Social Media and B2B – Facebook and Conclusions

Posted on December 9, 2010 by David Shedd

In a previous blog, Social Media and B2B – Let’s Get Started, I listed the three key benefits of social media as:

  1. Brand
  2. Relationships
  3. Information

Today, I will specifically discuss Facebook. I will then offer with some final thoughts about B2B and Social Media.

Why Use Facebook?

The benefits of using Facebook are as follows:

  1. Brand
    1. Increase visibility to build the brand
    2. Tell stories and share information that reinforces your key brand promise
    3. Personalize and humanize your company and brand
  2. Relationships
    1. Through engaging in conversations, expand your network
    2. Facilitate relationships by knowing more about the people you meet and do business with
  3. Information
    1. Share information that shows your customers and potential customers that you know what you are talking about and understand and care about their needs
    2. Listen to what your customers and others are saying about you and your brand

 

Facebook is often considered to be the social media space for your personal life as it started out as a way to connect with family and friends. There is, however, a use for Facebook for a B2B company. Facebook is unlikely to be the primary social media marketing tool for your business (the primary tools would be Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter as I have already discussed). But, with over 500 million users, Facebook should be part of your overall social media strategy.

What to Do?

  1. Conduct initial research and familiarize yourself with Facebook
    1. Look at the Facebook pages of well-known B2C brands – Nike, Coca-Cola, Gap, etc. – to see what they do
    2. Look at the Facebook pages of some larger and better-known B2B companies to see what they do
    3. Ask around in your company and find people who are active on Facebook and have a brainstorming session with them for ideas
  2. Based on the research, start with a modest Facebook page that can be put together in half a day at most
  3. Monitor the site for the comments and opinions on the Wall
    1. What are others saying about your company?
  4. At least every few weeks, add material and update your Facebook page
  5. Add new features as you learn more about Facebook
  6. Monitor other Facebook pages every few weeks
    1. When going to meet with a customer or other company, peruse their Facebook page to see what further information that you can learn about them
    2. Continue to check out other B2C and B2B company pages to see if they are doing things that are of interest to you

The initial set-up of the Facebook page can likely be done quite quickly and quite expertly by one of your employees who is a Facebook fanatic (nearly every company has at least one such fanatic). After that, your personal attention as the leader of your B2B Company can be as little as a quick scan daily. Nevertheless, keeping current with Facebook is important. With its large base of users, Facebook has the critical mass to lead the evolution of social media. And you will want to know about that when it happens.

Conclusions

Phewww!!! We are done. Over the course of five blogs, I have covered a lot of ground and given a lot of suggestions about social media marketing.

As always, amongst all of these ideas and all of the social media tools, it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

  1. The goal of using Social Media is to build and improve your business!!
    1. It may be great to be “world class” in social media marketing, but only if it is truly helping your business to grow
  2. As an important element of your overall marketing plan, social media can…
    1. Increase the visibility and validity of your brand
    2. Further your relations with customers and other stakeholders
    3. Improve and enhance the information flow between you and your customers
  3. Social Media is a part of your marketing plan. As such, it enhances but does not substitute for the personal face – to – face interaction that is of paramount importance in the B2B world. So, no matter what we do with social media, as B2B business leaders, we all need to go out, meet, talk with and listen to our customers.
    1. As we all know, in the B2B business world, it is still largely true that “people buy from people.”

 

Until Next Time.

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Social Media and B2B – Twitter

Posted on December 6, 2010 by David Shedd

In a previous blog, Social Media and B2B – Let’s Get Started, I listed the three key benefits of social media as:

  1. Brand
  2. Relationships
  3. Information

Today, I will specifically discuss Twitter.

Why Tweet (use Twitter)?

The benefits of tweeting are as follows:

  1. Brand
    1. Increase visibility to build the brand
    2. Tell stories and share information that reinforce your key brand promise
  2. Relationships
    1. Facilitate relationships by knowing more about the people and companies you meet and do business with
    2. Enhance your credibility with key customers and stakeholders
  3. Information
    1. Share information that shows your customers and potential customers that you know what you are talking about and understand and care about their needs
    2. Listen to what your customers and others are saying about you and your brand
    3. Internally share the collective reading and learning of your management team better informing everyone

 

Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a micro-blog where the writer, the person who “tweets”, is limited to 140 characters. Importantly, within the 140 characters, you can use hyperlinks to refer the reader to another website, article or blog. What you tweet can be read by anyone who follows your tweets. In short, it is a one-to-many communication platform.

Especially among business professionals, Twitter has a terrible reputation as being a useless waste of time as people tweet about waiting in line or having a coffee at Starbuck’s or some other mundane thing.

For consumer companies (B2C), Twitter has often been used to promote specific products by offering instantaneous coupons or special deals to the followers of a specific tweeter. Since B2B companies rarely, if ever, use coupons or instantaneous deals, this use for Twitter does not apply. Rather, Twitter should be considered an important part of your social media marketing for its communication and information sharing purposes.

Tweeting

On a daily basis, consider tweeting information that reinforces your brand promise and positions your company as a “thought leader.”

  1. When you write a blog, promote it by tweeting about it many times over several days
  2. When you add something new and relevant to your web page, tweet about it
  3. When you read an article or blog that might be relevant to some of your customers, instead of E-mailing, press the little Twitter symbol at the end of nearly all articles on the Internet, add a brief introduction or summary of the article, and Tweet it.
  4. When you have a short thought or a brief quote that is in line with your brand and/or relevant to your customer’s business, Tweet it.
  5. When an employee wins an award or does something noteworthy, tweet about it.

With regular tweeting, you will also help improve your Google search engine ranking, increasing your company’s visibility.

Following

  1. Follow key customers and key individuals in these companies to know what are important and/or pressing issues for them
  2. Follow interesting and different people who may be thought leaders (not Ashton Kutcher, please) and who might give you some new insight or a broader perspective
  3. To get the most out of following:
    1. Stop following people whose tweets add little value and just clutter your Twitter “stream”
    2. Rather than just following one stream, create and follow multiple “lists.” With the list feature, you can collect together all the tweets from different members of a group that you set up. So, you can create separate lists of customers, of thought leaders, of suppliers, of employees with Twitter accounts, etc.

 

Searching

Your company should also consider using Twitter for its search capabilities (http://search.twitter.com). Twitter search is generally considered to be one of the largest (but often unknown) search engines. Along with using Google search and Google alerts (www.google.com/alerts), you might want to:

  1. Search Twitter for references about your customers. Are there issues or challenges that they are facing?
  2. Search Twitter for references about companies that you are considering doing business with.
  3. Search Twitter for mentions of your own company. Are other people saying good or bad things about your company?

 

Internal Information Gathering

Twitter has the capability of creating private accounts where the tweets can only be seen by those who you chose to let follow you. Combine this with the list feature and consider setting up a private Twitter list for your executive management team.

Currently, if you want to share articles or thoughts among the management team, you may E-Mail the article or thought to the different members of the group. It then collects dust in their E-Mail boxes and even if read is often quickly deleted and forgotten. With a Twitter list, just tweet the article (as discussed above, this is often a “one-click” action) or post the short thought or comment. All these will collect in the Twitter stream for your group and be accessible to the group members when they have the time to read or reflect upon them (e.g. while waiting for an airplane). In this way, the executive management team can collect together the best of all the wide reading and learning of each member of the group, significantly enhancing the team’s collective learning.

Final Thoughts

  1. With only 140 characters to use for an individual tweet, you need to…
    1. Develop the art of writing useful but seductive headlines (Note: Personally, I have yet to master that art myself. J)
    2. Use a program such as TinyURL (www.tinyurl.com) to shorten the hyperlinks in your tweets giving yourself more space in your tweets.
  2. For important ideas that you want many people to see, it may make sense to tweet the same thing multiple times over a day or two. Otherwise, they may get lost if their Twitter stream gets filled up with more recent tweets.
  3. Tweeting is easier and quicker than it looks
    1. You can gain 90% of the benefits of brand, relationships, and information by being active on Twitter twice a day for 5 minutes at a time

 

Next Time, I will discuss Facebook and conclude with some final thoughts about Social Media for the winning B2B company.

Until Then.


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Social Media and B2B – LinkedIn

Posted on December 2, 2010 by David Shedd

In a previous blog, Social Media and B2B – Let’s Get Started, I listed the three key benefits of social media as:

  1. Brand
  2. Relationships
  3. Information

Today, I continue this series on Social Media and B2B and specifically discuss LinkedIn.

Why LinkedIn?

The benefits of LinkedIn are as follows:

  1. Brand
    1. Increase visibility to build the brand
    2. Personalize and humanize your company and brand
  2. Relationships
    1. Facilitate relationships by knowing more about the people and companies you meet and do business with
    2. Enhance your credibility with key customers and stakeholders
    3. Gain referrals and access to people you don’t know and may want to know
  3. Information
    1. Share information that shows your customers and potential customers that you know what you are talking about and understand and care about their needs
    2. Better utilize the collective learning and experience of your team
    3. Learn from others; post questions on tricky issues and get the help and feedback from others who may have already faced the issue

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is the social media site for business. With more than 80 million users and growing fast, LinkedIn is fast becoming a vital part of doing business today.

What to Do on LinkedIn?

There are so many things that your company and key employees can be doing on LinkedIn that I will limit myself to just ten suggestions to get you started. I would be very interested to hear others that I may have overlooked. Please share.

  1. Create a company LinkedIn profile emphasizing your brand. Link your blogs, website and Twitter account through that profile and make sure that they are visible to people who are following your company on LinkedIn.
  2. Post job openings in your company on LinkedIn
  3. Follow key customer companies on LinkedIn
  4. Have your key employees post their profile (with a picture) on LinkedIn and actively expand their connections
  5. Use LinkedIn to expand your company’s network
    1. Use your and your employee’s connections to get second and third level connections to network with customers and other people that you want to know so that you do not have to cold call on them
  6. Before any meeting with a potential customer or stakeholder, have your management and/or sales team read the profile of the key individuals so that they are better prepared and know the individuals’ background. This lets you find a proper sales approach and possible personal areas of commonality, better facilitating relationships.
    1. Anecdote: A high- powered salesperson recently asked me for a meeting to sell me something. Since it was a referral from someone I knew well, I agreed to a 45 minute meeting. During the course of the meeting, it became clear that the salesperson (who was selling something that I actually might have bought) had no idea about me and about my background. He had just not done any homework. With that, I was actually offended. My unspoken thought: how could you not prepare for a sophisticated sale without at least reading my LinkedIn profile to know something about me? As you might expect, this “high – powered salesperson” left our 45 minute meeting empty – handed.
  7. Read the profiles of your employees to learn more about their background. Some companies have easily accessible internal databases of employee competencies and backgrounds, but most don’t. So, if you don’t, use LinkedIn.
    1. I know of more than one occasion when a senior manager was looking externally for a person with a specific experience. Through using LinkedIn, he found out that such a person already existed within his company. No one within the current company had known that that person had the specific experience while working for a previous employer.
  8. Find out about potential employees. One of the key challenges in business is finding a replacement for someone in a specific and critical role that is only a “C” player. Use LinkedIn to search for people who can fill those roles, giving you a possible alternative and thus a lot more flexibility to upgrade your team.
  9. Join LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your customers. When in the groups, have key individuals answer intelligently and informatively questions posed by potential customers in that group. This develops a relationship and gives credence to your company being a knowledge leader in solving customer’s problems in that specific market space.
  10. Have top management join senior executive LinkedIn Groups and, where necessary, pose questions related to tricky issues that they may be facing. You are likely to get dozens of insightful comments from people who have already faced and surmounted the same issues.

 

A Downside to LinkedIn?

I can hear you saying. But, if I allow my employees to be active on LinkedIn they will just spend time job hunting and will be visible to competitors and others that want to poach them.

