These are the kinds of problems that are worth having and if you advance, as Thoreau said, in the general direction of your dreams, you may have them. If you advance in the direction of someone else’s dreams—if you want to live someone else’s life rather than yours—then get a TV for every room, buy yourself a lifetime supply of your favorite quaff, crank up the porn channel, and groove away. But when we expend our energies in rightful ways, Robert Frost observed, we stay whole and vigorous and we don’t weary. “Strongly spent,” the poet says, “is synonymous with kept.”

A very nice article.

LEADING Through Meetings

Find me a boss (or non-boss) who doesn’t constantly bitch about “too damn many meetings”—I’ve never found one. But here is the irreducible fact of “boss-world”: Meetings are what bosses do. There is no escape. And if that is true, then, also by definition, meetings are therefore the principal platform, or theater, in which every boss projects her or his leadership skills.

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Meetings are what bosses do.

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Immutable “bottom line”: Every meeting that does not stir the imagination and curiosity of attendees, and increase bonding and co-operation and engagement and sense of worth, and motivate rapid action and enhance enthusiasm is a permanently lost opportunity. Call that a stretch if you wish—but then please explain to me why it is not the self-evident truth? (FYI, another self-evident truth: If the boss publicly complains about meetings—it’s “game over.”)

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“Wretched” meetings: Theatre of Leadership EXCELLENCE.

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Tom is right. I remember a team member asking after I had talked through operational plan for the remaining year, “and what will you do?”

I was at a loss, because I knew I was busy. I didn’t have a language for it then, but I was busy leading through meetings.

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Related posts:

• Acknowledge staff, or lose them.
• Top ten ways to show appreciation to staff

And the remaining five:

1. Find meaning in your work
2. Word hard
3. Discover the relationship between effort & reward
4. Seek complex work to avoid boredom and repitition
5. Be autonomous and control your destiny.

An outstanding read, if haven’t picked it up, as they say, “do yourself a favour.”

In a speech given by Sir Gerry Robinson, for the London Business Forum, he makes the claim that you’ll never succeed in business unless you’re capable of motivating and inspiring other people.

Gerry says that, while most things in business can be learned (I’d say almost all), there are a few things, which your either have or you don’t. He’s come to believe that, “there are some essential starting points.”

The first, being the ability to inspire and motivate people. The other, but more ephemeral is what Gerry calls “nous, a bit of common sense of what will work and what doesn’t.” They have a, “presence, the capacity to make you feel you’re important and that you want to please them and get fit right.”

As to whether this ‘nous’ is able to be learnt or not is highly contentious, just as the age old question, ‘are leaders born or made?’ Gerry quotes Alan Sugar, “Business skills can be acquired, just as any fool can learn to play the piano, the ability to see an opportunity, the alchemy of turning that into a profit is god given talent as surely as perfect pitch.”

‘Back it in yourself, and back it on others when you see it.’

Gerry lists a few more attributes that you see in business leaders:

1… Vision. The ability create a clear compelling vision. As much as this is an overused, if not cliché, people like to know what’s expected of them and are happy to deliver it to you.

Visions don’t always have to be financial. But the objectives are simple and clear. Such as the fastest turn-around-time. That which is genuinely doable, but still difficult to do.

2… Passion. Leaders must have passion. Must absolutely believe that what you are doing is important, that you live the values you espouse. It cascades itself down the organisation extremely quickly. About making it happen in the most brilliant way possible.

3… Responsibility. Gerry, says that management while much maligned, is an extremely important job. I couldn’t agree more, bosses are critiqued and degraded constantly, there couldn’t be a more difficult job. Gerry, also importantly, in my opinion doesn’t believe that executive pay issues are well founded, given the grave accountabilities they face. Managing is a hugely important job that requires much courage to do it.

4… Follow-up. This is one of my favourite coaching bug bears that I constantly find myself mentoring managers on. If you are not going to do something, don’t say it in the first place. If you ask someone to do something, follow up with them. If you ask them to do something hard, and then you don’t follow up as if it wasn’t an important job, how will they know the next request is important?

