photo credit: m.a.x

Productivity is pretty important, but it had better apply to the right sort of work.

Even if your employees are incredibly efficient at whatever they do, if their work no longer brings substantial value to the table, your business could evaporate.

The failure to automate the work that can and should be automated will eventually push your costs out of line with the competition. If some of the work you do now could be automated without losing quality, you have to take an honest look at it.

Remember…If you don’t address this issue, the marketplace will do it for you.

If you’ve ever had to lay someone off, you know it isn’t fun. When they walk out for the last time, they have to go home and tell their family and they have to figure out what’s next. It won’t feel any better that it happened because you weren’t paying attention – and it certainly won’t help you to be understaffed.

In order to avoid this, you have to look for places to become more efficient. It has to be done without losing quality, distinction or value. It’s possible that your choice becomes your new edge and that the staffer who was doing the low value work ends up managing the process that replaced their labor.

Are you still doing the right things?

Sometimes, automation isn’t enough. You realize (or the market tells you) that you’re doing the wrong work.

Every month, you have to ask yourself about your business and about your people, “Am I doing the right sort of work? If not, am I ready to? If not, what do I have to do to get there?”

If your work can be outsourced easily, you’re living on borrowed time.

If you’re a middleman adding zero value, you’re living on borrowed time.

You already know this if you’re paying attention and being honest with yourself. Even so, it’s nothing to be ashamed of unless you ignore it. Everyone faces market challenges but we don’t have to seek them out and invite them in for dinner.

There’s nothing that says you have to do what you do now, that your people can’t learn a new skill that someone places a high value these days or that your business can’t start making something that people will line up to buy.

The kind of work you should be seeking is the kind of work that produces real value and/or requires taking real responsibility for what you deliver.

Think about the vendors who serve your business. How many of them take real responsibility for the products and services they provide? Now consider the vendor you’d NEVER fire. You know why. They care as much as you do.

What if you don’t want to change?

“Boy, the way Glenn Miller played”…

Edith and Archie sang that song in the 70s about music from decades earlier, looking back upon what they saw as their golden years.

No matter how wonderful those golden years were, no matter what decade they were in, now isn’t then. Even in 1939, the handwriting was on the wall for Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel.

If you warmly recall that time two, three or even four decades ago when your area had low unemployment, the best jobs, more work than you could do and close to the highest per capita wages in the country.

Those decades are long gone. So are many of the high-paying jobs that were valued back then. Just like that steam shovel.

Everyone deals with it.

Many “middle class” jobs of a century ago (like coal and ice delivery) were steady jobs. They’re gone. It’s not much different with many of the jobs from 20-30-40 years ago.

If this describes your business, understand that I’m not trying to make light of that. I was trained as a programmer. 20 years later, tens of millions of people in India, the Ukraine, China and elsewhere can do what most “first world” programmers do for $10-20 an hour. I understand the competitive pressures.

If your work can be outsourced at $10-20 an hour, you have to ask yourself…”How much value do I really deliver?”

Take charge. Do the right work.

photo credit: ericmcgregor

When it was just you and you were a bulletproof superhero, you could remember it all.

You could look at code you wrote six months earlier and you knew exactly what it did and why you wrote it that way.

A bit of time has passed since then. You’ve hired new people. Because you didn’t write good technical documentation back then (or didn’t keep it up to date), there are many mysteries about your business buried deep inside the heads of your most senior, most expensive staff.

And now, they’re being interrupted repeatedly with every new hire because the new person needs the knowledge stored in the heads of the “old ones” in order to do their job and learn your business.

You want a new programmer to hit the ground running. To become as productive as possible as quickly as possible.

Think back to the last new person you hired. Remember that ramp-up period?

Now imagine hiring three or five at once. Just try to get something productive done while they are getting up to speed. You (and whoever is managing them) probably have other tasks to do, perhaps very high ROI tasks. Without strong technical, application/market and process documentation, those tasks are going to get incessantly interrupted with things that should have been documented.

Sure, you’ll get brilliant questions that you might not have foreseen. The other 912 questions likely could be answered in your internal wiki or other documentation. Or you could enjoy their visits to your office, their emails, IMs, texts and phone calls, while pondering the time they’re wasting by getting you them both out of the zone every time they have questions.

Your choice.

PS: Just because you aren’t a programmer or don’t have programmers doesn’t mean you’re immune to this.

photo credit: Selma90

Howard Schultz is doing what few large corporate CEOs have done: Following up rhetoric with leadership, action and money.

While I prefer freshly-roasted beans from local roasters and rarely do Starbucks outside of airports, I will stop in this week in order to support this.

The post title? It’s inscribed on a wrist band you get if you donate $5 to the job creation fund the Starbucks Foundation started.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/03/us-starbucks-idUSTRE7921M320111003

photo credit: Abhisek Sarda

Last week I was talking with a friend who was celebrating, or at the very least – remembering, the fact that a certain day this week marked the 10th year on the job at his employer’s business.

10 years. How many people do you know that have had the same job for 10 years? I’ll bet the number is smaller than it used to be.