Yes, that is a risk. But, first, a reality check. Your best employees are going to be on LinkedIn and visible whether you want them there or not as LinkedIn is such an important part of their personal career management. You might as well get the benefit of their efforts and connections on LinkedIn to help your business succeed.

Conclusion

Active participation on LinkedIn does have some risks for your company. But, this potential downside is far outweighed by the upside of using LinkedIn to build your brand, further relationships, and gain and share information.

Next Time, we will discuss Twitter.

Until Then.

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Social Media and B2B – Blogging

Posted on November 29, 2010 by David Shedd

In a previous blog, Social Media and B2B – Let’s Get Started, I listed the three key benefits of social media as:

  1. Brand
  2. Relationships
  3. Information

Today, I will specifically discuss blogging.

Why Blog?

The specific benefits of blogging are as follows:

  1. Brand
    1. Tell stories and share information that reinforces your key brand promise
    2. Personalize and humanize your company and brand
    3. Increase visibility to build the brand    
  2. Relationships
    1. Enhance your credibility with key customers and stakeholders
  3. Information
    1. Share information that shows your customers and potential customers that you know what you are talking about and understand and care about their needs
    2. Internally share collective stories and learning better informing all employees about the company goals

Blogs are written in a more informal, more personal style than what is written in marketing materials or on a website. The purpose of a blog is to let the customer hear the “voice” of the company. It is this more personal voice from blogging whether through stories, anecdotes, examples, or other insights that gives support to all the promises in your other marketing materials.

How?

Let’s say your brand focus is on relentless customer service and technical excellence in coming up with innovative solutions. You can write about these brand attributes in a website and have it as part of a mission statement. But, it is better to blog about different customer stories (hide the identity of the customers, of course) and how you responded and followed up with customer service and innovative solutions. By continuously blogging over time at a set interval (say, once a week), you can build up a treasure of stories that would be related to the brand attributes and highlight the many problems that you have solved and the industries that you have served.

Why is this important? First, stories “stick” much more than promises. Second, these stories and anecdotes show your customers that you know, understand, and are able to respond to their issues and challenges.

Third, these stories can be excellent sales tools. As an example, let’s say that a sales call leads to a discussion about responsiveness in product warranty. The salesperson responds that the company is excellent and thorough in standing behind their products. That night, he sends a follow up E-Mail attaching and also giving the link to a blog that discusses a time when the company did an outstanding job in solving a product warranty issue. As something given to a customer after the fact, but written down before the meeting, the blog and the related story truly resonate, reinforcing this brand promise of the company and differentiating the company from the competition.

Further, these stories and blogs are important in giving employees an understanding of the goals and objectives of the company and of highlighting the company’s successes.

Finally, blogs will also increase the visibility of the company and its brand promise. First, insightful, well-written blogs are often shared and tweeted across the internet, exposing your company to numerous other potential customers. Second, regular blogs improve your position with SEO (search engine optimization) tools, helping move your company onto that magical Google first page and making your company more likely to get that call when someone is searching for a solution to their problem.

To get started with a blog, go to WordPress.com or other sites, set up your blog, set up the appropriate URL’s, link the blog to your website and your LinkedIn profile and you can be up and running within 30 minutes, telling stories about how great your company is.

Next Time, we will discuss LinkedIn.

Until Then.

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Social Media and B2B – Let’s Get Started

Posted on November 23, 2010 by David Shedd

Nearly all B2B (business to business) companies have websites and marketing materials touting their products and services as an integral part of their sales and marketing strategy. Over the last few years, however, these have become insufficient.

Companies, even B2B companies, need to become actively engaged in social media. That is to say, they need to create, publish and exchange information over the Internet, telling stories, becoming known as ‘thought leaders’ and engaging in conversations with customers and other stakeholders.

Full disclosure: I am by no means a social media expert. Instead, I will try to address the topic of social media from the perspective of a business leader. As such, I hope to provide a practical guide to help get you started in using social media to make your businesses more successful.

  1. Getting started with social media
    1. Why spend time and effort on social media?
    2. The benefits of social media
    3. How to get started
  2. Key social media that B2B companies should be involved with
    1. Blogging
    2. LinkedIn
    3. Facebook
    4. Twitter

This blog will discuss getting started with social media. My next blog will discuss Blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in more detail.

Why Spend Time and Effort on Social Media?

But, David, we already have all of our marketing material and we have a good website, so why on earth do we need to spend all the time and effort on social media?

Excellent question! To answer that, let’s begin with a 10 minute exercise and a quick quiz.

Exercise: Go to the website of a one of your supplier companies. Browse through and read the website for 10 minutes. Then take the following quiz.

Quiz:

  1. Could you last the whole 10 minutes of reading or did you get bored and move on?
  2. Did you believe what you were reading or was it just marketing fluff?
  3. Do you now understand how this supplier is different from all the others and better able to serve your needs?
  4. What stuck in your mind and made you want to do more business with this supplier?

Unfortunately, most of you would have felt (like I do) that you were just reading advertising copy or marketing materials. Most likely, nothing stuck in your mind, nothing was memorable, and nothing differentiated the supplier company from all the other companies in the same market space.

Today, having a good website is just a cost of doing business. A good website is largely just an electronic form of marketing materials. It gives basic information about your company. But, it rarely tells what is unique about your company and why people should buy from you.

To differentiate your company today, you need to…

  1. Tell stories that show how your company lives its brand promise
  2. Develop relationships and viral marketing so you have others as referrals or (in a perfect world) evangelists for your company and its products and services
  3. Show your customers that you are listening to them and understand their needs and the issues that they face in the marketplace

Done well, social media takes giant steps forward in each of these three ways to differentiate your company and significantly enhance your sales and marketing effort.

The Benefits of Social Media

Three key benefits to social media:

  1. Brand
    1. Increase visibility to build the brand
    2. Tell stories and share information that reinforces your key brand promise
    3. Personalize and humanize your company and brand
  2. Relationships
    1. Through Facebook, LinkedIn and engaging in conversations within social media, expand your network
    2. Facilitate relationships by knowing more about the people you meet and do business with
    3. Gain referrals and access to people you don’t know but may want to know
  3. Information
    1. Share information that shows your customers and potential customers that you know what you are talking about and understand and care about their needs
    2. Listen to what your customers and others are saying about you and your brand
    3. Internally share the collective reading and learning of your management team better informing everyone
    4. Learn from others; post questions on tricky issues and get the help and feedback from others who may have already faced the issue

 

How to Get Started

  1. Write down and communicate limited goals
  2. Monitor to ensure that everything is in alignment with these goals
  3. Commit time and resources to do regularly

Write Down and Communicate Your Goals and Strategy

Social media is vast and can be overwhelming. As such, you will need to keep the goals limited or you will never accomplish them.

First, if you are brand new to social media, it is crucial to get on all the key social media, to try them out, and to understand what each of them is all about. By this, I mean not just the marketing department, but also the business leaders.

Next, it is time to develop the initial goals and strategy for social media. To help get you started, I give a possible example of initial goals and strategies for a B2B company. As you have success pursuing these goals, you will likely develop more complex, even unique strategies that take advantage of all that social media has to offer in making your business more successful.

Goals

  1. Brand
    1. Reinforce and strengthen three key brand attributes (as an example)
      1. Relentless customer service
      2. Technical excellence to come up with innovative solutions
      3. We understand our customers and their needs
    2. Broaden knowledge of company and brand
  2. Relationships
    1. Facilitate relationships so that people buy from our people
    2. Increase the number of relationships and referrals
    3. Really listen to the customers and stakeholders that are communicating with us through social media
  3. Information
    1. Position our company as industry experts
    2. Improve internal information flow and sharing

Strategy

  1. Brand
    1. Blogs, tweets, stories, anecdotes will revolve around and reinforce our three brand attributes
    2. Our Facebook and LinkedIn profiles will represent these brand attributes as well
  2. Relationships
    1. Using LinkedIn, everyone will go into meetings with customers and suppliers informed about the background and interests of the individuals across from the table
    2. Using LinkedIn, we will actively seek to expand our network and to use referrals to get more business
    3. Using Facebook, we will listen to what others are writing about, posting about or like about our company. When appropriate, we will engage with them.
  3. Information
    1. By blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, we will share information with customers and suppliers that position us as the company that understands and can respond to their customer needs. We will become the industry “thought leader”.
    2. By blogging and using the private group feature in Twitter, we will internally share company success stories and disseminate information that all of us come across in our daily work increasing the collective company knowledge.

 

Monitor to Ensure All Efforts are Aligned with These Goals

Once the goals and strategy are written down and communicated, it is vital to monitor the individual and company social media effort. Once something is on the internet, be it a blog, a tweet, a posting on Facebook, etc., consider it there forever. So, to keep to the goals and strategies, strict policies likely need to be in place to ensure that everything is done in accordance with the goals and strategies. This will likely mean that only a few individuals will be allowed to blog, tweet, or post for the company.

The monitoring of the efforts should be done at the top level. Why? First, the leaders are the ones who best understand how they want the company to be portrayed and defined. Second, requiring the top level to monitor social media forces the leaders to be actively involved in social media, be it blogging, tweeting, or… Third, the occasional blog or tweet from the business leader is essential to give credibility to the social media effort, both within the company and with customers.

Commit Time and Resources to Do Regularly

The biggest critique of social media is about the amount of time it takes to do all of this. It can be time-consuming, especially creating insightful and “on message” blogs. But, it does not need to be overwhelming. Less material of a higher quality on a consistent basis is more useful than lots of “junk.”

Some suggestions from my own experiences:

  1. Have one person who has at least 30% of his or her job dedicated to social media. For larger companies, this can be a dedicated person. It is critical that this person can actually write and create content as well as be a “facilitator” for social media. One thing to be aware of: just because someone is in marketing does not mean that that person can actually write well!
  2. Keep the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles up to date and fresh, reviewing at least twice a month adding new information, articles, press releases, photos, etc.
  3. As a company, try to publish a blog once a week. It may not sound like much, but after one year the company would have 50 high quality blogs reinforcing the brand attributes and positioning the company as a thought leader. Note: blogs do not have to be long. A 250 word blog on a successful job for a customer with a photo or two can work wonders.
  4. Try to tweet or re-tweet on a daily basis. If not possible, then do it on a regular schedule, say, twice or three times a week.
  5. Commit key management to spend a small portion of their day – 20 – 30 minutes but no more – on social media. Do it every day.

In short, for the B2B leaders out there, it is time to get started with social media!!

Next time, we will discuss the key social media that B2B companies need to be actively involved with – Blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Until Then.

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Three Lessons on Business Change from Learning the Piano

Posted on November 17, 2010 by David Shedd

Five years ago, I attended a leadership training class that ended with each participant giving a passionate speech about how they would do something new and different in their lives. My first two speeches stayed under 100 decibels and thus lacked the passion that was required. On the third go round, I screamed out: “I WILL LEARN TO PLAY THE PIANO!!” The volume and passion was there, and I graduated from the class.

Later that summer, we bought a piano, and I began playing. I have been playing daily ever since.

As one who has learned a new skill somewhat later in life, I have come to see parallels between my learning to play the piano and people and businesses learning how to change and effect business transformation.

The three parallels that I have seen are:

  1. To change you need to create your own discipline
  2. You cannot change totally and be anything that you want to be
  3. We overestimate the change that can be done in one month, but underestimate the change that can be done in 5 years

 

To Change You Need to Create Your Own Discipline

To learn something new or to change, you need to have discipline and self-control to do something different from your old way for an extended period of time. In their book, Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard, the Heath brothers conclude that change is so difficult because discipline and “self-control are exhaustible resources.” When changing, we simply require too much of people, too much change, too much discipline, too much self-control. And so they give up and fail.

At the beginning of my piano adventure, I tried to play 45 minutes to an hour a day. That lasted all of about 2 days. Then, I tried 30 minutes a day. That lasted a couple of weeks. So, I shrunk the change and decided on 20 minutes a day. That has now lasted for 5 years. With 20 minutes a day, I have the time to practice every day. With 20 minutes a day, I have the discipline to do it even on those days when I am tired or absolutely do not want to practice; I do it because it is “only 20 minutes”.