A quick remedy: create and maintain a waiting for list. If you ask for something to be done, write on the list, and follow up progress. Gerry says, “if you don’t follow up people will think long and hard before they do the next difficult thing asked of them.”

Gerry also goes one to suggest a system, at the beginning of very year create meeting times in your diary with each of direct reports, and create corresponding folders for each. Drop the action items agreed in the folder and bring that to the next meeting.

Not one of your people will fail to do the things asked of them, as they know it’s going to come up at the next meeting. This is not just about picking up the things not being done, but perhaps more importantly, and related to jthe initial point; the ability to motivate people by recognising a job well done.

It might seem natural to curt spending on advertising during a recession, but it would be madness.

McGraw Hill carried out two studies:

1. Advertising during a recession creates 132% more 5-year sales growth over those that didn’t advertise, or cut their budget.
2. Advertising during the 1981-82 recession created a 256% increase in sales growth by 1985.

It is must that you spend on advertising during this recession:  you will gain by it during and after recovery.

Spending on advertising and marketing will pay.  Cut spending by staying in a down market hotel and travelling coach, not by cutting out the client meeting altogether.  Not meeting with clients is suicide.

Coke have just increased advertising spending. I am not advocating TV advertising like they do – be creative, and get a buzz.  Word of mouth is good, and meaningful relationships are better than TV advertising.

Relationships

In his new book ‘Tribes’, Seth Godin talks about actively building strong relationships with ‘your people’.  How do you do that? People don’t want to connect to companies – they want to connect to each other, so let them.

Be patient. Get in front of them frequently and wait. Word of mouth takes time, but it’s worth it.

Post your information monthly instead of quarterly. Ask for referral monthly instead of quarterly. Don’t look for customers for your products, but seek products for your tribe.

Sales & Marketing is a process not an event

You ultimately need a process. I have lately been studying consulting firms.  Bain & Co. is now a heavy weight:  they started with a simple 6-step model.

1. ID newly appointed CEO
2. Research the companies and work out how to help them
3. Procure a meeting
4. Use the research to get them to open up
5. Layout the value proposition
6. Get an existing customer to say how great they were.

You need a simple measurable formula – but all based on the value proposition innovated earlier.

Get out and get personal.  Remember birthdays – remember their family’s birthdays. Send written notes rather than emails. Care, and always, always offer value when you call.

If you take nothing else from this, understand this point:  personal relationships win.  Forget brand management and manage your tribe. People who want to be part – who want to hear from your company because they want to connect – to feel part.

‘Helping Leaders build great organisations”

www.DanielLockConsulting.com

(C) Daniel Lock.

It is how we think.

And what we choose to focus our attention on.

How we think has enormous influence on our outcomes. All success is not in the outside world but in the inside. When you change your thoughts, what you focus on and where you place your attention, the external world changes to reflect those thoughts.

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts . With our thoughts, we make the world.” - BUDDHA

So focus on your attention. Where are you placing it? Are you allowing the media and mainstream news bombard you with negative economic news?

The latest stats show that top athletes are spending as much as 70% of their times on mental imagery, mental rehearsal and practice. Only 30% of their time is in the physical. The practical application for us in our daily professions is to do the same. Plan your and visualise your ideal week, month, and year, mentally rehearse the next meeting.

I spend an hour each morning reading my goals, vision, and planning he day. I spend an hour at the end of the day recapping what I did looking at the month ahead and planning the next day. I do this every day, which is 2 hours out of each work day, which may seem like a lot. But his process keeps me connected and on top of my goals and projects. I call it the daily scaffold.

This keeps me balanced, certain, and allows me to relax into the activity I am doing knowing that everything else is covered. In martial arts the ability to create power is from speed. And speed must be created from a relaxed balanced state. This is true in our thinking. We need to relax and balanced.

Action steps:

• Become aware of what has your attention.
• Write it down and journal what is happening for you and set up an action plan to deal with it.
• Journal, and plan your week, month, and year, and the ideal vision of each area of your life and work, review it daily.
• Set up a daily ‘scaffold’ or structure that is the same each day where you can affirm, visualise, journal and plan.

