Reinventing Yourself Can Be Profitable
By Ron | February 7, 2010
Smart enterprises don’t rest on their laurels or listen to their own propaganda. Too many times I have sat in staff meetings and heard executives talking to themselves and continue down that same old road instead of listening to their customers. Certain Starbucks stores recently started doing this….
What they found out was this – their customers were tired of the Starbucks cookie-cutter approach. People wanted a cup of coffee in their unique neighborhood setting. Many Starbucks operations have reinvented themselves and shed the sameness that we all have witnessed when we walked into a Starbucks.
What a great lesson to learn for all of us. Individuals such as Madonna have been reinventing themselves successfuly for years. How about the Human Resources department? I’m sure that most HR organizations can use a facelift, or at least, a botox injection in the old epidermis. Many people in our community have been recommending some serious changes in the last few years and I’m not talking about just changing the labels – “Staffing” to “Talent Acquisition” etc.
Maybe we should take a tip from Starbucks and ask our customers…
Topics: HR | 1 Comment »
The Tenth Step To Great Management
By Ron | January 30, 2010
The 10th step is to – Provide Customer Service. No… it is to provide “over-the-top” customer service. We all love to have great customer service ourselves, but rarely get it. When we do, we are usually a little surprised, but immensely grateful. One more time, here is what I have told my clients to do:
Do extensive research on what would make your customers say, “Wow!” You need to make your competitors obsolete by how you are going to treat your customers. Once you get the data, indoctrinate every employee in how to provide “it.” Do not, I mean, do not stop at your sales and marketing force – everyone in your organization should be serving the customer either directly or indirectly. When every person working for you has the new approach emblazoned in their minds and hearts, you just may have your secret weapon.
You can only get to this point by constantly reinforcing and recognizing the new behaviors. Do not by shy; repeat the mantra over and over again. Walk the talk. Show how it’s done by your own behavior. Let your people see how you are treating the customer differently. Include the new customer service values into the performance appraisal system. And….do not hesitate to say good-bye to those employees who just don’t get it.
Topics: HR | 1 Comment »
The Ninth Step To Great Management
By Ron | January 24, 2010
The 9th Step is: Performance Management. Okay, you have executed Steps 1-8, but not all of your employees are performing up to par. What do you do? Here is what I have told my clients in a nutshell:
Get your new employees off on the right start from the get-go by establishing performance standards upfront and then, keeping them on track through continual coaching. As Ken Blanchard said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
When an employee’s performance falters or bad work habits become a problem, it is important that these issues are addressed quickly and effectively.
As basic as all this sounds, my observation is that most organizations fail at truly managing their employees performance. Managers either are not skilled at working with their employees to reach their full potential or they are fearful of confrontations. Human Resources doesn’t always help either. Too many times, they are supplying useless performance appraisal systems and forms and turning the whole thing into a bureaucratic nightmare for the line managers. Another problem is leaving the “bad apple” on the payroll too long.
Topics: HR | 2 Comments »
Eighth Step To Great Management
By Ron | January 17, 2010
The 8th step to Great Management is – Managing Goals and Projects.
Regarding this important step, here is what I’ve told my clients: Your Business Plan which we worked on (2nd Step to Great Management) must be kept alive. To have a “living plan,” you must keep it in front of your staff all the time. This Plan should drive Goals and Projects. In addition, your people should have personal goals.
By now we all know how to set goals by using the SMART acronym. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Reachable and Time-bound).
If our Business Plan states that we want to increase market share by 3% this year, employees must have individual goals to accomplish this. Examples are…Create Marketing Penetration Plan by the end of February to increase market share by at least 3% or, Call on 30 potential customers each month to obtain business away from out competitors – at least 3%, etc.
Staying on top of progress towards goal completion is an important part of the management role called “control.” The trick of good management is to follow-up to ensure things are on track without seeming to be “micro-managing.” Reviewing high level goals at the executive staff meeting is essential.
Projects are large work chunks that need to be managed and coordinated. Most companies aren’t very skilled at managing projects because Project Managers don’t usually have all of the required skills to do the job. They must have tremendous influential skills in order to manage people who ordinarily don’t report to them. They also must be well-organized, assertive and determined.
Setting Goals and managing Projects based on a Living Business Plan is an essential part to running a successful operation.
Topics: HR | 1 Comment »
The Seventh Step To Great Management
By Ron | January 10, 2010
Motivating employees is the 7th step to great management and the one that most managers get wrong. They get it wrong because they come from their own heads, not their employees. I have worked with countless managers who set up “carrot-dangling” systems to “motivate” their people. They bribed their people through bonus programs, promises for promotions/salary increases, prizes, awards, etc. They failed to understand that motivation is an inside job.
I’ve touched on this subject so many times in this blog, I’ll just summarize by saying – every employee is different. Every employee is motivated by their own needs. Our job of management is to know these needs and play to them, mostly, by designing the job to meet them.
There is not a “one-size fits all” program to motivate people. We in Human Resources should refrain from creating or supporting such a program. Unfortunately, I think that HR has been party to this problem in the past.