Importantly, I do not do more than 20 minutes a day. That means that I often stop practicing in the middle of a piece of music, energized and wanting to do more. But, I take that positive energy and eagerness and commit myself to have a perfect 20 minute practice tomorrow. As such, I remain engaged rather than wearied or exhausted.

Further, I play 20 minutes a day every day that I am home. I do not take days off. I play on Sundays. I play on Christmas Day. I even play, much to my wife’s chagrin, when I am sick. I firmly subscribe to the idea that it is easier to do something 100% of the time than 95% of the time. Playing every day creates a habit that sticks.

As a business leader, think of something that you may struggle to get done. As an example, think of employee development and performance evaluations. If you were to take 20 minutes a day (approximately 5% of your work day) each and every day to focus on employee development, I daresay that you would do a professional job and begin to see significant positive benefits from that attention. More importantly, your January and February would be far more pleasant as you would not have to cram to write up all those yearly performance evaluations that you have procrastinated on for the previous 10 months.

You Cannot Be Anything That You Want To Be

I have likely practiced the piano for 500 hours so far. Malcolm Gladwell and others have written that someone can become an expert by practicing for 10,000 hours. At my current run-rate of 100 hours a year, I should be planning for my Carnegie Hall debut in the year 2105. Except that I won’t. I just do not have the talent to ever be a great pianist no matter the discipline no matter the dedication.

Talent, personality and innate ability matters. I can now read music. I can play all the notes correctly. I can keep a metronomic beat (O.K. reasonably well). But, I just do not have the feel and the innate musical ability. When I try to play quickly my fingers just will not go on the keys that they are supposed to go on. And I have a very poor “musical memory.” Perhaps, I just am not musically talented. Perhaps, I just started learning too late. I am confident that I will become pretty good. But, I will never be an expert no matter my discipline no matter my sheer force of will.

But, David, you have only practiced for 500 hours, you still have 9500 hours to go. True. However, I watch my children and other children in piano recitals leap ahead of me with their speed and feel for playing. Trust me; I am just not that innately good.

Likewise, most people in your organizations are what they are. Someone brought up in operations his or her whole life is unlikely to become a highly effective and aggressive cold-calling salesperson. A sales hunter is unlikely to become a detailed and organized operations manager. Yes, there are exceptions; but, they are rare.

So, realize the strengths and limitations of your people and adjust accordingly. If you need more outside sales presence do not assume that a meticulous inside sales person will become your ace sales hunter. As the business changes the required DNA of your team may need to change. That is likely to mean that your team members need to change. It is unfortunate. But, I, you, and they cannot be anything that we want to be. In short, putting a square peg in a round hole will not work out long term.

We Overestimate the Change that can be done in One Month, But Underestimate the Change that can be done in Five Years

As I have said before, I will never be a concert pianist. Nevertheless, after five years, I can play. Each day it does not feel like I am getting better. But, when I look back at the pieces I played 1, 2, 3 years ago, they seem simpler and simpler. The change and improvement that I am making is tangible; but it happens over a long time and from the constant effort.

Likewise, in a company, real lasting change happens slowly. Real lasting change takes a tremendous amount of effort.

But, with constant, sustained effort real lasting change can happen.

In my old company, we started talking about improving safety in about 2001 – 2002. And we really got serious about it in about 2005. Getting really serious meant that each day, everyone from top management on down was talking about and focusing on improving safety and the safety culture. By 2009, the safety culture in my group of approximately 500 employees had markedly changed. Safety was in-bred in nearly all employees and was a constant point of discussion. As a result, in 2009, we had no serious accidents and a safety recordable rate (minor injuries) more than 60% below the national average for all businesses. Similar results happened across the larger company as the constant, sustained, daily focus on safety was transformative.

Think of the major change initiatives that you want to undertake: safety improvement, introducing a culture of accountability, operational improvements such as lean or six sigma, or markedly improved customer service and satisfaction. To stick and become permanent, all of these really require a cultural change. As such, to really effect and implement these changes will not take one month, two months, or five months. It will take constant, dedicated attention for years.

But, if you give the constant, dedicated attention for years, the culture will be transformed, the change initiative will be successful, and the results will be significant and permanent.

Summary

Both as an individual and a company, the most effective way to change is:

  1. To ensure that you and the people in your company have the innate capability to succeed at the change that needs to take place
  2. To accept that the change will be difficult and time consuming and thus to focus on only one or at most two major changes at one time.
  3. To create the discipline to work on the change on a daily basis for the years that it may take.

 

Until Next Time.

Posted in Improve / Turnaround | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Embrace the “Antithesis” for Better Decisions

Posted on November 11, 2010 by David Shedd

As business leaders, our organizations depend on us to make the best decisions for the success of our businesses. The challenge, of course, is that most of these decisions need to be made without complete information and with conflicting facts or opinions. The result is that many times we make decisions without fully analyzing the information and considering the pros and cons of the course of action decided upon.

Well, that is not exactly true.

Most of us do consider all the “pros” to a course of action. Where we often fall down is in not thinking through the “cons.” We do not seriously consider the arguments against the decision, strategy, or course of action.

Way back in high school or college, we likely learned about something called the dialectic and how to use it to improve critical thinking and evaluate decisions (and write a good term paper). The dialectic consists of three parts.

  1. Thesis: The thesis includes all the reasons and justifications for doing something (the “pros”)
  2. Antithesis: The antithesis includes all the reasons and arguments for not doing something (the “cons”)
  3. Synthesis: The synthesis is the modified version of the original thesis that takes into account the arguments of the antithesis. By considering all the counter-arguments to the thesis, the synthesis is well-thought out and stronger.

Huh?!?!

Well, let’s see it work in an example.

When I would interview for a senior manager role, such as a General Manager, one of my most important questions would be: “what are your weaknesses relative to this position?” Of course, I would then have to listen to 2 – 3 minutes of well-trained gobbledygook about how they work too hard, care too much, or some other strength which they would be trying to masquerade as a weakness. I would cut them off and tell them what I saw as their three biggest weaknesses, e.g., “you have a great background in manufacturing, but you do not know services,” or “you know operations but you have little experience with sales”, or “you do not know the industry.”

I would then ask them: “if you are hired, what are you going to do about these weaknesses?” The response to this question would be insightful about the ability and commitment of the candidate.

Moreover, for the selected candidate, we would both have a good understanding and agreement on the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, and we would create a short-term action plan that included coaching and training to address these weaknesses. For other equally strong candidates, by considering seriously their weaknesses, I would realize that no amount of planning, coaching, training, or re-alignment of responsibilities would overcome their weaknesses and/or deficiencies for the position. Thus, they were not hired.

Devil’s Advocates

Some companies have tried a similar approach in decision making by having a dedicated “devil’s advocate”. The role of the devil’s advocate is to argue against the decision (to argue the antithesis). This can be effective, but requires that the devil’s advocate is someone that is highly respected and whose opinion counts. And the role of devil’s advocate needs to rotate among different people from time to time to prevent one person getting the reputation of a “naysayer”. Finally, while useful for bigger decisions, having a formal devil’s advocate is not practical for the dozens of smaller decisions we, as leaders, have to make.

In short, we need to become our own personal devil’s advocate.

Antithesis

I can hear some of you thinking:

  1. “This takes too much time that I do not have”
  2. “We are doers and not thinkers and it is time to do”
  3. “Analysis paralysis.”
  4. “This is a fancy term, but it is just not practical.”

Synthesis

Yes, when poorly done, arguing the “antithesis” or having a “devil’s advocate” is useless and does slow things down. But, embracing the “antithesis” and then coming up with a superior “synthesis” can be done well and done simply.

For starters, we should…

  1. Identify and write down the three most important reasons against a new strategy, decision, or course of action.
  2. Think seriously about whether they are critical weaknesses
  3. If not critical, consider how we can avoid or mitigate these weaknesses
  4. If we have some time, we should come back a few hours or a day later and think through these weaknesses again
  5. Modify our original thesis to account for the weaknesses and create a better synthesis

By embracing the antithesis and spending even a few minutes considering how to argue for our “thesis” and against our “antithesis”, we will gains insights that will make for a better, easier to implement, and ultimately more successful strategy, decision, or course of action.

Until Next Time.

Posted in Leadership, Personal Success | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Bedrock of Your Winning Business – Ethics and Integrity

Posted on November 4, 2010 by David Shedd

“We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence. But, rather we have those because we have acted rightly.” — Aristotle

 The times are tough. The pressure on you and all your employees is intense. You have employees that are being foreclosed upon. You have managers that cannot make their numbers. You have teams of people who have worked longer hours for no extra pay and feel that they “deserve” something more for their efforts.

In short, the conditions are fertile for ethical infractions in many companies.

As the leader of your company and/or business unit, how do you ensure that your solid ethics and high integrity infiltrate your organization completely, thus minimizing the risk of ethical violations?

First, I will tell you what not to do. Do not do what every company does. Do not bring in a consultant or a canned program discussing ethics and integrity and have everyone be forced to sit through the program and answer 10 ridiculously simple questions that Bernie Madoff could answer correctly blind-folded. This a waste of time and somewhat insulting to your employees with virtually no impact other than ensuring that you can say that you have an ethics program.

You need to do the following three things:

  1. Set the example
  2. Regularly talk about ethics and ethical situations
  3. Be aggressive in chasing down ethical violations and then air the dirty laundry

 

Set the Example

My regular readers knew that setting the example as the leader was going to be one of the three keys. It is vitally important that you are and that you are seen to be ethical. That means not involving yourself in any situation that may appear to be unethical or inappropriate.

Of course, this applies to the big and obvious ethical violations such as taking bribes, kickbacks, collusion, or price fixing. Do not even go near any of these things being especially careful about conversations that you may have with leaders of competitor companies at trade shows or trade association meetings.

Further, be attuned to the risk to your reputation found in the gray area of such things as favoritism, nepotism or excessive entertainment or gift-giving.

Finally, be seen setting the correct example in small things. Yes, you are the leader of the company, but… Do not take office supplies and bring them home. Do not use tools or any other items for your personal use. Do not treat yourself to special breaks that are not available to others. Be especially aware on all your expense reports that you pay for everything that could appear to be personal or explain why they are bona fide business expenses. Yes, bookkeepers and accountants are not supposed to talk, however… In short, every small ethical transgression eats away at the fabric of what you are preaching.

Be ethical and be seen to be ethical in all things, big or small, black, white or gray. Enough said.

Regularly Talk about Ethics and Ethical Situations

This is easier than you think. When you attend meetings or have training sessions or have brown bag lunch sessions, bring up ethical situations that you or others in the company may have seen. Make sure that they are relevant to what the employees might experience at the office or factory. Invite 5 – 10 minutes of roundtable discussions. No more. And repeat on a regular basis. Over time, it will be more powerful if others in the group discuss ethical situations that they have encountered. By discussing, you lay down the ethical framework that you and your management team want and you will often set policy for certain types of ethical situations.

Some discussions points:

  1. A supervisor in the plant borrows tools over the weekend to do a personal task
  2. A salesman exaggerates and embellishes his or her expense report
  3. An employee in the plant sees a broken item in the trash that he can fix and takes it home
  4. Unethical incidences at other companies that you may have heard or read about

The key in all of this is the example, the discussion, and you or your top management team driving home the ethical issues.

Be Aggressive in Chasing Down Ethical Violations and Then Air the Dirty Laundry

I have personally failed in the past on aggressively chasing down ethical violations.

Several years ago, there was a good employee reasonably high up in a very successful and profitable business unit. The individual was, to my view at the time, devoted to the company and was definitely a workaholic, travelling 3 ½ weeks a month. Some discrepancies appeared in spending with his credit card. We immediately confronted him. He denied everything offering an excuse that stretched the boundary of credibility, but could have happened. We believed him and did not dig any further…

By now, you know the story.

