Dear Santa,

I have been a good employee all year and wish that you could help my manager bring me the following gifts this season. They would help me become happier and more productive next year.

1. Give me the gift of clear expectations – help my manager become more clear in what he or she expects of me. I am tired of guessing the expectations and getting limited direction.
2. Give me the gift of regular feedback – rather than wait until my performance review, I wish my manager would give me feedback regularly – daily, weekly and monthly. If he or she gave me regular feedback on what I was doing well or needed to improve, I would do my best to improve.
3. Give me the gift of feeling part of the team – like everyone else I have the need to belong and feel part of the team. Help my manager build a stronger team by treating people fairly, not playing favorites and not talking about people behind their backs.
4. Give me the gift of better communication – help my manager keep me better informed about what is going on. If communication is so important, why does my manager do so little of it? Sure they are busy – typically doing things that we the employees could do if only they would delegate and stop trying to make every decision themselves.
5. Give me the gift of praise and recognition – it’s natural to find faults but please help my manager notice all the good things we are doing and tell us about them more often. We will be more likely to repeat the good things if they are mentioned to us more often. On the other hand when our manager focuses on the negative, we tend to give him more of that. Human behavior is funny, eh Santa?
6. Give me the gift of a challenge to grow my talent – My manager finds it easier to keep giving the same assignments to the same people. He thinks it makes his job easier but it really hurts our flexibility and we want something new to do every once in a while. One of the reasons I will stay in my job is because I can learn something new.
7. Give me the gift of training (and train my boss too!) – Show me I am important by investing in me to do my job better. My manager could benefit from some training too – making my wishes come true. I think even my manager’s manager needs some training because my boss behaves the way his boss expects. In fact most of the behaviors my boss wants to change come all the way from the top!

I will remember to leave out the milk and cookies!

I had the pleasure of attending a social event connected to a convention I was attending in Calgary. The organizers had planned an entertainment-packed evening at a “cowboy ranch” with gun slinging cowboys, a comedian, a live auction, and for those who were brave enough, a mechanical bull. All the proceeds were to go to the organization’s foundation.
 
Unfortunately, many members of the audience were happy just to sit and socialize and then get back to the hotel for some rest before the next day’s program. So when the host announced that the first bus had arrived, half the group left, making the auction a dud.
 
The organizers were ticked. They spent all this time and energy to plan a great outing and the attendees had the gall to leave early!
 
They fell into the trap of “blaming the customer” and I hear variations of it in many of the organizations I work with. I’ve done it myself – blame the customer for not buying, blame the participants for a mediocre session (this happens rarely!).
 
Don’t Blame the Customer
 
You have heard the expression, “the customer is always right.” Now we know that the customer isn’t always right, however it could be said that, “the customer is always right in his/her own mind.”
 
This distinction is important because right or wrong, when the customer decides to vote with her feet and money, the impact is felt on your organization. Similarly in a “discussion” with my wife Robin I can choose between being “right” and spending quality time on the couch or allowing her to be “right” which makes for a cosier bed time.
 
No amount of “marketing” can push a bad product or service onto a customer and expect to last in the long term. Many organizations think they know better what the customer wants, when in reality the customer isn’t buying it.
 
Be Thankful for “Challenging” Customers
 
Customers with high expectations help challenge your organization to achieve more.  One group of customer service reps was complaining about how disorganized their customers were. I pointed out that those disorganized customers were placing even greater value on the service provided by their company. If the customers were better organized they would place less value on the service provided and profits would decrease.
 
There will be customers who you are better off without. The ones that cost you more than you make. Before writing them off, consider how to provide the level of service they expect at a profit.
 
Reflection Questions
 
Does your organization blame the customer for it’s challenges? Are you an accomplice to this act? How could your organization be more customer-focused and earn record profits?
 
Action Items

• Listen for signs that your organization is blaming the customer for its woes.
• Ask questions that move your organization forward, “How can we win the business and maintain profitability?”
• Stop complaining about customers and start finding ways to make them happy at a profit.
• Remember that the ultimate antidote to having difficult customers is having no customers at all…

I probably shouldn’t have been thinking about business when I was supposed to be enjoying a meal out with my wife and daughter. We headed down to the closest location of a national italian restaurant chain. Based on previous experiences, it wasn’t my first choice.

I should have trusted my gut. The men’s washroom was littered with paper towel, the service was slow and the staff were frazzled. This wasn’t an isolated incident; previous visits had exposed similar poor performance.

Another location in the same chain had a totally different feel. Staff were happy, service was fast and as customers we were happy. While I didn’t have actual data, one outlet certainly looked busier than the other.