A decade or two ago, it was commonplace to have the same job for 10 years. In the decades of my parents’ work life, 25 or more years wasn’t unusual at one job.

Recent research indicates that people entering the workforce will have as many as 30 jobs during their lifetime. Meanwhile, some of today’s employers are often heard lamenting the attitude of the supposedly uncaring young people they employ, not realizing that their actions often provoke the attitude they perceive.

The “all corporations are evil” tribe members out there will likely be quick to paint all employers with this uncaring brush, but that would be intellectually dishonest of them. While some certainly fit that mold, numerous large businesses treat their employees as if they’re critical to accomplishing their mission. You already know their names.

To be sure, some companies struggle with ethical, accountable behavior. When businesses hit rough times, some organizations will have employees who continue to show loyalty and deliver quality work. Guess which ones? The rest may look like a rodent-infested, Renaissance-era sailing ship slipping below the water – people won’t be able to leave fast enough. But they will, because their management will have made it so it just isn’t worth it anymore.

Is that really what this birthday thing is about? Of course not. It’s about common courtesy. Remember that?

Little Things

As I learned more about this employee’s work anniversary and how the day went, it became clear through the conversation that no one at this business remembered the date (who would after 10 years?). No wonder there was no mention of the anniversary.

No, it’s not a huge issue, unless you’re that employee.

Keep in mind that:

• Someone who feels valued, even by the smallest of occasional gestures, will think nothing of doing a little extra when asked. Sometimes even when not asked. Remember, they’re the front line between you and your customers more often than not.
• Someone who feels like they are just another brick in the wall tends to be made to feel that way over time. Little signals like the anniversary thing send the message that staffers are taken for granted are received, perhaps intermittently, but they continue to arrive.

For most adults, work is more than a paycheck. It’s part of who we are at some level. If it isn’t for someone on your staff, ask yourself how that adult came to feel that way about their work.

What you are vs. who you are

Sometimes the little things people do to recognize events like this 10 year anniversary are the ones that remind them that they’re more than a “(whatever you make/create/repair)”.

Imagine the conversation I would’ve had with that person if their general manager, regional manager  or (gasp) the home office sent the guy a hand written note. Two minutes to write it. What message does that send?

Imagine the value of a phone call or an off-location cup of coffee with an employee who has seen your business change and adapt over the last 10 years. Remember the year. This particular anniversary means the hire happened just after 9/11, when very few were hiring.

Any number of small things could have been done. A small “10″ on a new name tag. A name badge that’s a different color, with “10 years” on it. A custom fitted company ball cap with “10 years” across the back. Any number of inexpensive gestures.

Perhaps something as inexpensive and priceless as a handshake and a sincere “Thank you”.

How difficult?

How difficult and expensive would it be to put every new hire’s start date into a private-to-your-business Google calendar? Hark, I hear the cries of privacy advocates, so talk to your HR folks before making this egregious error (that was sarcasm, mostly). That Google calendar will automatically email or text you to remind you of each date.

Your work is almost done, but keep in mind that your Google calendar can’t put meaning into that handshake.

You have to do that.

UPDATE: Want some hints on how to improve how you thank your staff? Check this out:

photo credit: e³°°°

I got an email from Amazon this morning about a Kindle book called “Before your next meeting“.

The Kindle / Kindle reader software version of the book is free until August 9, 2011.

It’s a quick read and perhaps the most meaningful you’ll read if you are in an organization that has a lot of meetings.

Let’s say you have a 30 minute meeting between your staff every weekday and that there are 7 people in attendance from the sales clerk to the CEO.

If you do a little meeting math, you’ll find that 30 minutes times 7 people times 5 days per week = 1,050 minutes per week. Over SEVENTEEN HOURS every week.

If you don’t feel that you’re getting 17 hours of productivity out of those meetings every week, maybe this book is worth reading. It’s short, sweet and to the point. Oh, and free until Aug 9.

If you prefer, you could call a meeting to decide whether or not to read it.

NOTE: You do not need a Kindle to read this book. You just need the Kindle reader software, which is free for the same device you’re using to read this post.

Easy – like going downhill.   photo credit: Mikelo

Ever made life difficult for internal customers?

Oh, I don’t mean intentionally. Really I don’t.

Last week, I was talking to a friend who works for a large multi-national corporation.

The conversation reminded me about corporate culture, something I’ve mostly missed out on since my Electronic Data Systems (EDS) days. That was the pre-GM, pre-HP, Ross Perot era, if you’re keeping score.

He reminded me of situations including those where you can often get an outside vendor to provide a service faster, better and cheaper than an internal corporate division that was built and funded to provide those very same services to co-workers.

It also reminded me how easy it is to understand (logically, at least) how companies can lay off thousands at a time.

Thousands. Sometimes tens of thousands.

Think about the financial, cultural and emotional impact on a community (or communities) when that occurs, not to mention the impact of those workers on their employer’s financials from a return on investment perspective. Did they make themselves irrelevant?