Several months later, other discrepancies came to light, we finally decided to investigate in depth, and it was revealed that this individual had used corporate funds to buy personal items. Once this was determined, we acted immediately, and the individual was terminated. The monetary amount was not that high – $5,000 – $10,000. But, the damage to our reputation was much higher. This person, by virtue of his senior role, was, in the customer’s eyes, a reflection of our company. As a result, both suppliers and customers thought that this business unit lacked high ethical standards.

The lessons learned are ample:

  1. Without pre-judging, where there is smoke there is usually fire. So, seek it out.
  2. When you find out about something, it has usually been going on for a long time and is a whole lot worse than you first thought.
  3. Any employee’s lack of ethics represents, in the minds of outside stakeholders, the lack of ethics of the company.

The fourth point that we learned is that you need to air the dirty laundry about these incidents. For legal or other reasons, most companies sweep such events under the rug and they are only known through the “rumor channel.” Don’t do that. As we did in this situation, explain what happened (you can do this in vague enough terms to please your corporate lawyers or human resources department), explain how it went wrong, explain what you did wrong, explain what lack of control has been fixed and how you will act differently. As I said, this Mea Culpa (“I’m guilty!!”) is not the easy way to go, you expose your weakness and mistakes to your team. But, doing so really begins to show your strength, your leadership, and your commitment to ethics and integrity.

Finally, ensure that you report on other incidents that might have happened at sister companies.

Conclusion

The character, ethics and integrity of you and your entire team are really the bedrock upon which your businesses success is built.

  1. Financially, you want ethical people in your organization to be your eyes and ears to ensure that others do not steal or defraud and to communicate that fact upward if it happens.
  2. Legally, an ethical organization is much less vulnerable to lawsuits and retribution.
  3. From an employee perspective, ethical people want to work with ethical people. You, as the leader, may be the most ethical person in the world. But, if an employee’s immediate supervisor is not, then, in that employee’s mind, the organization is an unethical, potentially corrupt, organization
  4. From a customer’s perspective, they assume, rightly or wrongly, that any unethical act by an employee has the blessing and support of higher management.
    1. When the customer is aware of the unethical act, it is, of course, obvious to them.
    2. Thus, they think that it should be obvious to everyone in management at the organization.
    3. Ergo, the organization is unethical.

Only by doing the tough and right things of setting an example, maintaining the discussion, and aggressively chasing down and then publicizing transgressions will you bring your high values in ethics and integrity to life for you and your entire company.

Until Next Time.

Posted in Business Acumen, Leadership | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

8 Steps to Satisfy Your Current Customers and Re-Charge Growth

Posted on October 28, 2010 by David Shedd

In a previous blog, Things to Start Doing Today to Re-charge Growth, I described the first stage in re-charging growth:

The business leader needs to …

  1. Get personally involved in sales, marketing and customer service on a daily basis
  2. Talk to customers
  3. Talk to the sales team

As entrepreneur Ken Morse says: “if your business leader does not love customers and is not committed to delivering value to them, your venture will fail.”

The second stage in re-charging growth is to satisfy your current customers.

In general, tremendous attention is dedicated to the “sexy” business of finding new customers and markets. Yes, that is vitally important and is the third stage in re-charging growth. However, much of that effort is wasted if the success in finding new customers and markets only replaces the revenue that was lost as your current customers stopped buying from you.

In short, to re-charge growth, you first need to master the “mundane” task of holding on to your current customers by satisfying them and keeping them buying. Winning businesses are built inside outward; you expand on the shoulders of your satisfied and thankful current customers.

To highlight the importance of customer satisfaction, I relate a story from my own experience.

A few years ago, a $10M operation became part of my division. As a way to re-charge growth, I began working with the General Manager and the team to re-establish the importance of the customer and customer service. I asked the General Manager to go out and start talking to customers (both current and former). A few weeks later, the General Manager called to tell me about a meeting that he had just had with one of their former customers. The General Manager had met with the President of the customer company. This company, which was one of the 2 – 3 largest potential customers in the market, had done business exclusively with our operation until about 5 years before.

In precise detail, the customer President told the General Manager the story of why they stopped buying from us. Our company had let the customer down on a critical and time-sensitive job. Our product was late; we then lied directly to the President about the shipping status of the product costing the customer more money and delays; we never followed up; and we certainly did not apologize for our mistake.

It was no surprise that that was the last order that our company had gotten from that customer. In our discussion, my General Manager and I determined that this atrocious customer service and lack of follow-up had cost this $10M operation about $7.5M in revenue over the previous five years.

My question is as follows:

  1. How much time and effort went into getting new customers to replace the revenue lost by this one customer’s dissatisfaction?

Customer satisfaction does matter.

 

Some Fun Facts about Customer Satisfaction

A survey conducted in the early 2000’s about customer satisfaction had the following results:

 

  1. It costs 5 times more to attract new customers vs. keeping old ones
  2. 68 percent of the customers who walk away, do so because of lack of attention
  3. The average customer tells 9 to 10 other people about a poor service experience
  4. But, most customers will repeat buy if they feel that their customer service issue was resolved satisfactorily
    1. And they will tell 5 – 8 people about the good service that they received

 

 Satisfy Your Current Customers in 8 Steps

 

  1. Measure your churn over the last few years
    1. How many customers have you lost over this time?
    2. How many customers are buying less and less from you?

     

  2. Act on the churn data
    1. Don’t accept the answer that your customer’s business is smaller
    2. Follow up with them and ask why they stopped buying or are buying less

     

  3. Institute a very simple customer satisfaction survey
    1. GE and others have used this one:
      1. On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend this supplier to other people
        1. 0 – 3: Negatives
        2. 4 – 7: Neutrals
        3. 8 – 10: Positives
      2. Do you have any comments or suggestions for ways that we can serve you better?
    2. Make it easy to respond to
      1. Stick it in an E-Mail and ask them to answer the questions and hit the Reply button
      2. It is important that it be as easy as possible for the customer to respond, even if that makes it more difficult for you to collate the data
        1. Personally, I am glad to respond to a survey like that. It takes me two minutes and I get a chance to share my thoughts.
          1. But, I rarely click on a hyperlink to take me to a survey. It takes too much time, and I dread that the survey is going to be 30 questions long.

     

  4. Lead by example on customer service
    1. Get actively involved in customer problems and issues to understand and resolve these problems and issues
      1. In his effort to transform IBM into an integrated, customer-friendly organization, Lou Gerstner required his top 200 executives to make face-to-face problem-solving visits to at least five customers each, and then get personally involved in every visit report.
    2. Teach and preach customer service
    3. Autopsy customer service failures
    4. Share and praise customer satisfaction success stories

     

  5. Treat your customers well
    1. Respect the customer
      1. Repeat after me: there are no irrational customers, only lazy and arrogant suppliers
      2. Even when the profit on a sale is low, the customer expects and deserves good service
      3. Return their phone calls and respond to their E-Mails
        1. Even if you do not have the answer, tell them that you received their message and will get back to them by a specific date
    2. Communicate with the customer
      1. Tell them the truth
      2. If there may be problems, give the customer a “flashing yellow light” as a heads up
        1. As one customer once told me: “Had all parties known of the delays, we may not have been happy but at least we would have had an opportunity to make planned adjustments.”

     

  6. Perform
    1. Performance is very simple: do what you say you are going to do
      1. Especially deliver on the customer’s hot buttons
    2. Ensure that what you are providing matches the expectations of the customer and solves the customer’s problem.
      1. Note: the customer’s expectation may be different from what the PO or the contract says. Find out what their expectations really are and manage them.

     

  7. Maintain a sustainable presence with the customer and in the marketplace
    1. Consistent and intelligent customer contact and follow-up
      1. But, don’t waste the customer’s time
      2. If the customer does not buy during a sales call, try to give them a little quid pro quo – perspective, advice, industry overview, leads, something
    2. Listen to the customer
      1. In a survey by Harvard Business Review, it was determined that what customers most wanted was salespeople that understood the customer’s problems and understood how the salesperson’s product and services could help the customer resolve these problems
      2. How do you understand the customer’s problems? Ask and listen.
      3. As has often been said, all customers are turned to radio station WII-FM
        1. What’s In It For Me!!

     

  8. Ask about other needs and requirements that your company can address with the customer
    1. Opportunity for additional sales
    2. Opportunity for new ideas
    3. Opportunity for a partnership with the customer potentially tying you in closer with them

 Summary

 Think about it.

Your current customers already have a habit of giving you money. If you continue to earn their trust on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis by doing what you said that you were going to do, they will remain loyal.

With loyal current customers, all the work to win new customers and penetrate new markets will be an add-on to your current revenue stream allowing you to re-charge growth.

 

Until Next Time.

Posted in Growth and Strategy, Perform / Execution, Sales and Marketing | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

The “Art” of Building an Organization – Guest Blog by Mark Herbert

Posted on October 26, 2010 by David Shedd

 In my series of blogs, I have been writing repeatedly about the how’s and why’s of building a winning business.

The essential ingredient to a winning business is having the right mix of people with the same shared vision.

My metaphor for the right mix of people involves DNA. Every business has to have the people with the required DNA. That is, every organization needs people with the right combination of skills, knowledge, talents, and passion to create an organization with the strength and diversity required to adapt, survive and thrive in the business environment of today. Equally important is that all of these different individuals with their different DNA have the same shared vision. This shared vision ensures that everyone in the business is rowing in the same direction.

In the guest blog that follows, Mark Herbert, a management consultant with a focus on improving employee engagement and relationships, treats the same subject of creating a winning organization with a slightly different perspective. Mark uses the metaphor of a mosaic.

The “Art” of Building an Organization – Mark Herbert

I am a fan of both Seth Godin and Daniel Pink. Seth talks a lot about the idea of building “products” that ship. By shipping it means the product is completed, it actually moves successfully from concept through development to be available to the end user of customer.

Pink talks a lot about concepts like flow, that place where effort and result are perfectly balanced, I really enjoyed his discussion about sprezzatura, where you are in that great space. He has also described it as our “art”, that contribution that each of us brings to the world.

When I think about the context of building organizations in the context of visual art I think about it in this way.

The entrepreneur or founder of a business in some ways reminds me of a painter or sculptor. They have a vision in their head which they convert from concept to reality. At least in the beginning stages this work is largely an individual activity. The painter doesn’t invite others to “put a few dabs on” or the sculptor doesn’t hand you a hammer and chisel and say “shave a little off there would you”. They have a vision many times that lives in their head and never really fully expresses itself until it is complete. The issue in some cases is that if you want to “reproduce” the piece it isn’t truly scalable.

When I look at the leadership of a team or organization I see it akin in some ways to constructing a mosaic, you are building something by assembling pieces. Finding the right piece to go in the right place is what ultimately allows us to complete the whole.

When I have worked with founders or closely held businesses the transition from “painting” to constructing a mosaic is one that they struggle with. Recognizing that to create scalability you have to move to more of a mosaic model is tough to do.

The mosaic represents itself in multiple ways. From an organizational standpoint you may need to bring different “specialists” into the organization. Functions or decisions that you made may now be spread amongst several people or even departments. The “pieces” you need will also evolve. If all the “pieces” look and act the same you have no texture. That to me is the defining competency of leadership, fitting the different pieces together in a way that contributes a whole.

Each person on your “team” has to play their part, both technically and from a “fit” standpoint. I believe great managers and leaders are adept at this, bringing the disparate pieces together using a shared vision as the “glue” that cements the mosaic into a whole.

Because I live in a place where relationships are key (metaphorically), I see the construction of that mosaic and fitting and cementing those pieces as very key. You must also examine the pieces from not only the “technical” or skill dimension, but also the “fit” or shared vision.