How can it be that two locations of the same chain in different cities could have such a different customer experience? Sites are selected using strict criteria and there are standard operating procedures. So what would explain the difference? Leadership.

In our experience a weak manager or supervisor will cause differences in profitability, sales, costs, cleanliness, morale and turnover. This variation doesn’t just show up in restaurants. It applies to retail stores, factories, production lines and engineering groups.

What leadership behaviors lead to these variations in performance?

1. Expectations: A weak manager doesn’t make his or her expectations known clearly to all staff. Without clear standards, performance tends to drop to the bare minimum.
2. Hiring: A manager will contribute to his or her own demise be being less selective in hiring decisions, poor interviewing skills and deviating from standard procedures and guidelines.
3. Training: Weak managers will either omit training or delegate training to staff members who are not qualified to teach the company system.
4. Monitoring: Managers need to personally observe performance and make sure staff are doing what is expected, correct unacceptable performance and provide encouragement.
5. Communication: Weak managers spend less time speaking with staff one on one and in team meetings.

A new business season is upon us and with it comes some old challenges and some new ones. Here are three action steps to achieve a strong finish in 2009 and set your organization up for a great year in 2010.

1. Get a Recovery and Growth Mindset

Now is the time for you and your team to shift thinking from defense to offense. As the recession begins to fade there are tremendous opportunities to grow your business. The challenge is to recognize the opportunities and then take action to exploit the potential.

2. Upgrade Your Mental Software

When was the last time you invested in growing the knowledge, skills and capabilities of yourself and the team around you? Is your team trying to achieve success in 2010 with a 2004 mindset? If your organization isn’t changing as rapidly as the environment around it then you might want to upgrade capabilities with training, coaching or consulting aimed at the areas of greatest need.

3. Lead

The root cause of both success and failure is leadership. If your team isn’t up to the challenge it may be them or it may be the leader. Develop a clear idea in your mind on what you want to achieve and then ask the team how they can make it happen. Challenge is a top motivator so get your team reenergized by focusing on a big goal that they can sink their teeth into.

If we can help your organization reenergize and refocus, please connect with us for a complimentary consultation.

With business demands and the amount of information increasing, it is tempting for managers to hunker down and spend most of their attention on tasks – dealing with customer/supplier issues, operational issues, answering email, endless meetings and the never ending to-do list.

By spending so much time on tasks, the leader tends to spend less time on the people side of their job. The people side includes explaining expectations, delegating, communicating face to face, providing coaching, training staff, giving performance feedback, and challenging, correcting and recognizing employees.

In the short term, focusing on tasks gets things done. Think of how much you get done on the day before leaving for vacation. In the medium to long term, the task-focused manager creates even more work for themselves because they allow the team to wither and become demotivated. This causes a drop in productivity and results begin to wane. It becomes a death spiral when the manager puts even more emphasis on tasks, hoping to turn things around.

Tips to Get a Better Balance Between Tasks and People

1. Monitor Where You Spend Your Time

For one week, take an inventory of your time usage. As you complete a task, deal with an issue or attend a meeting, ask yourself if someone else on your team could do that task if you were to delegate and coach them. Ask yourself if the task requires your personal attention or could be completed by someone else at a lower cost allowing you to focus on higher value tasks. Ask yourself if your time is being absorbed by activities caused because you did not spend enough time communicating expectations, training staff or addressing a problem sooner.

2. Grow the Capability and Capacity of Your Team

Take the tasks and opportunities you identified in step one and determine how to get your team to take ownership of that task. It may be a simple matter of asking an individual to take on the task, or it may require some clarification of expectations and coaching. View this time as an investment that will pay dividends when you no longer have to take valuable time to do it yourself.

3. Redirect Your Efforts

Without as many tasks competing for your attention, use your new found time to plan, set goals and develop people for the medium and long term. Be known as a developer of people and you will quickly rise to higher levels of leadership responsibility.

Spending more time on the people side of the leadership equation will raise business performance and get more accomplished with less stress and aggravation.

After many months of discussion and pleading from my daughter, our family decided to adopt a dog from an animal rescue. Dundee is a cross between a shih tzo and a poodle (a.k.a. a ‘mutt’) and in the past three weeks he has captured our hearts and settled into our family.

Not having owned a dog before, we did some research and discovered an excellent book by John Ross and Barbara McKinney called Adoptable Dog: Teaching Your Adopted Pet To Obey, Trust and Love You. As a leadership trainer and coach, I am called on to teach managers and supervisors how to shift their leadership style to achieve greater success. Often the individuals being trained have been in the position for a while and have some bad leadership habits that need to be replaced with constructive techniques. In reading Ross and McKinney’s book I couldn’t help but notice some similarities between managing the behavior of a dog and managing employee behavior.