Ouch.

What’s your corporate pleasure?

Your small business might specialize in the type of work that a corporate person needs from their internal division – but can’t get. That work might be hydrology, remote sensing or language translation, and I expect that your business is likely do a better job than a corporate division or department that is supposed to take care of those services for their company.

Sometimes “better job” means “we actually deliver the service”. Sometimes it means more than that.

The internal customer goes out on the open market and finds cooperative, hungry vendor, beats them up on price (perhaps), sets a deadline and then has the audacity to expect on-time delivery.

All of that happens faster and with far less hassle than dealing with the internal department designed to do this work for the company.

It’s not hard to see how profits could be hard to come by when there are whole buildings full of people making life difficult for their colleagues.

Instead of pushing the issue and making a stink within their management food chain, those colleagues get the job done because they need the job done sooner rather than later.

They don’t have time for “Dancing with the Stars” style management politics.

They don’t need a five week wait, a nine meeting approval process, an internal purchase order and the signatures of 12 people to get an engineering report delivered.

They just need the work done – effectively, the What-You-Do version of the Staples “Easy Button”.

Divide and Conquer

One thing I always found interesting (if not amusing) was the widespread acceptance of  ”small” $2999 (or some similarly “almost the next big amount” number) corporate credit card payments.

At some levels of management, corporate card holders can spend up to some amount of that nature every month without purchase orders, without RFPs, without any other massive paperwork and they can buy TODAY.

IF, that is, you are willing to accept split payments over a few months so that this person can get the work done rather than spend all their time writing proposals, reviewing bids and greasing the finance committee.

To be sure, some spending abuse occurs when this happens, but most of the time, it happens because the grind to get things done through channels is more work than the work you actually want to get done.

The point of mentioning this is to make sure that your corporate clients are well aware that you offer this sort of thing as a payment option.

The corporate buyer’s responsibility is to get things done. Internal purchasing policy hassles make for a poor excuse to upper management. Fixing those hassles is management’s job, so it is ironic that they will find them poor excuses.

Regardless, your direct contacts have things they need to get done. Help them do so.

The Employee Shoe

If you’re the corporate type, one thing to be very careful of here is that the treatment you get as an internal customer doesn’t negatively affect your work with your external customers.

Sometimes it’s hard, but I can tell you this – if you think and work like a business owner rather than as an employee, you’ll be the one who benefits in the long run.

photo credit: Watt_Dabney

Today’s guest post is a quote from Henry Miller that I stumbled across.

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. – Henry Miller

Look at your business through that lens. What do you see?

photo credit: Philgarlic

Today’s guest post is a little unusual: It’s a page in the Amazon book store.

What originally drew me to it was the name. It appeared in the “people also bought” list when I was checking out another book.

The game in the book write up is something worth playing. It’s a discussion worth having with yourself or your staff about why and how you sell what you sell.

Does everyone really get it? This game will help – even if no one does.

Check out the Gamestorming book page.

photo credit: Max Braun

A few weeks ago, we talked about the importance of strategic delegation and how it might just enable you to enjoy a phone call free vacation, much less free up some hugely important strategic thinking time.

When I was in the photography software business, I quickly learned that photographers absolutely detest being pulled out of the camera room to answer the phone.

Likewise, if I emailed them about something urgent (usually because they said it was urgent), they’d often respond hours later saying that they had been in the camera room and hadn’t seen my email.

It’s not as if they were hiding from us. Usually we were trying to contact them to help them resolve a problem, train them or answer a question.

But you don’t pull them out of the camera room.

It’s not Disneyland

The camera room isn’t a magical place, but it is where they make their money. It’s where the backgrounds, props, lights and cameras are. It’s where their clients are when they are creating their masterpiece, which results in revenue. They DO NOT like being interrupted while they are in there, just in case I wasn’t clear.

Technical jobs (programming, engineering, etc) work the same way. While performing detailed, highly-technical work; these workers despise being interrupted. We get into the zone, into a flow, we get clear, whatever you call it.

Interrupting us from this work after immersing ourselves in it is expensive and annoying. It takes a while (15-20 minutes or more) to get back to the zone where we can be productive with all the right stuff in our head.

And then the door to your office opens because someone wants to know where the toilet paper is or what place we have planned for lunch.

In an instant, you’re out of the zone. Even if you aren’t “technical”.

Produce a Procedures Manual

One thing that helps reduce these interruptions is having a procedures manual. Just because it’s called a manual doesn’t mean it has to be printed. It might be a wiki or a really long MS Word document. It doesn’t matter as long as it is documented and accessible by anyone who needs to perform a task at your business.

This manual might prevent you from getting a call on a Sunday afternoon at dinner time because someone went into the office to plan their week (or pick up something they forgot), and realized that they don’t know how to turn on the alarm.

Or the alarm is going off and the police are there and they want to know how to turn it off, so they call you while you’re in the doctor’s office, on the beach, etc. Worse yet is when they can’t reach you, so they leave without turning the alarm on, or similarly less-than-ideal situations.