Topics: HR | 2 Comments »
The Sixth Step To Great Management
By Ron | January 5, 2010
The 6th step to great management is – Communicating with Purpose. I personally think this is the key to leadership. Managers should be totally aware of their effect on people. Employees take their cue of what is important to their managers by what they say and do. Even the questions are important. Here is what I’ve told my managers…
Think beforehand of what you want to get across to your people. Use the Hewlett Packard technique of “managing by wandering around.” If you think that your employees aren’t paying enough attention to the customers, focus on that. Ask questions of them, like, “What do you need from me to help you satisfy our customers?” Another way of “communicating with purpose” is to continuously stress the vision and/or mission of the company to the employees.
Use every communication venue to “communicate with purpose.” Take every opportunity to pound your message in your emails, meetings and 1X1’s. Mediocre managers deal with facts and figures. Great managers engage their employees through hooking the heart because employees need a sense of purpose in the process of doing their work.
Topics: HR | No Comments »
The Fifth Step To Great Management
By Ron | December 28, 2009
Building Teamwork is the 5th Step to Great Management.
At one electronics company, I created and facilitated over thirty teams. This meant that for a company of only 300 employees, virtually everyone was on a team. For each team, we created a “foundation” – a code of conduct on how the team would operate. We didn’t get into hassles in our team meetings because we had our “foundation” plus, I provided training on how we could solve problems and improve quality and productivity through structured teamwork.
We didn’t have team-building exercises. No, we didn’t go out the woods and climb trees to demonstrate trust. We built trust everyday on the job by supporting each other in the pursuit of team goals. Every quarter we celebrated each team’s success by the members reporting out to the executive staff. Teamwork became a way of life.
In about three years, we tripled revenue and increase our profit margin. I believe that most of our success came from building teamwork.
Topics: HR | No Comments »
The Fourth Step To Great Management
By Ron | December 20, 2009
Shaping the Culture is the 4th Step to Great Management. Great leaders are aware of the culture of their organizations and work hard at shaping it to ensure that it optimizes the processes needed to produce great results. The best definition I ever heard was, “Aroundhereisms”….as in, “Around here, we never take coffee breaks.”
In the hayday of Silicon Valley, all you had to do was go into the nearest bar after work to find out what the culture was at AMD, Intel or the other electronic companies. The employees were very open about the “aroundherisms.”
Culture can be more formally defined as: the values, norms and rituals that characterize the organization.
It is hard for people in authority to change the culture. It is what it is. Words do very little. Even single events don’t do much. We have all worked in companies which talk the good talk and nothing changes. Many of these same companies promote people who don’t demonstrate the company values. Policies, procedures and systems are often contrary to the good words published on the company web site.
However, culture shaping is possible by implementing 6 actions:
1. Model the behavior that you expect your people to have.
2. Remove fear from the organization.
3. Hire and promote only people who are passionate about the company values, vision and mission.
4. Train all supervisory personnel on how to walk the values, vision and mission daily.
5. Eliminate dumb policies and procedures which do not support the culture you want.
6. Use recognition, reward and corrective action carefully, making sure, that they are used appropriately to the values of the culture you want to stress.
Topics: HR | 1 Comment »
The Third Step To Great Management
By Ron | December 16, 2009
The third step to great management is to Staff for Success. In other words, Hire Winners. Hiring the right people can have a huge impact and should never be compromised. We all have seen what can happen when a poor hiring decision was made. These decisions are usually made when there is a tight labor market or we are in too much of a hurry.
My sense is that in today’s market, hiring managers are being very picky and that is a good thing.
Too many times we hire people only for the technical reasons (they have the skills to do the job), but they lack the other attributes – fitting into the culture, being part of a team, identifying with the mission, etc.
We in Human Resources can make our biggest impact in this arena. Our ability to find the right candidates and get them sold to come work for our organizations is one of our most valued skills. Talent Acquisition is where we can shine and make our internal clients our fans. We need to exercise this third step to great management ourselves by hiring great recruiters.
Topics: HR | 1 Comment »
More On The Second Step To Great Management
By Ron | December 11, 2009
So I told you that the Human Resources Department should also have a Business Plan (Step 2). Based on my suggested model, I’m providing some of the ingredients that I developed for an electronics company:
The stakeholders – Employees, Customers, Stockholders and the Community.
External Trends – I included: the pending recession, the challenge of globalization, increased automation, the changing workforce and immigration.
SWOT for HR – For this company, I said that their Strengths included their formal teams that improved quality and productivity, that their people were focused and that the company was small enough to respond to the market place quickly. Their Weaknesses included high benefit costs and some weak managers. Their Threats were business fluctuations, hiring the wrong people, and a failure of some employees to be flexible. The Opportunities were in hiring the right people and in employee/management development.
Their Mission in the HR Business Plan was: …to champion a total quality of work-life where every person is part of one team obsessed with satisfying internal and external customers and that we wamt each person to have job satisfaction, motivation and a sense of purpose.
The Execution Plan included (based on their SWOT) – Hiring the best by tightening up their screening process and presenting the Interviewing Seminar to all managers, Re-evaluating their insurance carriers and conducting a wellness program to reduce benefits costs, Introducing an Executive Leadership Program to ensure that their growth is managed properly and their employees are trained for flexibility, etc.
Topics: HR | 1 Comment »
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