What Leaders Can Learn From Dog Behavior

1. Communicate So They Understand: Ross and McKinney say that it’s easier to get your dog to do what you want when you learn to speak dog. That means a deep growl to show displeasure and a high friendly pitch to show pleasure. We’re not suggesting that leaders growl to show displeasure, although I have met a few aggressive managers who have come close! We want to communicate with words and tone that gets the message across clearly to employees. Get rid of the corporate speak mumbo jumbo and talk in plain language.
2. Correction and Praise Needs to Come Immediately: Conventional dog training would say if you come home to discover that Rover left you a present on your carpet, you should bring him over and rub his nose in it so he knows not to do it again. Unfortunately Rover doesn’t link the punishment with the crime. Instead Ross and McKinney say to offer immediate feedback (and they mean immediate) so the dog understands the difference between right and wrong. Similarly some managers and supervisors wait too long to express their displeasure with employees who are not performing; the behavior continues, the manager gets more frustrated and often the employee is oblivious. Similarly immediate praise for a job well done helps increase the probability of repeating the success. Even though Dundee was 18 months old when we brought him home, he was not housebroken. By watching him closely and catching him before the act, we got him outside and gave lots of praise when he “did his business”. There have been no accidents since his fourth day in our home.
3. Structure and Routine is Important: As pack animals, dogs like structure and discipline. Employees also appreciate knowing what’s expected and enjoy a degree of predictability. Even in a rapidly changing environment, create structure to allow employees to perform to expectations.
4. Learning Through Repetition: Breaking an 18-month old dog of bad habits can take as long as he’s been alive. We were lucky to solve the housebreaking issue so quickly. Teaching the basics of sit, stay, lie down and come are more challenging with an older dog than a puppy. Using a combination of compelling the behaviour, and inducing the behavior is the best strategy for success. For “sit” that means lifting the collar at the same time as pushing down the back side, and using a treat as a reward. Similarly employees need to be trained to do what you want (likely more than once) and they need to be praised for doing a good job.
5. Fitting In Is Important: Dogs are pack animals and they will jockey for position within the family just as they do with their litter mates as puppies. In our home Dundee finds it easy to dominate my 11-year-old daughter with her higher pitched voice, but he is leery of my 15 year old son (perhaps the shaggy hair throws him off!). Showing the dog who’s boss means making sure he knows that he is not the pack leader. One of the prime motivators for employees is the desire to be part of the team. Employees tend to establish their position on the team including the troublemakers who decide their role is to aggravate the boss and humor co-workers. Help employees feel part of the team by keeping them informed, not playing favorites and not talking behind people’s backs. Help troublemakers find a constructive role in the team by building on their strengths.

Even though human beings are higher-order mammals, we share many behavioral traits with our canine cousins. Leaders who consistently apply fundamental leadership principles will enjoy success.

Is your organization better off stealing star employees from a competitor, parachuting a leader in from outside or would it be better to grow your own stars and develop leadership from within?

That was the question being addressed by a session presented by the Richard Ivey School of Business at their ING Leadership Centre in downtown Toronto, Canada. The session title had me intrigued: Finding Your Next Top Talent: Perspectives on transferring leadership and developing stars. The session was presented by Professor Glenn Rowe, the Paul MacPherson Chair in Strategic Leadership and Goldman Sachs Canada CEO Tim Hodgson.

A star performer is defined as an employee who achieves a disproportionately higher level of performance than colleagues. This of your absolute best employee compared to his or her coworkers.

According to research by Professors Rowe, Boris Groysberg and their colleagues, the likelihood that a star employee plucked from another company can duplicate his success within your company is very slim. The main reason is that the star employee’s success had a lot to do with the specific operating enviroment and supporting cast of your competitor and less to do with his or her raw talent.

Within the financial services industry the research showed that men suffered a PERMANENT 20% decline in performance after moving to the new company, never able to achieve the previous level of performance. Women were generally able to maintain their level of success. The reason for the difference is that in this male-dominated industry, the men’s success had a lot to do with the internal relationships within their firm which they found difficult to duplicate after changing companies. The women tended to form better networks outside their firm and were able to continue those relationships after changing companies.

Some companies have attempted to pluck an entire team away from a competitor, hoping to duplicate the chemistry the team enjoyed. This is a high risk, high reward strategy. It can destroy the company aquiring the team because of the clash of culture.