I think in much of the work that we do around organizational change and process we really underestimate the shared vision and values piece. I believe that piece is what creates or fails to create engagement. In fact I would go so far as to say if you just have the “systems” without the shared vision as a connection point you will never really see truly optimized performance on a sustained basis. I think the research on engagement validates my perspective.

If you are going to introduce a new model like lean, six sigma, or a new technology you need to ensure that the connectivity piece to the shared vision is there or you simply won’t see sustained success.

The other interesting thing is that the latest research concludes that this connectivity is critical in achieving engagement.

Four out of the five key drivers cross generationally are about connection to the mission and vision with the last one being about individual autonomy and flexibility within the organization. The order was only slightly different, and the list of drivers overlapped 100%.

So think about where you are at in the evolution of your business- are you painting or sculpting or have you reached a stage where you need to build your mosaic? Remember that as you evolve if you desire scalability, or the ability to replicate efficiently it is likely that building the right mosaic is what will serve your “art”.

Also remember that as you assemble your human mosaic that among your technical specialists you will need to include linchpins, those individuals whose
greatest abilities may lie not in their “technical” contribution, but in building human mosaics…..

Mark Herbert is a Principal at New Paradigms LLC and the author of the book Managing Whole People. Mark can be reached at www.newparadigmsllc.com

Posted in Leadership, Team / People | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Do’s and Don’ts of Employee Engagement (and Motivation)

Posted on October 20, 2010 by David Shedd

A “Winning Business” is built by having talented, well-trained and engaged employees. To that end, multi-billion dollar industries exist to help companies find the right talent and to teach, train, coach, and develop employees and managers.

Unfortunately, less time and money is spent ensuring that these same employees are engaged and give their best day in and day out. In a recent study by TowersWatson, an international HR consulting firm, fewer than 21% of employees surveyed described themselves as highly engaged, down from 31% in 2009.

Would having only one-fifth of your employees highly engaged be a hallmark of a Winning Business? Continue reading →

Posted in Perform / Execution, Team / People | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

How to Be 10X More Effective in Your Life (Well, Almost): The 4- Hour Workweek and Effectiveness Management

Posted on October 14, 2010 by David Shedd


Tim Ferriss wrote a best-seller, The Four Hour Workweek. The premise of the book is that it is possible to improve your effectiveness and use the Internet and Social Media tools to create a lifestyle where you work only four hours a week, instead of the usual 40 hours. This then gives you the time to do the interesting things that you have always wanted to do: travel, learn, have free time. I recommend the book as an excellent read with a lot of insight and some good suggestions. Continue reading →

Posted in Perform / Execution, Personal Success | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Less is More (Jason Jennings)

Posted on October 11, 2010 by David Shedd

Less Is More: How Great Companies Use Productivity as a Competitive Tool in Business (Jason Jennings)


  1. Focus on the Simple Big Objective
    1. Keep everything simple and clear – including strategy
    2. The focus is determined by the leader in a defining moment
    3. The leader needs to crystallize for people where the business is going and how it is going to get there
  2. Get people on board
    1. Leader needs to live the achievement of the Objective
      1. There is no try. There is only doing.
    2. Sell the big Objective
      1. Build the culture around the objective
    3. Deal with the Unions and Cynics. Then Move On.
    4. Fire Some People
      1. The right people are the key resource
    5. Abandon anything that takes the eye off of achieving the Objective
    6. Prove that you are in it for the long haul
  3. Streamline everything
  4. Communicate truthfully with everyone
    1. Deal with fact and reality
    2. Be open with the numbers, with communications, with supplier communications
    3. Criticize the process, not the people
    4. Some people don’t do truth and openness well – not “on the bus”
  5. Destroy the bureaucracy and make it simple (“The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency”)
    1. Change everything as fast as you can (which is always faster than you think you can)
    2. Get the right people on the bus
    3. Blow up functional silos and construct cross-functional teams
    4. Decentralize to create entrepreneurship
    5. Flatten the organization to increase responsiveness to customers and others within the company
    6. Create passion in the ranks; lead by visible example, show the troops you care – a lot.
    7. Create and reinforce a high performance culture
    8. View all decisions from the perspective of “Does it help the customer” and “Does it make us money?” If it doesn’t, it’s bureaucracy. Shoot it.
  6. Get rid of the wrong executives and managers… fast
    1. Many managers are too chicken to play hangman
    2. Get rid of special perks for executives
  7. No layoffs
    1. Organizations lose valuable knowledge when institutional memory is not transferred to others
    2. The damage to workers includes loss of morale, anxiety, pessimism, and a “save my own butt” attitude – a siege mentality that is not in the best interests of the company.
    3. It is more expensive to lay off workers (legal, administrative, and financial packages out the door) and then rehire (recruiting and training expenses) than it is to shorten the workweek and temporarily reduce pay.
    4. While layoffs may lead to superficial short term efficiencies, they don’t produce or sustain productivity.
    5. No layoffs – The Secret – Productive Companies Don’t “Hire” Employees
      1. They hire people only when absolutely necessary and when they know the people well
      2. Outsource when necessary
      3. Cross Train
    6. But, there is room for a “One-Time Reorganization Layoff
  8. WITGBRFDT – What is the good business reason for doing this?
  9. The Real Financial Drivers
    1. Focus on the drivers of productivity
    2. Find the drivers, measure them regularly and seek constant improvement
    3. Communicate and share the drivers with everyone
  10. Systemize everything
    1. Have a system for every part of your business and work it over and over
    2. System
      1. Everyone does things the same way each time.
      2. The company has determined that each step is the best way to perform the task
      3. The objective is to perform tasks with zero variation
      4. The way a task is done becomes the baseline for continued improvement
    3. People will fight the systemization
    4. Empowerment can be a big excuse for doing nothing
    5. Trust and respect are required for systems to work
    6. Make a system into a culture
  11. Continuous improvement – Kaizen
    1. Leadership must be involved in continuous improvement
    2. There needs to be agreement on the objectives
    3. You need to know what the real product or service is
    4. Start by mapping the current process
    5. The people performing work must be involved in the new process
    6. The improved process is implemented immediately
    7. Continuous improvement becomes the ethos of the company
  12. Compensation
    1. It’s not the money
    2. Pay for productivity
      1. Capable of quickly weeding out people who won’t fit in
      2. Organized as group based
      3. Built to drive the team spirit
      4. Designed to provide constant reinforcing of the culture
      5. Easy to understand
      6. Financially rewarding for hard and smart work
  13. Digitize
    1. Neither knowledge nor technology creates a competitive advantage
    2. Digitization does not create a competitive advantage
    3. Technology for technology sake is waste
    4. Map and understand the flow first – then digitize
  14. Motivate
    1. Competition within an organization needs to be directed at an external goal or objective
    2. “Us” against the world
    3. Authentic motivation
      1. Create a safe and secure workplace
      2. Give meaning to work
      3. Make workers stakeholders and give them responsibility
      4. Allow mistakes
      5. Foster teamwork
      6. Encourage diversity
      7. Find an external enemy to fight
      8. Then get out of the way
  15. Embody – The 11 Traits Required for the Leader of a Highly Productive Enterprise
    1. Attention to detail
    2. High moral fiber
    3. Embracing simplicity
    4. Competitiveness
    5. Long-term focus
    6. Disdain for Waste
    7. Coach leadership
    8. Humility
    9. Rejection of bureaucracy
    10. Belief in Others
    11. Trust
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Communicate the Vision… Teach the Vision

Posted on September 30, 2010 by David Shedd

As a successful leader, you must …
  

  1. Define and communicate the values and vision for your company
  2. Align the company and all employees towards your values and vision
  3. Engage and then develop the employees to act in accordance with your values and to achieve your vision.

 In short, your values and your vision need to be understood and shared by all employees. They need to stick. They need to be front of mind. They need to be thought of on a daily basis.
  

So, how can this be achieved?   

   

  1. You as a leader need to spend the time to teach and explain your values and vision directly to the employees in your company!!

 What?!?
  

Yes, teach. As a leader, stand in front of groups, large and small, and directly explain, teach and preach your values and your vision, how they were derived, and why they are important.
  

You likely have three questions:
  

  1. What to Teach?
  2. When and to Whom to Teach?
  3. Why Teach?

 What to Teach?
  

The goal is to teach all members of your team about your company, about your values, and about your vision for the company.
  

As Division President, I conducted countless teaching sessions, formally in a 2 day class that I called “Precast University” and informally in small group settings. The purpose of these sessions was to ensure that everyone understood what the company did and to explain the values in the company and the vision that I and the leadership team had for the company.
  

First, I would explain about the company. I had a show and tell about the size and extent, the culture, the customers, and the products and services in the company. I was always shocked to discover how little people who had worked at the company knew about the company. Finance and human resources people would not know the products that we produced. Even production people would have no idea how the products that they made were used, who our customers were, and why they bought our products.
  

After this introduction, I would explain my values and the values that I wanted permeated throughout the company. Then, I would lay out the visions and the objectives of the company. I would explain why we are doing what we are doing.
  

When and to Whom to Teach?
  

I would teach the values and vision to the VP/ General Managers at formal General Managers’ meeting. I would teach to up and coming managers at small group “Manager of Managers” training. I would teach at formalized training programs as part of other teaching I might be doing or as an introduction before other training sessions. Finally, when visiting plants or different departments, I would teach the vision in informal small group “lunch and learns.” The opportunities for teaching are endless. What is essential is to ensure that as many people hear it as possible, both managers and employees.  

Finally, you need to have classes with your direct reports present and classes without your direct reports present.  When your direct reports and their direct reports are in the same class at the same time, they are all hearing the same message.  This limits the mis-communication and the lower level employees can serve as a check on whether their supervisors are following what you want them to do.  Conversely, when your direct reports (their supervisors) are not present, employees are much more open and the interaction is much livelier. 

   

Why Teach Your Values and Vision?
   

Teaching your values and vision to your team has three key benefits:
  

  1. Helps spread and refine your vision and your message
  2. Forces you to live the values and focus on your vision
  3. Helps you develop relationships and understand your team below the level of your direct reports

 Helps Spread and Refine Your Vision and Your Message
  

As leaders, we continue to over-estimate the penetration of messages to all levels of the organization. We may have been preaching a message for years and feel that we have communicated it to everyone, yet it still may not have penetrated down in the “trenches.” Richard Nixon (of all people) had it right when he wrote: “About the time that you are writing a line you have written so often that you want to throw up, that is the time the American people will hear it.”
  

By taking the time to teach your message directly and personally to the people throughout your organization, you get the opportunity to ensure that your values and vision are heard. In larger companies, this may be the only personal interaction that an employee will have with “the big boss”. If that is the case, would it not be important that that interaction revolves around what you as a leader stand for and where you want the company to go?
  

Surprisingly, the constant teaching and communicating of your values and vision has another benefit. It helps you improve the message. When I do this, the general content of what I communicate rarely changes, but the words and how I communicate does change. Especially at the beginning, I might be stressing a point and see by the reaction in the group that I had lost them completely, either from confusion or (yes, I will admit it) sheer boredom. In the end, the message gets shorter, more relevant, with more examples and stories, and stickier. Through this teaching, I have come to realize the importance of relating the vision and values that I was teaching to each person’s daily jobs, directly answering the fundamental question: “But, what does this have to do with me?”
  

A successful vision has a lot to do with each and every employee.
  

Forces You to Live the Values and Focus on Your Vision
  

Regular readers will know about my firm belief in the importance of leading by example. Through teaching your values and vision, you will be (over time) in front of hundreds of employees in large groups and small settings. You are on stage and they will directly see how well you live your values and vision through your actions during the different sessions.
  

Moreover, by teaching you will really understand the subject. As such, your values and vision will be driven home to you yourself; they will clearly be and remain in the front of your mind. Thus, each time that you teach your values and vision, the little voice inside your head will be telling you how well or how poorly you are living up to your values and properly focusing on your vision. This will reduce the hypocrisy which cripples companies where leaders say one thing and do another. As a leader, you know that…
  

  1. If you cannot adhere to your values and vision, then why should anyone else?
  2. “Do what I say not what I do” does not work on any child over the age of 5 and will certainly not work on your employees.