Important Safety Tip

There is no process that must be done regularly in your business that is too trivial to leave out of this documentation.

Yes, I said no process too trivial.

One reason I suggest that is that someday you will have a new employee. They will start at the bottom. They won’t know anything.

And they’ll pull you out of the camera room (or your equivalent) every five minutes to ask you about this or that if you don’t have anything else (like a procedures manual) to provide this instruction.

Certainly there will be enough face to face contact as it is. In the old consultant’s home, you’ll hear us muttering something along the lines of “What’s worse than spending the time and effort to train an employee who stays for years? NOT training them and having them stay for years.”

I know you’ll train them. Really I do. Still, there are things that simply shouldn’t require hands-on training. They might be performed by a temporary employee.

These tasks will often be mundane, ranging from opening the store, to packaging to closing the store at the end of the day to turning off the alarm when set off by mistake.

Each is one less “really good reason” to pull you (or someone else) out of the zone.

1926 Ford Model T photo: digitizedchaos

Henry Ford, despite his success with the assembly line at Ford Motor Company, made a mistake that many business owners still make today.

He didn’t delegate.

Most business owners delegate at least a little. Not Ford.

According to Peter Drucker, the senior Ford didn’t believe in delegation or floor management and it cost him plenty. Fortunately, he had the millions, if not billions, to backup what is now commonly considered a sizable error in judgment. We do, of course, have the benefit of a century of hindsight.

Ford’s son, Henry II, felt differently about the delegation of management. He believed that having management on the factory floor was critical. That decision was one of the keys to turning their family business around from a financially perspective.

Delegation is Efficient, Strategic

Ford II understood that leadership had a place in the assembly line factory floor back then as much as it does now in any business that has employees.

He discovered that empowering factory floor managers with the power to make decisions within the authority granted to them resulted in a savings of time and money. I suspect it also resulted in a safer factory floor in an era that isn’t known for having safe manufacturing workplaces. It’s also likely that the decisions made were better than (or the same) as those Mr. Ford might have made, since they were made based on those managers’ day to day experience on the factory floor.

That has several benefits we’ll talk about shortly, but it isn’t the number one reason to delegate. Your time is the biggest reason.

If you are focused on making the small decisions, every minute you spend on them is taken from the time available to research and make big decisions.

If the big decisions that affect your business long-term aren’t getting the proper amount of analysis, what problems could you miss? More importantly, what opportunities could you miss the importance of, if not miss completely?

Return on You

I can’t sit here and tell you exactly what to delegate and what to do yourself. What I can suggest is that you consider if something can be delegated to another person when you put that task on your todo list or schedule. You could do this daily, as you add things to the list, as you finish the task or whatever works for you. The key is that you actually do it.

Maybe you have to do it yourself this time, but make another todo to prepare as necessary to delegate that task next time. That way, when it comes up, you’re prepared to delegate without delay.

I’ve already made note of the value of being able to focus on the important stuff. Yes, this is the Department of Obvious Obviousness stuff, but I see enough of it that it’s worth repeating.

An additional benefit is that you might be the highest paid person at your business. If so, do you want to be doing things, management or otherwise, that someone who makes less than you *could* do? Being willing to mop the floor is essential. Doing it yourself, when you could outsource it or delegate it, allows you to focus on and work on valuable work that grows your business.

You wouldn’t hire someone to mop the floor and pay them $75 an hour. Yet that’s exactly what doing it yourself might be, effectively.

Fertilize Your Garden

One of the other benefits of empowering people on the floor (in the cubicle, on the road, whatever) is that you make that person more valuable.

Just like compost or fertilizer strengthens the plants in a garden, empowering your staff has a similar impact.

It engages them more closely in your business, makes them worth more in the marketplace (and thus to your business) and allows them to gain more skill in making decisions. The better they get, the less time you spend on those decisions, giving you more time to focus on the big picture.

Failure to “fertilize your garden” leads to the next topic…

Vacationus Interruptus

Once in a great while, you probably like to take a day off.

You’d love to leave for a week and come back to a business without 100 emails about decisions that “couldn’t be made while you were gone”.

You’d probably love to take a vacation and not have your cell ring every hour with a question about a decision that, now that you’re on vacation, seems like an annoying interruption.

Empower. Delegate. And enjoy that vacation.

photo credit: Koshyk

In today’s guest post from Forbes, an interactive map showing where people are moving to and from, county by county across the US.

Thanks to @BeckyMcCray for sharing it with me.

photo credit: One Laptop per Child

One of the things I’m always pushing clients to do is expand their education.

Naturally, that includes the education of their staff, if they have one.

This education expands well beyond your line of business, because there are valuable lessons from every industry.

Likewise, there are processes in almost every industry that you can learn from, modify to fit your needs and thus use in a completely unrelated business.

What I seldom mention is that you can’t let yourself think you’re so smart that you let your guard down.

While it was more than a decade ago, we’ve seen the same sort of situation lately.

While the Fool has a point, neither they nor I would suggest that literacy on any topic is a bad idea. Financial literacy is their reason to exist.