The next event is 20 January, 2009. Click here to book.

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How To Thrive In These Economic Times

Panic, Panic, Panic!  2008 will be remembered as the ‘year of the credit crunch’ up there with the depression in 1929, the 1987 crash and oil crisis in 1974.
Right now, this is CRAZY market.

Where the media is in a frenzy and many people are just sitting tight to ride it out and work out what is happening next.

All of you are here because you are interested in an approach to take advantage of the current conditions and thrive.

Many of you have been in management roles for a long time. So what I am about to present will allow you to build on what you already know.

As we go through this session, keep thinking about how you will apply this to your business. I will make the case that if you can follow these principles you will thrive as a result of these time.

1. Mindset

Truism: What you believe is what you get.

Henry ford said” If you believe you can, or if you believe you cant, either way your right”

Adversity is when we usually go on to create amazing success, for example Coke formed out of prohibition 1886. Prior they had a wildly successful wine laced with Cocaine. They responded with a dry version. How could they have known at the time?

Recent survey of CEO’s and boards quoted in a business week article mentioned how they will be asking how to minimise impacts to short term profits as opposed how to take advantage of conditions and build value for the long term.

What is your strategy, long term of short term?

Other example of counter intuitive thinking:

Warren Buffet in the last 3 months has invested $13billion dollars

• $3billion in GE
• $5billion in Goldman Sach’s
• $5billion in a variety off ordinary shares.

Warren is no slouch. He knows what’s going on. He is the richest man in the world. Last year he was quoted as saying that h couldn’t find anything to buy, as everything was too expensive. While everyone else was in greed trying to ‘get in on the action’.

Now is the time companies will dominate their industries. The next two years will make more millionaires than the last eight combined. Why? because most people will get caught up in the media driven fear and pull back.

2. Know Thyself

• Re-group, re-organize, re-view
• Above all Know thy self.

Step 1 breakdown your business by customer type. And understand your core competencies

Find out your core competencies.

Finding out what you do that others cant do at all, or fail to do even poorly.

Example:

• The Japanese who are outstanding at miniature electronics components, which is basically the art of 300 year old tradition of painting landscapes onto miniature lacquered box,
• Or Mark & Spencers being able to make ready-to-eat gourmet meals for the middle class person.

We need to shift core competency analysis from anecdotal to hard analysis and this is why we need to breakdown the business into sub-sections as seen by the customer.  Peter Drucker called it “result control”. That is under stand exactly how much it cost to generate a result.

But the problem almost all organisations run into, is they don’t have the information, this is because of the accounting system, which is 500 years old and has barely evolved. Therefore it has to be built. Once you have it, you will be amazed at the negative correlation.

I explains why Return on sales appears high but you aren’t making any money.

3. Focus Relentlessly

•    Find the 80/20 rule in your business. The pareto principle.

•    80% of the value comes from 20% of the inputs

•    80% of value generated in business will come from 20% of it products.

•    Separate your business as defined by your customers perspective

The only place where more accurate accounting exists is manufacturing which in the western world is about 15% of GDP.

The key, and for most of you in ‘service businesses
‘ (or knowledge businesses) is being able to relate expenditures to results. In most of your businesses you know where it comes from, and where it goes, but no one has any idea about to relate expenditures to results.

All CEO’s use the accounting system to manage the business. But we all know it can be manipulated and that cash flow is a better indicator.

The big problem is that traditional accounting systems are based on what HAS happened as opposed to meaningful data that can be used to indicate future performance.

Toyota is the best publicized example of this type of accounting systems. It manages the costs of suppliers and distributors, and measures all it products from the perspective of the customers, not line item expenses in it P&L.
All on one stream

4. Know Your Market – the Need for external information

• To develop a strategy we need organised information about the external environment
• What you don’t know will hurt you.
• In order to find the opportunities you need to know what’s going on In your market.
• In the army the call it ‘intelligence’
• Customers & non-customers alike\
• The biggest challenge for businesses that I see is lack of external information.
• You need it now more than ever.