 Develops Relationships With Employees Below the Level of Your Direct Reports
By spending time directly with employees at all levels in both small and large groups, you will get to know many of them. You will get to know their name. You will get to know 1 – 2 things about them. In their body language, their engagement with you, and their questions and comments, you will learn a little about their personality, their capabilities, and their style. In turn, they will learn a bit about you. In short, you will begin to develop a relationship with them. This occurs especially in those meetings where your direct reports (their supervisors) are not present. Through this budding relationship you will begin to know better what is going on in the trenches and with customers without the insulation of several layers of management. As I discussed in my blog Do You Know How Your Managers are Managing?, it is these relationships with people layers down in the organization that let you understand the character and quality of your direct reports and other managers and whether they share your values and promote your vision.
  

Summary
  

Countless surveys expose some dirty little secrets of business today. Most employees in most companies…
  

  1. Do not know the values of their company and what their company stands for
  2. Do not know the goals and objectives of their company and how these goals translate into what they do on a daily basis
  3. Have little interaction with any leaders in their company outside of their direct supervisor

By getting out and teaching your values and vision and interacting directly with employees throughout your company, you, as a leader, can dramatically improve the alignment of your employees with your values and vision and increase the engagement employees feel in their daily work lives. With improved alignment (everyone rowing in the same direction) and increased engagement (everyone dedicated and committed), your company can significantly improve its business performance and realize your vision.
  

p.s. When you get out there and begin teaching your values and vision, you will find that not only is teaching a vital, albeit often overlooked, leadership tool. Teaching is actually a whole lot of fun!!
  

Until Next Time.  

 

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Are You Being Honest? Are You Really Being Honest?

Posted on September 23, 2010 by David Shedd

 

The first fundamental of a Winning Business is to “Do the Right Thing.” The first fundamental of doing the right thing is to be ethical. That is, to have integrity and honesty.

I leave to a later blog my discussion of ethics and integrity. Today, I want to focus on honesty.

Honesty can go by a number of different names: truth, candor, face reality… Despite the many names, honesty remains uncommon in the business world.

Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, writes that “lack of candor is the biggest dirty little secret in business.”

In business today…

  1. Companies are not honest and candid about the performance of the company
  2. Managers are not candid in their performance evaluations
  3. Leaders and employees are often not honest with themselves

 

This lack of honesty is so pervasive in business today, that we just expect a lack of candor or honesty and are surprised when someone is blatantly honest.

Consider this fictional excerpt from a quarterly earnings statement that you and I will never read:

“Today, Acme Corporation announces a 25% increase in earnings year over year. This increase exceeds the analyst projections and entitles me to the full complement of my bonus. But, it is not a great thing for the company and let me tell you why. In short, despite the increase, we did not have a good quarter.

  1. The economy was just stronger than anyone had expected. So, demand was higher and we rode that to improved sales despite continuing to lose market share.
  2. The weather was perfect. We had screwed up and over-stocked on swimwear for the summer, but warmer than expected weather throughout September and October on the West Coast and in the South helped us move those items. Moreover, on the East Coast, it was much colder than expected so we got a great head start on selling out our Winter line.
  3. The charge that we took last year when we were really sucking wind was, of course, much too high so we were able to write some of that back to profit.
  4. Finally, as I am 65 and retiring soon, we have continued our aggressive program of eating our seed corn and being focused on the short term. Product development and marketing expenses remain below the appropriate level to grow the business and our market share continues its steady decline.

In short, we made our numbers. But, we really are not as good as you give us credit for.”

So, how do we as leaders create a more honest and more candid culture in our organizations?

  1. Lead by Example
  2. Publicize Failures and the Lessons Learned
  3. Look Gift Horses in the Mouth

 

Lead By Example

By now, many of you are aware that I value the example of the leader as absolutely crucial in how effectively he or she can do his or her job. In the case of honesty and candor, the leader needs to set the example once again.

  1. Admit mistakes
  2. Refuse to speak and accept BS
  3. Be candid in performance reviews

Admit Mistakes

My favorite episode of the 1970’s sitcom, Happy Days, involves the Fonz and his inability to admit that he made a mistake. Throughout the episode, Fonzie tries to say that he was wrong. All that comes out is: “I was wrrrr. I was wrrrr.”

As leaders, many of us are like the Fonz. We just cannot admit that we made a mistake, even when it is obvious to everyone within the organization that we have made a mistake. We make excuses. We pass the buck. We refuse to express regret. In short, we exhibit all the behaviors that limit us as leaders and weaken our standing among our employees. [Note: see my blog post on What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith for a full list of these weaknesses in leadership behavior.]

Refuse to Speak and Accept BS

Noble Prize Winning Physicist Richard Feynman had it right when he said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

In short, speak the truth as best you know it or say nothing at all. All of us as people, leaders, and employees have very astute BS detectors. We just are not fooling anyone by speaking or letting someone get away with speaking BS. The more insidious result from speaking and accepting BS is that we may lose touch with reality.

You will often see this happen in failing companies where the leaders and employees believe sincerely that they are performing well, even heroically. They have accepted the BS from their leaders so long that they do not know what is up and what is down. To change this mindset will then require a cold bath of “Face Reality.” Avoid the shivering and start requiring the truth, painful and ugly as it can be.

Be Candid in Performance Reviews

When I have acquired or taken over other operations, I often begin by reading everyone’s performance reviews. As such, I am whisked back to Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Lake Wobegon is the fictional town of radio personality Garrison Keillor where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” It is surprising how organizations can fail while all employees are receiving above expectations and superior ratings in their performance reviews.

This is something to avoid. So begin to be honest in your performance reviews. Knowing someone’s weaknesses is vital as their manager. It may mean that they need to work hard to improve on the weaknesses. It may mean that they need some help and a re-definition of their job responsibilities to focus on their strengths while someone else covers for their weaknesses. It may mean that they are a wrong fit for the job. But, it definitely means that the weaknesses need to be addressed and spoken about.

Publicize Failures and the Lessons Learned

If you have lead by example in being honest, then publicizing failures in your company will come naturally. Moreover, developing lessons learned from these failures, even if only a one page, five bullet point list of lessons learned is invaluable for organizational learning.

Leading companies conduct post-mortems on all their major projects, initiatives, and acquisitions, both the successes and the failures. These post-mortems are then disseminated and become a source of learning and continuous improvement.

  1. What went well?
  2. What went wrong?
    1. What could we have done better to detect earlier what went wrong?
    2. What could we have done better to correct what went wrong?

The answers do not need to be very long; but they will be productive the next time you try to do something similar.

Look Gift Horses in the Mouth

As my fictional quarterly earnings statements attests, it is the rare company that analyzes what goes right and why. For most companies and leaders [I have been guilty of this], the common response is: “You have made your numbers. Great job.” But, a deeper look is often needed to avoid getting burned.

  1. John made his numbers yet again. But, did he play with the numbers to get there or stuff the inventory channel or ???
  2. Sales are up. But, are you losing market share?
  3. Profits are up. But, are you continuing to invest in new product and market development?

Focus on the good parts of the results as well as the bad parts.

Summary

Being truly honest in an organization creates a stronger, more realistic company that continues to do the right thing, retain the best employees, and respond to and excel in changing market conditions.

In short, honesty is an essential ingredient of a “winning business.”

Until Next Time.

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More Quotes on “Do the Right Thing”

Posted on September 16, 2010 by David Shedd

As you may recall, I consider “Do the Right Thing” to be the first of the three keys for a Winning Business. Do the Right Thing is defined as:

  1. Ethics, Integrity and Character
  2. Do the Right Thing to Ensure the Success of the Business
  3. Focus and Prioritize to Effectively Get the Right Thing Done

I have already published a blog: Quotes on “Do the Right Thing.” In this blog post, I have collected together additional quotes about Doing the Right Thing.

Ethics, Integrity and Character

  1. “What you do speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you say.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
  2. JP Morgan was being testified in Congress by Samuel Untermeyer, a relentless corporate lawyer. Untermeyer asked Morgan if the main criterion for lending was the money or property of the borrower. “No, sir,” Morgan said. “The first thing is character.” “Before money or property?” Untermeyer asked. “Before money or property or anything else,” Morgan said. “A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.”
  3. “The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.” Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School Professor
  4. “The interesting thing with ethics is that it really starts getting complex when you get into the issues. You can say you have certain values and believe in certain things, but when you’re up against a very difficult situation, which you often are as a leader, it’s only then that those values and belief systems really start to play out.” Carl Bjorkman
  5. “Character in the long run is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.” Theodore Roosevelt
  6. “As a leader, the key to developing trust and showing your integrity is to make and keep promises.” David Shedd

 

Do the Right Thing to Ensure the Success of the Business

  1. “All organizations are perfectly aligned to get the results they get.” Arthur W. Jones
  2. “Private Equity firms add value by overcoming management strategic inertia and helping to make needed changes in leadership in order to improve operations and better serve the customer.” Arthur Laffer
  3. “The fall from greatness, though, was from lost discipline driven by a failure of leadership to listen, to continuously renew, to act sooner, and to keep the strategy fresh and great along the way. Like the popular buy and hold investment strategy, some of the companies seemed happy with average performance and overly reluctant to fix what wasn’t (clearly) broken.” Arthur Laffer
  4. “First and foremost what used to consistently keep me bothered nights and days alike is how to keep the work force motivated to stick to the objective of continuous improvement, to always remain constructively dissatisfied with the end result. In my view, this is what keeps a company competitive into the future. It is a culture characteristic that has to be instilled and sustained without the constant need to micromanage business results from the COO and/or the executive staff.” B Mitchell White
  5. “Return calls and E-Mails in a timely way. That would put you 99.9% ahead of your competitors. People are shocked, people are in awe. Than can’t believe it. And we can’t believe that people can’t believe it because we think everybody should do it.” Dan Gilbert, Founder, Quicken Loans
  6. “Always be alert to a better way of doing everything, never stop innovating.” Dan Gilbert
  7. “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” Winston Churchill
  8. “We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, then that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.” Clayton Christensen
  9. “If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.” Clayton Christensen
  10. “You have to do what is right for the organization and what is right for the individuals. You have to find a way to get the right people in the right roles at the right time. You have to do it early and decisively.” George Bradt
  11. “The reality is that replacing the non-performers with high performers is in the best interest of everyone – even the non-performers.” Gary Henson
  12. “The number one thing high performers want is for management to act on low performers so that the whole group can do better. Choosing to act on people who are in the wrong roles now or will soon be in the wrong roles is generally not the most enjoyable part of leadership. But it is in an essential part.” George Bradt
  13. “I would always tell my managers that when you fire someone for non-performance you should be able to sleep well the night before, secure in the knowledge that you had done everything possible to communicate and work out the performance issues. It should be clear that the non-performer had, in fact, really fired himself.” David Shedd
  14. “Before you fire someone who is not performing what did you do as a leader to help them get an A?” Ken Blanchard

 

Focus and Prioritize to Effectively Get the Right Thing Done

  1. “The prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully.” Samuel Johnson
  2. “The more focused you are, the easier everything becomes.” Marc LeBlanc
  3. “The most important thing in life is to decide what is most important.” Ken Blanchard
  4. “W.I.N. — What’s Important Now?” Lou Holtz
  5. “What is my Commander’s Intent? (Chip and Dan Heath)
    1. If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must accomplish…
    2. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is…”
  6. “People are naturally wired to focus on only one thing at a time (or at best very few) with excellence.” Stephen Covey
  7. “The key is not efficiency; it is effectiveness, which is doing the things that get you closer to your goals.” Tim Ferriss, Author of The 4-Hour Workweek
  8. “What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.” Tim Ferriss
  9. “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” Bill Gates
  10. “80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.” Pareto’s Law
  11. “There is a maxim; 80% strategy with 100% execution will win over 100% strategy with 80% execution.” Eugene Lee
  12. “‘Not-to-do’ lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance. The reason is simple: what you don’t do determines what you can do.” Tim Ferriss
  13. “Developing and executing an effective business strategy is all about choosing what not to do among the myriad of opportunities available.” Michael Porter
  14. “The hardest thing in business is to decide what not to do. It is the nature of successful business people and entrepreneurs to want to do everything and believe that with just 5% more time and/or effort that they can get this additional task done as well. The reality is that we run into limitations of time, attention span, and energy. As a result, we may get the tyrannically urgent tasks done, but neglect the supremely important (if not urgent) tasks.” David Shedd
  15. “Learn to make nonfatal or reversible decision as quickly as possible. Fast decisions preserve usable attention for what matters.” Tim Ferriss
  16. “Oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen.” Tim Ferriss
  17. “Time is the only thing that, once lost, can never be recovered.”
  18. “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” William of Occam (1300 – 1350), originator of Occam’s Razor
  19. “Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials.” Tim Ferriss
  20. “Time is wasted because there is so much time available. Am I being productive or just active? Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? Lack of time is actually just a lack of priorities.” Tim Ferriss
  21. “Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.” Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God
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Do You Return Phone Calls?

