Mike Goldman the author of the book “Performance Breakthrough: The 4 Secrets of Passionate Organizations” joins Enterprise Radio. Mike has over 25 years of experience consulting and coaching companies from the local entrepreneur to the Fortune 500.
http://epodcastnetwork.com/performance-breakthrough-the-4-secrets-of-passionate-organizations/
Mike Goldman is the founder of Performance Breakthrough. It’s a firm that helps small to medium sized businesses create a plan for growth, and Mike’s firm assists them in executing that plan.
Listen to Mike on the Success Podcast here: http://www.successpodcast.net/blog/2015/5/26/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”
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?
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!
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:
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:
While all organizations are unique, I’ve found the meeting rhythm below is a great starting point.
Meeting Rhythm Summary
Annual Planning
Purpose:
Duration:
Agenda:
Quarterly Planning
Purpose:
Duration:
Agenda:
Monthly Meeting
Purpose:
Duration:
Agenda:
Weekly Meeting
Purpose:
Duration:
Agenda:
Daily Huddle
Purpose:
Duration:
Agenda:
A few last thoughts:
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!!
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.