Example:

The invention of the pace maker, wiped out the profitable cardiac medication companies.

Even if you had 30% market share – which is huge, still there is 70% of customers you know nothing about.

Example:

• Until the 1980’s American department stores had 28% of the market share.
• Nobody knew more about there customers
• But 72% of people didn’t shop there – people they had no idea about.
• They were unaware that new customers and the affluent didn’t shop at department stores. Nobody knows why – they just don’t.
• By the end of the 1980’s they had become the dominant group and dictated how we shop. And the department stores died.
• Market share plummeted.

The big companies, Coke, Nestle, and some Japanese companies do it well. Almost no medium company does it at all.

In tough times here is a definite way to thrive, by understanding your business in terms of results, as viewed by the customer. And gathering external information, not just about your customers, but non customers and related or adjacent markets.

5. Innovate!

3 Rules for Innovation
1.    Based on what you do best
2.    Ensures leadership – catch up innovation aint much fun
3.    Reinforces and extends profitable variation – happier customers with lower costs

4 Types of innovation:

1. New value to existing – deepening relationships offering them more and more features
2. New products – Rule of thumb – ‘few,big,core’ Coke with Fanta & Diet coke creating huge value.
3. New channels – think internet trading, opening up trading to more and more investors.
4. Sell to new customers – by far the most risky. The safest way to is to take an existing product and sell it to new customer base.

• Ones that are most like you existing customer base.
• Classic gambits are to move up or down market
• Example: Honda started in scooters before moving on to the larger and traditional market of motorbikes.

6. Cut the fat not the meat

Two studies by McGraw-Hill

• Advertising during a recession creates 132% subsequent 5-year sales growth compared to competition who didn’t or cut back.
• Advertising during 1981-1982 recession creates a 275% sales growth by 1985.

SPEND, SPEND, SPEND… on advertising & marketing
.
If you take nothing else from this presentation, understand this point.

Cutting spending would be staying in a down market hotel, but not traveling to meet with a client is suicide.

Coke is classic at this, they just increase spending, now they have massive budgets, and I am not advocating spending up big on TV – which is dead anyway.

I mean creating meaningful relationships, and deliberately creating word of mouth. Seth Godin has a new book called “Tribes’, he talks about actively building strong relationships with ‘your people’.

How do create relationships and words of mouth. Get in front of them often. And be patient.

If you were posting information quarterly – make it monthly. If you were asking for referral quarterly do it monthly.

Ultimately you need a process. Lately – naturally I have been studying consulting firms. Bain & Co. now a heavy weight, when they started had a simple 6-step model:

1. ID newly appointed CEO
2. Research the companies and work out how to help them
3. Procure a meeting
4. Use the research to get them to open up
5. Layout the value proposition
6. Get an existing customer to say how great they were.

Easy.

You need a simple formula (that you can measure) – but remember it is all based on the value proposition innovated earlier.

Get out there and network more, send hand written notes instead of emails. Follow up on people’s birthdays. Be someone who cares.

And always, always, offer value when you call.

If you take nothing else from this presentation, understand this point.

6. Implementation Formula

• Peter Drucker said “What get measured gets done”. Therefore rule number one is measure what you want.
• Number two – get organized. Super organised and clean. But, organise for rapid response. Customer equate quality with rapid response

Implementing is the hard work, you have to push through the dip.

In tough times the key is to measure more and get organized. Super organized.

Organise for rapid response

When I was at the Bank, in the hey day of the mortgage boom 5 to 6 years ago. It was about turn around time from enquiry. When I started it was 7 days. Then it was 3 days, then 24 hours. The idea was take them out of the market ASAP.

You need to do the same. A prospect or a client asks for something, courier it, get it there immediately. Return calls the same day, emails the next day.

This is the stuff you measure. Because it has tangible results.

Get organised personally too.

The biggest problem is that we have is that all of the above mentioned activity takes effort, and in order to do so you will need the time and capacity to do so. Getting personally organised is the first step. Then flow it on to you organisation.