Posted on September 9, 2010 by David Shedd

 

“Your call is very important to me. Please leave your message, and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you.”

Welcome to the biggest lie in business!!

Unfortunately, most people in business are not returning phone calls or reading and responding to E-Mails promptly. This guarantees sub-standard performance from you as a leader and your organization for several reasons:

  1. Every day, it sets and reinforces a perfect example of lack of accountability
    1. You, your people, and your company are not doing what was said
  2. It kills time
    1. Urgent issues are not promptly addressed
    2. Due to all the delays, tasks that can be done reasonably quickly drag out or are not done at all
  3. It is just rude
  4. It increases inefficiency
    1. People will leave multiple messages, just to get ahead in the queue
    2. E-Mails fly about that are read by fewer than half the people in the group
    3. Supervisors waste time holding meetings to repeat things already written in E-Mails in order to be sure that the message is communicated because people are not reading their E-Mails.

     

Guess what? Immediately returning your phone calls and reading and responding to E-Mails will make your life much easier and simpler.

How do I know?

I know, because I have being doing exactly this for 15 years. And you can do it too!!

Returning Phone Calls

In the early 1990’s, I read an article about the Hollywood agent business and Michael Ovitz’s CAA. In the article, it was mentioned that all CAA agents were required to return all their clients’ calls by the end of the day or they could be fired. Working in a bureaucratic organization at the time, this sentiment resonated.

As such, I came up with a simple statement which I then shared with everyone (colleagues, employees, customers, suppliers):

  1. “I will return your phone call within 24 hours (by the same time the next business day) or I will pay you $100.”

 

Simple statement. Actually quite simple to do (most of the time).

In the last 15 years, I have written a $100 check once, but the person involved refused to cash it. After receiving the check from me, he found out that while I had not gotten back to him directly within 24 hours, I had left 3 messages with his assistant who had failed to relay these messages on to him. I really wanted him to cash the check, because it was my responsibility to get back to him, and I did not do it. I also wanted him to cash the check because for $100 it would make the story stick and resonate even more.

As I have been in the role of President of a $200M division, the reaction from most people the first time I return their call promptly is usually shock.

  1. “Oh my gosh, I did not expect your call.”
  2. “I cannot believe that you actually called me back.”
  3. “Thank you very much.”

 

For customers, it is truly win-win, they are so appreciative to have somebody actually return their phone call, actually speak to them, and actually address their concerns that your rating with them as a supplier sky rockets.

Yes, it can be a pain. On business in Europe, being up in your room at 1:00 a.m. responding to routine calls. But, that does not happen as much as you would think. And, even if you get voice mail when returning the call, you can leave a powerful message to your customer, supplier or employee that they matter.

“Sarah, I know it is 6:00 pm where you are but I was hoping that I could get you. I am returning your phone call from early today. I am on business over here in Ireland. But, I will be up for another hour so if you get this give me a call back and we can talk.”

 

I hear you saying. “I got so many calls that I cannot possibly return all of them.”

Yes, that will be a challenge at the beginning until you set out the rules of the road in your company, with suppliers, and with salespeople. Customers can also be cautiously and carefully trained, but that is less important since they are your customers and you want to be responsive to them under all circumstances.

Some rules to reduce the call volume and make you and your team more effective:

  1. Require people to leave a real message about what they want or need. This allows you to think about the response and get to the point when you call them back.
    1. No more: “Hi, this is David. Can you give me a call back?”
    2. Better: “Hi, this is David. We just had another large order from a solar company. As such, I am beginning a marketing campaign focused on alternative energy (solar and wind). I want to get your marketing insight on our approach. Please call me back to discuss.”
  2. Batch (or aggregate) phone calls and communication
    1. Unless urgent, require your people to only call you once about 3 items instead of three times about one item each time
    2. As the leader, this applies to you. Do not constantly be calling and disturbing your team. Aggregate your own communication, calling them when you have multiple things to discuss.
  3. Get to the point in all conversations and in call-backs
    1. If you get voice mail when you call back, then leave a substantive message as this can often resolve the issue in question without further phone calls
  4. Require salespeople that call you to do some work and follow up in order to earn the time to talk to you
    1. My preferred is to call back a salesperson and tell him or her that I would like a one-page summary of what they are offering and why I should be interested sent to my E-Mail within one day. If they do that, I would then talk to them. If not, I will not be talking to them.
      1. My experience is that 95% of all salespeople will not complete this simple task. As such, the other 5% would be the only ones worth talking to.
      2. To the point – yes. Polite – maybe. Effective – yes.

 

Reading and Responding to E-Mails Promptly

My goal at the end of every business day is to have no E-Mails in my In-Box. That is the goal. I always have fewer than 10.

How?

  1. Be organized. Be Ruthless.
    1. Scan your E-Mails for the ones that are most important first and then the ones that are most urgent.
      1. Read them once.
      2. Act on them.
      3. Delete the E-Mail.
    2. If you cannot immediately act on a particular E-Mail
      1. Set up a To-Do task and schedule a time that you are going to finish this task.
      2. Save any content that you need on your computer.
      3. Then delete the E-Mail.
      4. Don’t think about the task until it is the scheduled time.
  2. For any E-Mails where you are cc: or any E-Mails that are just “For your information”.
    1. Skim through
    2. Get the gist
    3. Delete
    4. Move on
  3. Require that you and your team always strive to resolve the issues on the E-Mail and to suggest solutions
    1. For my direct reports, I required them to come with their solution to any problem that they wanted my input on. Not only did this improve their strategic thinking and give them greater ownership of the solution, it also led to quicker resolution of the issues.
    2. By resolving and suggesting solutions, you avoid the endless and useless streams of E-Mail all of which really only say:
      1. “Yes, I read this E-Mail. I am passing my empty thoughts on to all of you for no reason other than to ensure that you know that I read the E-Mail and that my butt is covered.”

 

With these tactics, 95% of your E-Mails can be responded to and dispatched very quickly. To paraphrase General George Patton: “A good response, violently executed now, is better than a perfect response next week.”   

I know. I know. I will now climb down from my soapbox after making three final comments about returning phone calls and reading and responding to E-Mails.

First, as a leader you never want to be the cog in the wheel, the rate determining step holding up the flow of work. In business, time is the most over-looked element. Your slow response can literally have 10 people twiddling their thumbs for a day waiting for you to get back to them: ten people for one day at (say) $40,000 a year; that equals $1600. $1600 pissed away. Another customer potentially pissed off.

Second, if you really try, but are unable to answer back E-Mails promptly, then you need to think about why this is so.

  1. You may be patently un-organized.
  2. You may be in too many meetings.
  3. You may have too many things going on and thus are not prioritizing and focusing on the few critical issues.
  4. You may not delegate well enough.
  5. You may micro-manage and be too involved in what your team is doing.
  6. Or, as in the case of a failing colleague of mine who I once observed had 2,452 E-Mails in his In-Box, you may be all these things.

Third, I am not quite alone in my view of phone calls and E-Mails.

  1. In his book, Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School, Philip Delves Broughton relates some advice he got from Dan Gilbert, CEO of Quicken Loans.
    1. “Return calls and E-Mails in a timely way. That would put you 99.9% ahead of your competitors. People are shocked; people are in awe when you do this. They can’t believe it. And we can’t believe that people can’t believe it because we think everybody should do it.”
  2. Likewise, in a recent article in Fortune about Wal-Mart, CEO Mike Duke states:
    1. “I keep up with E-Mails. I don’t like carryovers. At the end of the day, I don’t want there to be any phone messages that haven’t been returned or E-Mails that aren’t addressed.”

 

Summary

Albert Schweitzer wrote: “Leadership is example.”

  1. What is the example that you show to your team and to your customers on a daily basis?

By not returning phone calls or responding to E-Mails promptly, you give the example of a leader who is not responsive, who is not organized and who is not accountable to the promise made. If you, as the leader of your organization, are like that…

  1. Why should your employees believe that they should be any different?
  2. Why should your customers believe that your organization will be any different?

 

Until Next Time

Posted in Leadership, Perform / Execution | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Do You Really Know How Your Managers are Managing?

Posted on September 2, 2010 by David Shedd

As the size of your business gets larger than $20M or so, you inevitably have to delegate a large part of the running of the business to your key leadership team, some of whom may not be located in the same office, state or even country as you are.

Most likely, you have a P&L and other accounting measures to determine whether the members of your leadership team are making their numbers. But, do you really know how these key managers are managing?

  1. Do they share your vision, values and philosophies?
  2. Do they interact with their subordinates in the outstanding, responsive, and enlightened way that you interact with them?
  3. Do they lead by their example?

 

A True Story:

A number of years ago, I took a 360 degree evaluation along with a group of other “high potentials.” For those that may not know, a 360 degree evaluation combines a self-evaluation with the results of a survey and/or interviews with your supervisors, peers, and direct reports to give a complete picture of how you are as a leader. In any event, we received our 360 feedback at a leadership training seminar that we all attended. As we were walking out of the meeting, a colleague pulled me aside to ask a sincere question about his results. “In my 360, my supervisors and I both rated myself very highly. But my direct reports gave me very low marks. How can my supervisors and I be so right when my direct reports are so wrong? Since I am already right, why should I change my behavior based on the results of this 360?”

This colleague is an example of every leader’s fear about their key leadership team. Leaders fear that they have an executive who makes the numbers and looks good in the upward direction while destroying the culture and values that the leader is trying to embed in the organization.

So, how can you get the “true truth” about your key executives, not only in terms of their results, but in terms of their example to their employees, their values and their vision?

As Ronald Regan said: “Trust but Verify.”

There are three things that all leaders should be doing in their managing of their leadership team:

  1. Ensure that your message is heard throughout the organization
  2. Develop relationships with stakeholders down, across and outside the organization
  3. Look the gift horse in the mouth

 

Ensure That Your Message is Heard Throughout the Organization

As the leader of your company or business unit, you need to define the values and vision of your company. You need to ensure that everyone has heard and understood the message, not only your direct reports but also their direct reports and all stakeholders. If not, employees many levels down in the organization may just accept the toxic values of a poor supervisor as being your values as a leader and the values of the company.

But, defining values does no good unless they are heard. To ensure that your values and vision are heard you need to communicate, preach, discuss, teach. Jack Welch writes: “there were times I talked about the company’s direction so much that I was completely sick of hearing it myself.”

While posters, signs and slogans may be nice and have their place, the message is best heard in person, face to face.