The bad stuff occurs when you stop doing what got you to the point of being literacy, or even highly literate.

Dancing with “who brung ya”

Another thing to watch out for as you educate yourself is that deciding (or just “forgetting”) to stop doing the stuff to communicate, support and enthrall customers.

No matter how smart you think you are, or really become, you still have to take care of customers. No matter how far ahead of the second place player you are, you still have to follow up and do the other things that got you to number one.

If you aren’t yet number one, you’ve gotta keep doing the things that keep you climbing, much less the things that the current number one is too lazy or sleepy to do.

Lazy? Sleepy? “Too smart?”

We’ve talked about lazy and sleepy plenty of times. I won’t belabor them.

When you get too smart… correction, when you THINK you’ve become too smart, bad things are almost certain to start happening. Even worse, if you really think you’re that smart, you might ignore a failure as an aberration rather than you losing your business mojo.

You make assumptions rather than testing the market, your software, your marketing, or that formula for Flubber.

You think that you’re “Too big to fail”.

Getting better

Focus on getting smarter, but also on getting better.

It’s not worth the time to get smarter if you don’t use what you learn. Think back over your year.

How many things have you done to make your business better? To make yourself better?

Not just reading what will make you better, but DOING it…

Look, even Tom Peters and Dan Kennedy have their bad days. Just the other day, Dan commented in his newsletter (hint…) that he had a bad day because he “only completed 11 of the 12 tasks he’d scheduled for the day.”

He called his day “Unsatisfactory.”

I hold myself to a pretty high standard, and like you, Tom and Dan, I fail myself as well.

The difference between most people and Dan is that 11 of 12 is a great day for most people. For that matter, 6 of 12 is probably a great day for most.

Looking at 11 of 12 as unsatisfactory from a “this was my plan, but this is what happened” point of view is what keeps someone as amazingly smart as Dan from getting sleepy about his business.

Overconfidence

The gist of the Motley Fool article is this, and I quote:

“In 1998, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, staffed thick with Ph.D.s and two Nobel laureates, exploded amid an almost incomprehensible amount of leverage. Behind the failure was raging overconfidence. “The young geniuses from academe felt they could do no wrong,” wrote Roger Lowenstein in the book When Genius Failed.”

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett said this about the firm profiled in the Motley Fool article:

“They probably have as high an average IQ as any sixteen people working together in one business in the country … just an incredible amount of intellect in that group. Now you combine that with the fact that those sixteen had extensive experience in the field they were operating in … in aggregate, the sixteen probably had 350 or 400 years of experience doing exactly what they were doing. And then you throw in the third factor: that most of them had virtually all of their very substantial net worths in the business … And essentially they went broke. That to me is absolutely fascinating.”

The EASY thing to do would be to dismiss anyone who is smart, or trying to get smarter, simply because this group of people royally screwed up. Of course, if you’re the type to think that way, you probably aren’t reading this.

I suggest you re-read that Buffett commet.

A final quote from the Fool article:

“LTCM is an example of financial education being overridden by a swamp of overconfidence, hubris, and a lack of common sense. Wall Street in general is another. The folks who ran Citigroup (NYSE: C) and AIG (NYSE: AIG) had plenty of financial education. But in general, they lacked the humility to realize the danger of what they were doing. One has to assume their top-notch pedigrees and financial educations contributed to that lack of humility.”

Like I said when we got started here…continue to educate yourself.

That *always* includes learning from someone else’s mistakes.

photo credit: OakleyOriginals

If your customers are treated like the enemy when they give feedback about your products, services, customer service and so on; that’s exactly what they’ll become.

How are you treating your customers when something you did (or something they *perceive* of you) manages to set them off?

It’s easy to take it personally…but do your best not to.

The high-value feedback you might normally miss out on is hiding right behind the bluster.

It’s often the most valuable you’ll get. It’s coming from a customer who cares in a vulnerable moment.

Soak it in. Thank them. And take action.

PS: That doesn’t mean you let people become abusive. Defuse, then discover.

photo credit: judepics

Sometimes one can conquer the other.

One of the most difficult, but rewarding things I do is encourage people to kick butt and take names – despite all assurances that they  can’t do whatever, can’t reach that rung of the ladder.

There’s a lot of people out there who don’t believe they can do (whatever). Some of them might be right – and if they never try, they are surely right.

But sometimes you encounter someone who is simply off-the-charts amazing. And sometimes you can see it, but coaxing it out of them is crazy hard.

At times, it’s all you can do to get them to step up to the plate and take a swing. But once they do…look out.

One such example

Paul Potts was a not-so-confident cell phone salesperson.

He didn’t want to go, but his wife convinced him that he had to give it a shot. Even then, a flip of a coin almost kept him off the stage at Britain’s Got Talent.

On stage, you worry for him as soon as you see him. He looks nervous. He’s unsettled and not at all sure of himself.

When I saw the opening moments of this video, I wondered how he managed to be successful selling mobile phones.