So called ‘work/life’ balance is a cock-eyed look at balance. Work, and non-work, well it all just ads up to a “life”. Everything affects everything else. If you are un-organised and unbalanced in you home life, how will you be able to concentrate and be present with a client. Cant happen.

Sort out problem relationships, exercise, get rest, and reduce your unnecessary obligations. Then focus that energy onto your work and relationships (work or otherwise).

Recap

1. Mind set – what you believe is what you get, are these times of opportunity or not?
2. Measure your business from the customers perspective to understand the 80/20 relationships
3. Get external data about you market, then use that combined with your strengths to identify opportunities
4. Using the data to innovate – this is hard work, but it has to be done.
5. Cut the fat not the meat. Market like crazy – with a focus on building relationships. Organise a simple sales process and measure it.
6. Get super organised for rapid response

Closing quote from Warren Buffett:

“We attempt only to be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”.

A free monthly newsletter on leadership, strategy and innovation.

Back issues are archived for free downloading at www.DanielLockConsulting.com.

Welcome

Welcome to the January edition of Strategic Innovation Newsletter, delivered the first Tuesday of each month.

Welcome to 2009.

After a very relaxing break I am ready to get into the new year with all the energy I can muster.  Of particular note will be the monthly breakfasts briefing I am holding, the next is Jan 20, to register please see below.

In this months article I am looking at how to transform your business into a service business, and if you are already in one what you need to look at to improve.

The Shift From Customer to Client.

Service businesses make up approximately 65% of the Australian economy, up to 75% of the European and 85% of the US economies.

Shifting your mindset from moving product to collaboratively creating value with the customer through providing a service can yield far greater results.

Co-creation of Value
The role of a service businesses is to help ‘unlock’ value for the customer. Service work is collaborative, it is not something you ‘do’ to a customer, rather it is about the ‘co-creation of value’ between the producer and customer. Where the customer is in the boundary of organisation.

To unlock the value in service businesses there essentially two variables which need to be considered. Technical Service Quality and Customer Service Quality.

Technical Service Quality
That is doing what you do – well. The first is the technical service quality. That is being able to consistently and reliably deliver your service time after time. This is fundamental to service.

The banking sector in the last 5 years has taken on ‘six sigma’ initiatives, which has significantly improved service quality. Inspired by GE, Australian Banks have implemented this approach to service to reduce the time taken to approve their mortgage broker applications. Rapid response being a key to providing value to the customer.

This demonstrates the power of ‘process design’ as a core science of service businesses. Creating predictable repeatable systems, which are managed up and down the value chain.

Customer service
The second aspect of innovation in the service economy is the actual delivery of the service. The cognitive sciences of human behaviour must be examined. As we don’t simply hand over a product and walk away, instead we deliver a knowledge and help them utilise it. How do we demonstrate and measure value?

Ultimately service businesses are all about relationships. There is no transfer of product. You must get your customers very involved. Listening more and tailoring solutions to their specific needs to achieve the goals they have and unlocking value for them.

Where can you shift to selling what you know? The message is customise and co-create with your customer, thereby making them a client.

Techniques of the month: Identifying Your Core Capabilities

Understanding how you succeed is just as important as understanding your challenges.

1. Brainstorm a list of all your possible potential skills To kick start your thinking review recent successes, customer research, and benchmark studies.
2. From this list Identify which ones are truly distinctive (expect 5 to 25).
3. Further cut down this list by grouping into specific core capabilities (expect 3 to 6)

This exercise is used to determine, why and how you succeed. To asses you market position, and which capabilities to pursue for growth. It is not a wish list, but a pragmatic and critical assessment of your capabilities and ares of distinction.

Want to know more read The Core Competence of the Corporation by Prahalad and Gamel, Harvard Business Review 1990.

Announcements: Business Breakfast – How To Develop a Winning Strategy and take Advantage of Economic times!

You’ve got products to make, services to deliver and customers to please.

The current economic conditions pose opportunities and threat. You need a strategy and you need it quick.

You have no time for theory and jargon, and you don’t need to change the world, just pragmatic strategy that delivers bottom line results.