  1. Manage by walking around (MBWA)
    1. Ask questions to employees throughout the office, in the field, and on the factory floor
    2. Preach the message
    3. Share stories that embody the values
  2. Teach classes to employees at all levels of the organization or hold skip-level “lunch and learns”
    1. Reinforce and explain the values and vision in more detail
    2. Gives an opportunity to get to know individuals and to be known
  3. Repeat
    1. “Power of Ten” – A new concept or idea may need to be communicated ten times or more before being internalized by the listeners

 

Develop Relationships with Stakeholders Down, Across and Outside the Organization

You need to develop relationships with individuals 1, 2, 3, 4 or more levels down in your organization. There need to be individuals many levels down in the organization that you can ask how things are going and get a reasonably honest answer. Likewise, you need to develop relationships with key suppliers and some key customers to know how your company is delivering on their promises to these key stakeholders.

Especially with individuals lower in the organization, you need to be careful that they are not perceived as spies. It is important not to undercut the authority of their supervisors, especially if you hear of a problem. And it is important that they do not take what you say out of context and run to their supervisors saying the equivalent of: “we can’t do it this way. I just spoke with the President and in our discussion, he said that he disagreed and…”

There is a fine line between getting the true truth from the stakeholders and over-stepping your bounds, usurping the authority of their supervisors and micro-managing. But, it is a line that must be approached.

Some good questions to ask:

  1. What is your biggest challenge today?
  2. Can you tell me what the vision or values of the company are? (Good question to measure congruence and if your message has been heard)
  3. What are your three biggest priorities? (Another congruence question)
  4. What can we as management do to help you do your job better?

After asking the questions, listen closely to the answers and don’t offer to solve their problem (that is their supervisor’s job). But, by listening you will get a clear picture of how things are going in that business unit.

Look the Gift Horse in the Mouth

The biggest challenge in managing managers is not the manager who does not deliver on their numbers. We all can deal with that. It is the manager that delivers on the numbers, but is toxic on the culture of the company.

Look these gift horses in the mouth. Trust and verify their behaviors and values with their subordinates and other stakeholders (as above). And importantly, listen and observe them in action.

  1. Listen and observe how they get their job done
    1. Do they work in accordance with your vision and values?
    2. What do they say they spend their time on?
    3. What are the problems that they continue to have?
  2. Listen to the stories they tell about their business and their team
    1. Who is the hero in the story? The manager or the team?
    2. Do the stories show empathy to team members?
  3. Observe their behavior with others in the office
    1. Are they friendly?
    2. Do they greet people by name?
    3. Do they know people’s names?

If you still cannot get a comfortable feel about this manager and his or her values and style, then I would recommend doing a 360 degree evaluation for them. It is not a perfect tool; some stakeholders (especially subordinates) may not believe that the answers will remain confidential. But, it will give a fuller picture of the leader. There are 360’s that can be taken on-line and ones that are taken with an outside firm. It does not need to be expensive; but can be quite useful.

Summary

The power in any organization comes from all parts of the organization rowing in the same direction and in sync. This does not mean that you want to create an organization of clones; you want and will almost certainly have leaders and managers with different styles and different personalities. Nevertheless, these key managers must share the core values and vision that you as a leader have chosen for the organization.

So, trust but verify. Ensure that your key managers are managing as you want them to manage which will ensure that your key managers are the right people for your rowboat.

Until Next Time.

Posted in Leadership, Team / People | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The Sweetness Of Doing Nothing

Posted on August 26, 2010 by David Shedd

 

Ahhh, summertime!

The time to take a vacation: to get away from the office; to relax; to spend time with the family and enjoy the important things in life.

Alas, it appears that yet again most business leaders will not take their full vacation. And when we do take vacation days, most of us still check E-Mails, answer the phone, and remain tethered to the office.

The reasons for not taking a vacation vary, but usually include some of the following:

  1. The economic crisis and/or challenging business conditions
  2. As the leader, we are too indispensable to the business
  3. We just do not have the time; there are too many things to do, and there is too much going on

Author Katherine Crowley suggests another reason: taking a vacation is not part of the identity of who we are as business leaders. As she writes, “we are a work-identified nation, that’s the badge we wear–where we work, what we do–that’s how we define ourselves. As such, we have a hard time giving ourselves permission to take vacation time.”

By contrast, I believe that as business leaders we must have time away from the pressures of work. That means taking vacations and taking at least one day off a week.

My reasoning is quite simple; vacations and downtime away from work are vital because they make us better leaders while making our companies better.

There are three reasons why downtime away from work is so important:

  1. Refresh
  2. Get Fresh Eyes
  3. Improve Effectiveness

 

Refresh

Consider someone who has been up 48 hours straight. It could be a medical intern. It could be a student cramming for a test. It could be an investment banker working on a multi-million dollar merger. It could be an attorney preparing for a big case.

Questions:

  1. During hours 46 to 48, were they performing at peak potential?
    1. Were they efficient?
    2. Were they effective?
    3. Were they creative and insightful?
  2. What is the one thing that these people most want to do?
  3. What is the one thing that these people most need to do?

 

The answers are obvious. While these people may have gotten work done, they were undoubtedly not particular efficient, nor effective and certainly not creative. And the one thing that they most want to and need to do is sleep.

Yes, sleep.

Sleep gives their brains the downtime to process information, to re-charge, and to re-connect. After a refreshing sleep, the person will then be able to get back near peak performance.

As an obvious parallel, consider the business leader who has been working for 52 weeks a year often 7 days a week often 10, 12 or more hours a day.

  1. Are they at their most efficient?
  2. Are they at their most effective?
  3. Are they at their most creative?

Most likely, the answer to all three questions is NO. They are more likely to feel over-worked and on the verge of burnout.

It is at this point that the business leader needs to take the time away from work in order to refresh themselves. By doing so, they can re-charge their batteries storing up the mental, physical, and emotional reserves that they need to draw upon each day.

Get Fresh Eyes

The biggest challenge in any business is seeing the reality as it is really is. As I discussed in my blog “Change and Business Turnarounds”, vacations and downtime give you the ability to re-evaluate and see the business reality (the true truth) with fresh eyes. With time away from work…

  1. You have a chance to vacate, to get some fresh air to evaluate your life, your direction, and your priorities.
  2. You gain a perspective on the business that you will likely have missed while fighting the daily battles. Instead of operating at 10,000 feet, by stepping back from the daily demands, you get the chance to fly up and see the business at 35,000 feet.
  3. When you take a vacation, you get the chance to see your team in action without you. This lets you evaluate your team and business.
    1. Is your team strong enough to handle the business while you are gone? If so, who steps up while you are gone to lead the business?
    2. Or are you so important to the business that the business begins to fail without you?
    3. Are you the problem in the business (dictator, micro-manager, etc.)?
    4. What are the fires in your office that you have to deal with when you come back? Where are they coming from? Why were they not resolved while you were gone?

In all these situations, the time away from work gives you a fresh view on the business and where it is going.

Improve Effectiveness

“The key in business as in life is not in being efficient; it is in being effective, in doing the things that get you closer to your goals.” Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek

Taking a vacation, taking the time away from work to do nothing, improves effectiveness in three ways:

  1. Sharpens focus on the right goals
  2. Forces prioritization
  3. Increases delegation

Sharpens Focus on the Right Goals

Taking a vacation and taking one day off each week (a weekly “sabbath” or sabbatical from business, the phone and E-Mail) naturally limits the amount of time that you can devote to your business. As such, you will likely not be able to do everything that you want to do. This is a good thing. It forces you to make choices and to order your business and your life better. Without the freedom of unlimited time, you will need to sharpen your focus on only the right goals, the most important goals.

This will serve you well and your company even better as an endless series of priorities from the leader of a company or business unit usually just exhausts the employees in the company and distracts them from their key roles of serving the customer, etc. The sign at the Crab Cooker Restaurant in Newport Beach, California says it well. “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

Forces Prioritization

Even with a sharpened focus on just the right goals, you can still get distracted by the unimportant urgent. But, you do not have unlimited time to get it all done. That means saying no to doing different things. That means creating a “stop doing” list. That means limiting the amount of time spent on certain activities. That means fighting the “tyranny of the urgent.” In short, that means prioritizing.

Prioritizing means that not everything will get done. Balls will be dropped; just make them unimportant balls. I quote Tim Ferriss again. “It is necessary to let small bad things happen if you want to get huge good things done.” In short, prioritize to give yourself the time and attention to do the main thing extraordinarily well.

Increase Delegation

Let’s say that you have prioritized well, but still do not have the time to get everything done while still taking your weekly day off and your vacation time. If this is the case, you must delegate more. You need to increase the amount and importance of the tasks that you delegate to your team in order to reduce your workload.

Magically, this increased delegation has the great good effect of focusing you on your essential leadership tasks while developing the skills, morale and confidence of your team. And it makes it even easier for you to take your time away from work. So, delegate well, get the main thing done, and see your team develop.

In summary, except when there is a crisis or a turn-around situation requiring your leadership and your presence, taking the downtime away from the office, away from the E-Mail, away from the phone is vital for both the health and longevity of you as a leader and your business.

That is the true “sweetness of doing nothing.”

Until Next Time.

Posted in Leadership, Personal Success | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Leadership and the One Minute Manager (Kenneth Blanchard)

Posted on August 26, 2010 by David Shedd

Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Kenneth Blanchard


 

  1. In leadership, don’t work harder; work smarter
    1. Lao-Tzu: “When the best leader’s work is done, the people say: ‘we did it ourselves.'”

     

  2. Management requires different strokes for different folks
    1. There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals
    2. A person will tend to be at different levels of development depending on the specific tasks or goals he or she is assigned
      1. As an example, consider General Managers who come up through operations:
        1. For operations, their development level is likely high
        2. For accounting, their development level may be medium to high
        3. For sales and marketing, their development level may be low
      2. Same person, three different development levels
      3. Would you manage these General Managers the same no matter whether they were working on an operations issue, an accounting issue, or a sales and marketing issue?

     

  3. Situational Leader – There is no one best leadership style
    1. You need to have a flexibility in your leadership style with your team
    2. You need to diagnose their development level
    3. You need to partner with them to lead them in the most appropriate leadership style

     

  4. Four different leadership styles
    1. Directive
      1. Provide specific direction
      2. Closely monitor task accomplishments
    2. Coaching
      1. Continue to direct and closely monitor task accomplishments
      2. Explain decisions, solicits suggestions, and support progress; engage in two way communication
    3. Supportive
      1. Facilitate and support people’s efforts towards task accomplishment
      2. Share responsibility for decision making with them
    4. Delegative
      1. Turn over responsibility for decision making and problem solving to people
      2. But, still be a sounding board and monitor (“trust but verify”).

     

  5. In situational leadership, the four different leadership styles create a leadership style continuum
    1. The goal is to increase the competence and confidence (preferences – what they like to do) of your people so that you can begin to use less time consuming leadership styles – supportive and delegative – and still get high quality results

     

  6. Failed Leadership Styles
    1. Autocratic / Dictating
    2. Abdicating / Abandoning

     

  7. Leadership behaviors
    1. Directive behavior
      1. Structure
      2. Organize
      3. Teach
      4. Supervise
    2. Supportive Behavior
      1. Praise
      2. Listen
      3. Ask
      4. Explain
      5. Facilitate

     

  8. Diagnosis
    1. Diagnosing a situation or an individual before you act is the key to situational leadership
    2. Everyone has peak performance potential; you just need to know where they are coming from and meet them there
    3. In determining what style to use, remember that leaders need to do what the people they supervise cannot do (or avoid doing) for themselves at the present moment

     

  9. Partnering for Performance
    1. Be honest with your people about their levels as it relates to their overall competence and preference / commitment and agree with them on the appropriate leadership style that will be used
    2. It is important that everyone know what is going on
    3. Situational leadership is not something you do to people but something you do with people
  10. Leaders need to have positive assumptions about their people. It is a given: managers should believe that people have the potential to become high performers. What fluctuates is the manager’s behavior, depending on his or her people’s needs for direction and support
    1. Leadership is about providing direction and support to help people develop their full potential
    2. Everyone is a potential high performer. Some people just need a little help along the way.
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