customer experience,’ the customer is always thinking:  Do I like this? Will I stay? Will I come back? Is the product/service good? Is it worth the hassle if other parts of the experience are not good?  Will I tell other people about my good/bad experience?

So if your organization’s total efforts are not leading to good customer experiences, you are missing the boat and leaving money on the table.

What goes into the Total Customer Experience?

Let’s look at Nancy’s complaint and the ‘moments of truth’ that are revealed. What does it mean ‘to get their act together?’

Emotional Connection – The first person wasn’t even nice. People buy from people they know, like and trust. If someone isn’t personable, caring and relating to Nancy as a unique human being, your company isn’t even getting to first base.

Empowered Decision Making – Too bad Nancy had to get passed around.  It’s frustrating to get passed from person to person until there is finally someone who has any authority.. Companies who are recognized for their superior customer experiences empower the person who answers the phone to make most decisions. In order to make this happen, they recruit wisely and invest in developing their people to make good decisions, to buy into the company’s values and vision, to understand the customer’s needs, to gather feedback. 

Infrastructure – The phone system, the staff’s capabilities using phone and technology, availability of information about each customer (customer relationship management), knowledge database,  technology to track trouble tickets or complaints. This kind of infrastructure allows caring staff to do a better job with the resources they need. It allows for quicker troubleshooting and availability of information on a broader basis for more empowered decision making. It would have allowed Nancy to find out sooner rather than later that ‘the fix’ she needed wasn’t available. But even better it would collect information about how many customers were having the same issue so the company could create ‘the fix’ sooner and take the issue off the table.

Systems – If the accounting team had a documented system for handling returns and credits, and each person was trained in it, then Nancy would not have had such a terrible experience. In fact, if the processes were really systematized and the right infrastructure was in place, the initial person who took the call could have handled it himself.

These are just a few of the things that companies who manage the total customer experience look at. Of course, it all starts with leadership. Leaders who get their heads out of the sand and recognize the importance of the customer experience want to infuse attention to the customer experience as they do strategic planning, diagram the organizational structure, create systems and processes in all departments, design their internal reward and recognition structures, and recruit, develop and empower their personnel. That’s what Nancy’s comment about ‘getting their act together’ is really all about.

If you have a story about a really great customer experience, please share it here along with your thoughts about the components that came together to create the delightful experience you had. Thanks for sharing.

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The Golden Rule Doesn’t Work!

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Do you adhere to the adage that all employees should be treated equally? If so, your team will never achieve their true potential, and never be truly happy in their work.
 
I’ve just made a short video that will change your perpective on your long held beliefs about the Golden Rule.
In this video, you’ll learn  
  • Why the Golden Rule doesn’t work
  • What you need to know to motivate your yourself and your team
  • The principle of “acceptance” and the platinum rule
 
Be sure to watch the video right now. Just click here or on the image below). It’ll only take you about 2 minutes and it will dramatically improve your business and your life.
 
After you watch the video, be sure to check out the tools (coaching and products) I have available to help you take the next step.
 
Break through and make it happen!
 
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Creating a Culture That Drives Personal Innovation

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This blog post was written by Tammy Kohl of Resource Associates Corporation

Improvement is evolutionary where innovation is revolutionary. “Innovation is about creating breakaway differentiation, it’s about creating superior economic returns and it’s about creating what author Geoffrey Moore describes, as ‘an outcome competitors are either unable or unwilling to match’.” (Peter Lefler founder of The Spruance Group)

In order for a company to achieve innovative ideas the company needs to foster a culture of personal innovation. Every employee, team member, or contributor within your organization can enable innovation. They are living every process, talking with every customer, working on every production line, so they know very clearly what works well and what does not work. And, if asked they can tell the organization how it can be done better! The question becomes what process does your management team have in place to ask your employees what they believe the organization can do better?

Innovative opportunities are constantly squelched by poor organizational goal definition, poor alignment of actions to goals, poor participation in teams, poor monitoring of results, and poor communication as well as access to information. Help your people be part of the solution and contribute to a higher level of organizational success.