Despite all that, he begrudgingly steps up to the plate and does this… (sorry, I can’t embed the video – but it’s definitely worth it).

Who is your Paul?

Who in your organization has a talent like this buried inside them? The talent could be anything – not just what Paul does. It could easily be something that you never expected them to be capable of.

I’ve definitely had tech staff come in-house only to find that they were amazing salespeople with an innate ability to create a relationship.  Not what you expect from a tech person.

What are you doing to seek out these talents?

What are you doing to make it easy to step out, step up and be amazing like Paul?

Does your business encourage such things? If a cultural change is needed to make it easier for folks to show a skill that the business could leverage, you have to step up and enable it.

What would it do for your company to find just one person with amazing skills that your company could leverage?

Look around. Enable their amazingness.

If you aren’t sure about the your business’ create-some-amazingness culture, think about how it accepts suggestions from employees and customers. Is that easy? Rewarding for the suggester? Is there a feedback loop? Or is there an abuse loop?

What environment do you need to create to make it as easy as possible for your Paul to step up?

What does your business potentially miss out on if you don’t enable/encourage your Pauls? What do your customers miss out on?

photo credit: thebittenword.com

Historically, my Scout troop does ok on our annual popcorn sale fundraiser.

The guys have done well enough over the years that a number of them managed to pay for their campouts pretty much year after year.

One of them had earned enough to buy himself a super nice down sleeping bag good down to 40F below zero. He likes to hunt in the backcountry all winter, so it was a good purchase for him.

On and off, a few of the guys did really well, reaching the scholarship level, where a percentage of their sales is put in a scholarship fund by the popcorn company.

But, as our troop’s average age rises and falls, we see a falloff during the years when our troop’s average age is a bit older. Teenagers have jobs, sports and other things – plus they just aren’t into the door to door thing.

Benjamin failed

The last 2 years, we tried a special incentive to get the boys motivated each week.

Each of 3 weeks of the popcorn sale, we offered the top seller for that week a crisp Benjamin (Yes, a $100 bill) if their sales reached a minimum level.

Of those 6 opportunities, we gave away ONE $100 bill.

Our sales were ok, especially given the age of the troop, but when $100 bills dont motivate a teenager who has gasoline needs, we knew we missed the boat.

New blood, new carrot

This year, we had a new-to-the-troop mom in charge of organizing our popcorn sale.

In addition, we have a number of new guys, so we expected the total sales to rise.

Still, we wanted to motivate them so they’d be able to pay their Scouting-related expenses over the year without asking their families for money. Times are tight in our little town, so every little bit helps.

Our new popcorn chairperson had some fresh ideas. She had get out of doing dishes on a campout coupons for minimum weekly sales and a big carrot for total sales over a certain amount.

Pie didn’t

The carrot? Getting to throw a pie in my face.

I’m the Scoutmaster. Tossing a pie in my face is a big, fun treat for a boy. Of course, I dragged my Troop Committee Chair into it. I wasn’t gonna meet the pie(s) alone, after all.

TEN boys qualified to throw a pie. That’s ten boys who exceeded our average sales-per-boy goal by $200 or more.

Our troop’s total sales were up NINETY FOUR percent.

I have a number of boys who struggle to fund campout expenses, gear and what not. Pie motivated them to work to pay their own way, a lesson worth learning.

Now I get to face 10 pies next Tuesday, but it’s worth it knowing how many boys don’t have to worry about campout expenses (and then some) for at least a year.

Think harder.

So why did pie work and a $100 bill not work?

Ever try to sell a comb to a bald man? That’s what the $100 bill was.

A $100 bill isn’t real in the world of many 12-15 year olds. They had trouble grasping the idea of  (and getting fired up about) something they’d never owned (and some had never seen), so they didn’t feel any motivation for it.

But…a pie in the face of an adult authority figure? That’s golden.

And you?

What are you doing to motivate your staff? Your customers?

What motivates you isn’t necessarily (and most likely isn’t) what motivates your staff or your customers.

Your job is to set your mindset aside long enough to find out what’s important in theirs.

photo credit: Vincent Luigi Molino

A couple of days ago, I was pretty forward with you guys about your responsibilities as both employees and employers.

It’s easy to assume that one will regularly take advantage of the other – even in the current tight job market. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s been going on forever so my guess is that it’ll continue.

Even the current education reform arguments are full of us vs. them employee/employer tension and rhetoric. You, of course, can put an end to it if you like.

The current employment/economy situation in general reminds me of a story General Schwartzkopf tells about the First Gulf War.

Quoting Schwartzkopf:

“…You can look at the number of tanks, you can look at the number of airplanes, you can look at all these factors of military might and put them together. But unless the soldier on the ground, or the airman in the air, has the will to win and the strength of character to go into battle, believes his cause is just, and has the support of his country, all the rest of that stuff is irrelevant.”

Employers face an identical issue, as did the commander of the once-feared Iraqi Republican Guard.

You can buy the best tools, have the best location, the best products and services, provide what you think is the best value, BUT as the General says: “…all that stuff is irrelevant.”