Transplanting a star into your organization can create resentment in colleagues who feel that their longer term commitment to the organization is valued less. If the new star is given more money or perks to attract them, it only makes the situation worse for colleagues. And you can imagine how things look when the new star doesn’t actually achieve the big leap in performance everyone expected.

Professor Rowe said that it can take 3-5 years for a high performer to unlearn some of the things that helped them in their previous company and establish a winning record in their new company. Unfortunately the tenure of a star performer is often fewer years. They tend to leave because of either being attracted to yet another opportunity elsewhere, or because of being managed out of their new firm when the promise of big performance fails to materialize.

Goldman Sachs has fared better than its global competitors within the finance industry. The company looked to General Electric (GE) and specifically GE’s Crotonville Leadership Center and then developed their own Pine Street leadership initiative in 2000. GE’s former CEO, Jack Welch is said to have dedicated up to 30% of his time to developing leaders within GE. Similarly, when Goldman Sachs identifies a high impact employee with leadership potential, they make sure the person gets formal training, special job assignments and mentoring to help them develop their leadership potential.

Goldman Sachs also employs the controversial policy of purging the bottom 5% of performers. Sometimes more, during difficult times. This achieves two things. First it shows that there are consequences for poor performance and behavior. Second, it gradually builds up the average and total performance of the team. Terminating employees needs to be done with class and respect in order to avoid creating a lot of negative perceptions about the company.

Goldman Sachs effectively uses 360 degree feedback in conjunction with job performance to determine overall performance and leadership potential. This does not mean that every top performer is a future leader because they may be better off remaining in a role at which they enjoy and excel. Hodgson makes it clear that if your treat people poorly and yet hit your numbers, that isn’t good enough. The wake of destruction on the performance of others far outweighs the individual contribution from the star performer. He also admits that your organization and its leadership need to support the idea of 360 feedback or it might blow up.

So what does it mean to your business?

• Your only sustainable competitive advantage that cannot be copied by competitors is your company culture and the strength of your leadership. Does your culture reinforce innovation, results and relationships? Think about your performance in terms of numbers and the capabilities of your employees. Are they both growing, declining, or mis-matched?
• Growing your leaders from within likely has the greatest probability of success except in some very limited situations. How actively does your organization identify, groom and deploy leaders? If you do not actively identify and develop leaders, top performers might leave because of lack of opportunity and your organization will never achieve its true potential results because people are not being stretched to grow.
• If you are known for developing excess leadership talent, your organization is more attractive to the best and brightest. The fact that some of these employees might leave should not be a deterrent because your organization will likely benefit from them having created lots of value along the way. Plus, actively developing leadership talent increases your bench strength so that you are less reliant and have less risk when a top performer leaves.

The Implications to You as a Star Performer

• Beware of the “grass is greener” syndrome. Think objectively about how much of your success is due to your own efforts and how much is due to the influence of your company’s systems, strategy, positioning, culture and coworkers. It may not be as easy as you think to establish yourself as a superstar in the new organization.
• Really get to know the people in the organization you are moving to. Goldman Sachs conducts between 15 and 25 interviews in the rare case they do hire a superstar from another firm. This due dilligence helps ensure a good fit between the individual and the new organization.
• Actively seek out opportunities to build networks and relationships outside of your organization. These networks can help your current success and make it easier should you ever decide, or be forced to leave.

Developing Leadership Talent From Within

• Recruit employees with great attitudes, an ability to learn quickly and potential for growth. If you’re not hiring great employees, we can help you refine the process from interviewing to selection testing. Although never fool proof, refining your hiring process will save you lots of aggravation later, plus create more value and growth in your company.
• Have the senior leaders regularly evaluate the performance and potential of employees. Look for signals that a person possesses leadership potential. We can help you define and implement a more effective performance management process including training for both reviewers and reviewees.
• Give your high-potential employees an opportunity to take on different challenges and continue to give them feedback on performance. Use a zig zag approach, where you give them a special project, or out-of-their-element opportunity to learn, then move them into a leadership position in a different area. We can help your management team create a Talent Review Process to help manage the careers of your high potential employees.
• Confront and continually pare down (outplace) your bottom 5% of performers. This sounds harsh but a lot of good and top performers lose respect for management when they see that there are no consequences for poor performance or unacceptable behavior. Handle the termination process with dignity and respect. The money you spend on outplacement counselling and severence should be more than made up for by improvement in your results and the signals sent about the expectations. Caution: Just implementing this policy without building a culture of performance first will be destructive.

How can we help your organization build up its star power and leadership strength to generate top results? We invite you to call or email and have an initial conversation.