In a recent project with an insurance company, a cross functional team was brought together to evaluate, rework and present a low cost, no cost solution to shorten their policy approval process which was currently 13 days. They knew the industry average was 12 days. The team worked together for five days. By Friday afternoon the team was presenting to management a no-cost, reworked process taking the existing process of 13 days down to three days. Once the team was given the objectives they went to work and as a team saved the organization 10 days and a significant amount of money. They did not just present improvement … they innovated the process.

Allowing your employees to contribute means they are participating and taking responsibility for accomplishing goals. It’s important for each team member to have a clear understanding of his/her part in helping the team accomplish its goals. Utilizing employees with different strengths creates high performing and innovative teams. The key to employee contribution and innovation is in creating a culture in which people are encouraged to challenge, question, and try new things.

Creating an innovative culture is not a switch that can be flipped overnight. There may be resistance at first because changing a culture is never easy. However, in this case the change and the results are worth it. Communicate the organization’s goal and objectives and communicate the details of those goals frequently. Put a process in place that offers a safe way for employees to share ideas for improvement and innovation and always provide feedback. Establish cross-functional teams to evaluate important business processes and listen intently to what they have to say. If management stays committed to the cultural change, you will see the insecurity and resistance dissipate fostering some of the best innovate and revolutionary ideas your company may ever have seen.

Tammy A.S. Kohl is President of Resource Associates Corporation. For over 30 years, RAC has specialized in helping businesses achieve sustainable results through management consulting, strategic planning, leadership development, executive coaching and youth leadership. For information on creating a leadership succession plan visit www.resourceassociatescorp.com or contact RAC directly at 800.799.6227.

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Leading More By Doing Less

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An executive recently lamented that she and her company had far too many projects going on. All of them were important, she said, but insufficient progress was being made on most. In fact, she described her company as being “very good at getting things 80% done!” “Why can’t we ever complete anything?” she asked me.

 This isn’t the first time that I have heard a business owner or leader talk about this struggle. Often the situation gets oversimplified as “too much to do and not enough time or people to do it”, which seems like an impossible problem to address…so many times it is merely ignored. Frequently, however, this problem is the result of a less obvious issue: a lack of focus by the company’s leaders.

 The Power of Focus

A wise person once said that if you chase two rabbits, both will escape. The same holds true in business as many companies have too many items on their To Do list. This lack of prioritization and focus leads to poor results. According to a Pricewaterhouse Coopers survey of 200 companies in 30 countries, only 2.5% of these companies had 100% of their projects come in on time, within budget, to scope, and delivering the right business benefits. This study demonstrates that 97.5% of the time we get it wrong in some way… and prioritizing can help. Just as focus and concentration allow your mind to function more effectively, prioritization allows businesses to achieve greater results.

“Doing Less”

Prioritizing can seem especially difficult when all projects seem important. But this is precisely when it can yield the best results. An oft-missing element in prioritizing is a process in which employees have confidence; one by which initiatives can be compared to determine their relative importance to the business. A fairly simple process is plot each initiative on the following 4-quadrant chart:

  • Initiatives landing in the upper left (high benefit, low cost) are “winners”…do it now.
  • Initiatives landing in the lower right (low benefit, high cost) are “losers”…dump it
  • Initiatives landing in the upper right (high benefit, high cost) need require a return on investment (ROI) analysis to determine if and when to move forward
  • Initiatives landing in the lower left (low benefit, low cost) are prioritized based on “gut feel”

 

Leading More

To get the best results from prioritizing, strong leadership is required to ensure that:

  • All projects are included in the evaluation and that there are no “sacred cows.”
  • Personalities, politics and quests for power are not allowed to influence the process.
  • The negative effects of existing paradigms and “business as usual” are minimized.
  • Employees are inspired to participate, buy in to the importance of this work, and trust the process to provide valid outcomes.
  • The outcomes are followed through on and resources are properly allocated to the “critical few” most important projects.
  • Prioritization is not viewed as a “one and done” activity. It needs to be part of the business’ standard operating process and performed on a regular basis.

Difficult challenges and decisions will be faced during this process, especially if focus and prioritizing are not core competencies. Elbert Hubbard said that “It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.” One way that leaders can help achieve greater results is by having and instilling the discipline to focus on a few, critical projects instead of trying to do everything all at once.

What prioritization struggles are you having? How have you tried to resolve them?