You’d better also have the best staff. Best trained, best attitude and so on.

That goes for you too, since being the best in your market includes all those things, as well as paying a decent wage, continually training the people you have and providing the tools they need to succeed – and not looking at them with that “Hey, the job market stinks so I can pay you less, replace you in a heartbeat, work you more and treat you not quite as nice as I usually might” kind of attitude.

Because as Schwartzkopf says…the soldier on the ground might be the best and have the best to work with, but they can make your business irrelevant.

They’re on the front lines every day. They’re the ones answering the phones and greeting your customers. They’re the ones you expect to smile whether you’re standing there or not.

That teenager working her first job deserves at least as much consideration, training and attention as an employee as the “best” full-timer you have because she can run off your best customer in a heartbeat.

How’s that training expense seem now? Tiny, I’ll bet.

Treat your people like your most valuable investment – because that’s exactly what they are.

Employees have a similar burden

Sure, the job market is tight so you obviously want to deliver as much value as you can – that much is obvious.

Little things make a big difference.

Do you show up on time? If something happens and you’re going to be late, do you call? Do you arrive ready to kick some butt? Do you show up looking the part? Nails clean? Yeah, little stuff like that.

You might think that owner of yours is a rotten old cuss who is getting rich off your back. While that might be true (and I’ve suggested you create your own economy via your own small business as a way to cure yourself of that problem), it’s also true that the rotten old cuss has and continues to take risks and invest their money to create and sustain the business that pays you.

If you make $30k and have just 3 fellow employees, consider what has to happen for your checks to clear each week. At the very least, they’ve got to take in at least $3000 a week just to make your checks clear (and set aside money for their part of payroll taxes).

Zig Ziglar once said that you should consider yourself self-employed whether you have a job or not. Do the job as if you owned the place, because it reflects on you.

You never know if that customer in front of you will someday be your boss, or better – your best customer (of your own business) or even the one who suggests to the person who owns your business that they’d be nuts not to promote you and give you a raise because of the amazing job you did for them.

You’re the one who makes your boss’ business more competitive on the ground level – and that’s what makes sure it’s there to pay you tomorrow.

photo credit: david.nikonvscanon

That person you’ll be meeting shortly.

The prospective employee.

The vendor you can’t get an answer from.

Your kid’s new soccer coach.

That school board candidate.

Those persistent salespeople you’re thinking about giving an appointment.

The people who live next door to that dream house you have your eye on.

Who are they… *really*?

Did you Google them?

Why would you do such a thing? Same reason that 79% of employers do it before an interview.

Maybe to protect yourself and find out a little reputational info about the person, but how about to continue the conversation with something more meaningful than the weather.

Seems like a really obvious thing, but too few do it. If they did, what will they learn about you? What will they find interesting and ask you about?

Probably something you might never mention on your own, even though you care about it.

If you find some less than flattering information, you might just let someone know that they need to think a little harder about what they do, how they do it or at least how much they post about it on Facebook.

Worst case, you might just make a really solid connection with someone over an obscure piece of info you might never have known, and make a *real* connection.

Yes, that’s a baby with a bong.

I’ll get to that shortly.

I spend 99.9% of my time here writing things aimed at employers/business owners, but today this one is for the employees and those who would like to be employed.

Lately, I’ve noticed a few things that make it not all that surprising that some folks aren’t having much luck getting work, so I have a few suggestions…

Be in Wikipedia for a good reason

The viral news piece of the last couple weeks has been the story about the Jet Blue flight attendant who, after getting clanged on the head by an overhead luggage compartment door (thanks to a particularly snarky customer), unleashed a flurry of profanities, popped the emergency slide, grabbed two beers and slid down the slide.

Yes, many of us have been sorely tempted to do something more than a little nutty when a member of the public acts like an idiot…but most of us find a way to suppress that impulse. Slater didn’t.

If you’re going to end up in Wikipedia, try to make it for a good reason.

To their credit, Jet Blue’s public response to this has been subdued and as close to ideal as you could expect for a “PR crisis” (or opportunity) like this, but ask yourself this:

While you might relate to Slater’s frustration and find his actions funny, you have to wonder if any other airline would hire a guy who did what he did.

For that matter, would *any* other business – of any kind – take a chance on him?

I wouldn’t. I can see the guy being frustrated at the annoying passenger and upset about getting clocked on the head, but popping the evacuation slide? He may have hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook, but how many of them will offer him a job?

And speaking of Facebook…

Don’t hang your keester out in the breeze on Facebook

Microsoft’s Data Privacy Day discussions made note of research finding that 79% of US hiring managers rejected candidates based on what they found online.

So….YES, those comments about employers that you make on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace might come back and bite you in the butt.

So might your discussions about how hammered you were at work yesterday (even though you’re sure no one noticed).

And so might those Facebook-visible photos you posted of your baby holding drug paraphernalia. Permanent link (pdf)

Don’t inhale

More and more employers perform drug tests and/or have illegal drug termination policies. When you take a look at the DUI-involved accident numbers in industries like trucking, you’ll see why.