This seminar will show you tips, and tools so you can develop an effective strategy for you organisation.

Learn tools to help you learn:

• Where you actually make you money
• How good is your competitive position
• What do your customers think
• How to increase profits quickly

Signs you need to attend:

• Profitability is slipping
• A Strategy hasn’t been updated in more than five years
• Growth is lack lustre
• Shifts in the market place and uncertain as to how they will impact you
• New competitors and products are entering your market place

Join Daniel Lock for a business breakfast that will inspire you to re-engineer your business from the ground up and deliver you these results and more!

Date: Tuesday 20 January 2009
Time: 7:15am (7:30am start) to 9:00am
Where: Cut Bistro, 333 King William Street, Adelaide
Cost: $39 per person

Don’t miss out on this event – book now online.

Phone: +61 8 7127 4047
Mobile: +61 413 033 703
E-mail: daniel.lock@daniellock.com.au

Official Daniel Lock website: www.DanielLock.com.au
Insights on Business & Success Blog: http://DanielLock.wordpress.com/
Property Development: www.daniellockdevelopments.com

I am always talking to my coaching clients about the importance of reading, in fact I am hounding them about it.

If you are reading this blog, I am probably preaching to the converted. So check out this quote from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s off-sider.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time-none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads-and at how much I read. My children laugh at me, they think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out”

So if that doesn’t inspire you to read I dont know what will.

They are:

1. Self management
2. Knowing your market
3. Marketing & Sales
4. People management
5. Systemisation

SELF MANAGEMENT

Self management is the key to all success. Time will march on regardless, so managing time is a defunct concept. You can only mange yourself, and priorities in relative to time.

The key understanding is ‘know thyself’. You have to know what your priorities in life are. Commonly known as your hierarchy of values. When you know what your values are and they are linked to you purpose in business you will be able to spend your energy where it is most effective. This is how you ‘manage you time’.

The other key to self management is concentration.  In the excellent book The Power of Full Engagement, Tony Schwartz talks of getting out of the ‘grey zone’. That is doing too many things at once, and not doing any of them well.

The human minds greatest capability is the ability to concentrate on one thing for an extended period of time. Minimising distraction and refining concentration has been the philosophy of many religions such as Bhudism for thousands of years.

In an aage when we have more distracters than ever, blogs, emails and so on, it is more important o be on ‘priority’ and on ‘task’ than ever before. When interrupted it takes 20 minutes to shift back the task at hand, or to the next item.

On Tim Ferris’s Blog (author of The Four Hour Work Week), he points to a study that showed multi-tasking lowers IQ more than smoking pot.

The efficiency cost from moving from one thing to another is dramatic, so set priorities, and stay on task. Each day I plan the 7 things to do that day. At the beginning of each month I plan the month ahead, at the beginning of each quarter I plan the quarter and so on. This keeps me continuously reviewing my priorities and keeping on track.

Chunk activities, spending extended periods of time on one thing at a time with out interruption.

KNOWING YOU MARKET

Your market is essentially the products and services that you sell to people.

Almost no one thinks about the market first. Many people launch their businesses based on what they did before, thinking they will be able to do out there and do the same but for themselves.

Now rationally they may think there is a need for what they do, as after all they were being paid for it, but whoever they were working for they will now be in competition with.

The key is to look at the market and how you can divide the market, and you can serve a niche. Based on your skills set, how can you serve a particular group that is under serviced.

You need to understand if the market can meet these 3 criteria.

1. Do they have an immediate pain and urgency? or an irrational passion to buy?
2. Is the customer proactively looking for solutions?
3. Do they have few or  no perceived options?

People buy for emotional reasons. We all do. You need to make sure the above questions can be answered well.

Look for prospects that are looking for you.

MARKETING & SALES

A concept that has really taken off since the internet, but really has been the stall wart of marketing for aeons is Giving your stuff away for FREE.

This is the puppy dog trick, where you say ‘take the dog home for the weekend, if you don’t him, bring him back.’ Done deal.