This also goes back to the Facebook issue. If you are doing these things, broadcasting them in public seems like a bad idea. It reflects on you, but also your employer, your kids, your parents and a number of others. Is that really what you want to accomplish by posting that stuff?

Besides, you might run for office someday.

Button your shirt

I was sitting in a restaurant in Columbia Falls last weekend, having a conference with one of my about-to-be Eagle Scouts.

A guy walks in to apply for a job.

His shirt is unbuttoned. Let me correct that – the shirt has no buttons.

Thanks to the prevailing airflow in the building, I can smell him across the room (about 10-15 ft.)

If he was applying to be an extra in a rap video, maybe (smell notwithstanding) you’d sign him up.

The waitress hands him an application, he sits down.

Shortly, the owner appears. He asks why he comes into his restaurant applying for a job with his shirt like that. “The buttons popped off on the way here.”

“All of them?”, the owner asks.

The topic of smell comes up. Excuses are made. “Didn’t you know you were coming to apply for this job when you left the house?’, says the owner.

It went downhill from there, with the owner providing some quiet advice to the man about thinking through the process before dropping in to apply for the job. Hopefully he takes it to heart.

Look at it from the other side of the table

Employers are under a lot of pressure from a lot of different places. Finances, insurance, legal, employment paperwork, Feds, State, etc.

They don’t need more baggage.

Make it a no-brainer to hire you. Don’t do this kind of stuff.

photo credit: a.drian

Bob Phibbs’ staff recently sent me a review copy of The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business, his newest book for the retailer looking to improve their business’ performance.

Or to go from wondering about survival to reaching a state of “thrival”.

The Guide’s subtitle, “A step-by-step approach to quickly diagnose, treat, and cure”, gives away the structure of the book. It’s organized by areas you need to address, such financials, training, hiring, retail presentation (merchandising, sort of), the internet, sales and finally, what to do after you’ve read the book.

When you have a business and you buy a book in hopes of solving its problems, one of the things that sometimes makes it difficult to take the first (and next) step is gleaning what to do from all those good ideas. Bob solves this with sections called “Stat” (medical-ese for “Do it now”) at the end of every chapter. Stat lists a half-dozen things to do RIGHT NOW based on that chapter’s teachings.

The Stat summary is a clever tool for the busy business owner because it not only tells you where to start, but with those things behind you, their success will encourage you to go back and look for more things to do.

As a whole, the Guide to Growing Your Business could become the roots of the operations manual you’ve never gotten around to creating. It’s rich in the what and why of fixing things rooted in common (yet incorrect) maxims of retail businesses, such as “if there’s enough gross, there has to be some net around here somewhere” (a Dan Kennedy quote).

About that operations manual thing – I know that you might think your business doesn’t really need one. However, since Bob has done much of the work for the core of it – why not take that and run with it? As he states in the hiring chapter’s discussion on job descriptions, every job needs a complete description. Likewise, every retail business needs an operations guide, which is simply a consistent rules-of-the-road document for how to run the place.

If it (it being an operations manual) is good enough to get 16 year olds to competently run a profitable franchise store, it’s probably good enough for you.

Even if your business isn’t struggling, each chapter of the Guide is bound to reveal at least one nugget, strategy, technique or “Stat” item that you should be doing. There’s bound to be something that you’ve overlooked, forgotten or just didn’t think about. Take those things, implement them and continue your success.

I suggest you grab a copy. I suspect it’ll end up dogeared.

photo credit: koalazymonkey

Multitasking: We all do it and we all pretty much know how good we are at it.

You may have seen the graphical representations of the difference between multitasking and not doing so.

They go something like this: Lets say you need to complete 3 tasks that will take 3 days each.

If you single task, the first task is done in 3 days, the second one in 6 days and the third in 9 days, so it looks like this:

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If you evenly alternate between them, doing a day of work on each one and then moving to the others, it looks something like this:

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That means that you don’t complete a task until the end of the 7th day.

Yes, you’re doing (roughly) the same amount of work, but your focus is completely different and MOST of your work is delivered later than it ordinarily would be.

But it gets worse…

If you have 9 tasks to do and they each take 3 days, the illustration changes your view even more:

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Task 1 isn’t finished until the nineteenth day, sixteen days later than if you weren’t multitasking.

Working in the Zone

If you do the kind of work that gets you into “the zone” (IT and other technical work is famous for this), give not-so-multitasking a try. This is why folks who do technical jobs are often sequestered away from doing customer support – the unscheduled interruptions can decimate their productivity.

Think about it: If it takes 20 minutes of reading/thought/analysis to get that programming (code/scenario) or differential equation into your head and have you thinking as if your brain were processing the program or equation, then an interruption to do customer support every 15 minutes (only 4 times an hour) will prevent someone from ever getting to that point.

And you wonder why they never reach optimal performance.

Here are some thoughts from Harvard Business Review that dig deeper into why you should stop multitasking and how to do so.