A study completed in the states talks of the justice principle, where we work towards a 50/50 solution. In the study they sat two people down, who didn’t know each other, and gave them $100. They had to divide it between them in any manner they wanted. One person decided how it was to be divided and the other had veto power. So if they weren’t happy with the deal they would say no and neither would get to keep any cash.

Most people divided 50/50 or 60/40 and they both took the cash.

It reached a point where at about 70/30, the person receiving the $30, got their  back up and said no-deal!

Which is crazy, because they should have taken the cash, it was free money, and they had no relationship to the other person. People cant stand to see the other guy get a better deal.

This is the same principle in business. Your aim is to get and keep a customer. So giving away 70 or 80% of your stuff to keep 20% make sense.

If instead you turn it around start giving away information, and education about your product or service. You actually engage the ‘reciprocity effect’ and people will buy.

Or this restaurant exaple. The owner said drink as many glasses of wine as you like at the end tell us how many at the end. He knows he was being ripped off, but it doesn’t matter – look at the line up around the corner.

Give away as something worth $100, give away information to start with. Take the thing that is best and give it away, so the customers get an experience of what your about. First experience count so make it your best stuff.

Then you add higher end back end products and up-sell.

Another technique, switch the mind set to repeat sales. Prospect hasnt been completely educated. One shot sale. People want education and training.

Sign up with FREE information, which would educate them about techniques, then sell them more products and services.

PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

Growing businesses require a cast of supporters.

Number one, get the right people first.

In a book by Brad Smart,Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People, says 75% of all people are miss hires, and that can cost up to 23 times the persons annual salary to right the wrong.

This is from lost opportunity, fraud, them suing you, money out of pocket and so on.

Look out for the C player. These are the people who are good a creating job security. People who make stuff up that only they can do. People who are interested in the work, not the outcome.

Look for one trait – people who are drivers.

C players are people want to do the work right as opposed to getting the results right. That is creating a customer and looking after them.

A driver, is constantly, proactively looking for things to do. They take personal responsibility. For getting something done, fixing problems and mistake when they happen.

How do you find these people?

Ask them about other jobs they have had and the projects they were involved. Ask them to tell the story about what happened. Ask for seven to 10 stories.

They might say, my “boss wasn’t very good, we didn’t have much money.” A driver would say “…yeah we had budget issues and my boss wasn’t so flash, but I did what it took to make it happen.”

Remember when hiring the rule of three. Interview three different people, interview three times, in three different locations. I learnt this one from Brian Tracy. I would also add to bring them on slowly over three months before taking them a permanent part of your team.  The patience of hiring slow will pay off. Remember hire slow, fire fast.

SYSTEMISATION

The most important distinction to make is to distinguish between work and results. Remember this maxim ‘work fills the available space’.

Don’t allow people to focus on the tasks or the work, only focus on the result, and the shortest route to achieving that. It follows then, the first and most important step is to define the result. This is the where the pareto principle kicks in. Spending 20% of the time planning and defining the result, will yield 80% of the value. Only 20% of the value is going through the steps of implementation.

The first system to implement is that of meeting with you staff and helping them to define their work.

When bringing on new hires for the first 3 months do this:

Technique: The daily update.
End of every work day, ask them to take 5-10min to do an update, any longer is to long doing something wrong.

1. Jobs I did today and the results I got.
2. Challenges problems that came up
3. Questions I have for you

With in 30 days you will have a good understanding how his person is working out.

The next is to follow up with one-on-one’s where you discuss performance against set objectives and talk about behaviour as well as the hard numbers of widgets cranked.

Then implement the annual review. The annual review should not be a surprise, and should take 10 minutes. Why is this? Because you held monthly one-on-one’s and discussed performance every 30 days.

Managers hate surprises. But it always surprises me that they never take the time to talk to their staff about the challenges they face, therefore leading to surprises.

BOTTOM LINE

Remember the core 5 areas of business. Eliminate the temptation to get side tracked, and focus on the disciplines of carrying them out. If you focus your priorities and continuously put off meetings with your people you will end up doing noting but fighting fires. More of the same.

Get in control, get organised.

(C) Daniel Lock. All rights reserved.