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Retrospective Training: Start Taking Notes (now)

The company I work for has accomplished a ton since inception just shy of five years ago. This year we’ll eclipse $100M in revenue and we’re continuing to grow at a rapid pace. But our onboarding process, particularly in the sales department, is lacking. It’s what most would call a “sink or swim” environment.

This isn’t a problem, except that the hiring doesn’t always match the training program. Because of this, I’ve been thinking extensively about training programs. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in his (excellent, thought-provoking) book Antifragile: training doesn’t precede success.

First, comes success. Then, comes a theory about how said success was achieved. Finally, a training program is built around these ideas. Again, not a problem, just how time works.

There is a problem with waiting years to analyze success though, you’re opened up to things that skew the facts such as survivorship bias and the halo effect. If no one is studying how prosperity was attained, than there is no blueprint from which to train new hires. Sometimes companies are moving too fast to take notes on what’s happening. They’re focused on the next sale, the next deal, the next merger, the next acquisition, the next milestone…

Who To Hire

Generally speaking, you can hire two types of people:

Those who can hit the ground running
Those you need to train

If you go with the former, you’ll pay them more up front and you’ll typically get fast results. You won’t need to invest as much in training, but you will have to invest in recruiting. After all, rock starts don’t just show up at your front door asking for a job (if they did, they’re probably not a rock stars).

If you go with the latter, you’ll save money up front on salary. But you should invest in a robust, ongoing training program. Over the long-term, this cost can add up. Then again, investing in your people has never been a bad idea.

College football coaches know this idea well. They can sign high school players with four years of eligibility who may need a year or two to develop OR they can sign a junior college player who is expected to step in and contribute on the first day. Scholarships are limited, so there is an opportunity cost.

This isn’t rocked surgery, it’s common sense. The organizations that ask themselves who they’re hiring and how to train them are the ones who will succeed in the long-term. If you haven’t slowed down to ask yourself these questions, it’s worth the thought exercise. Find your organizations sweet spot and be intentional about your hiring and training programs.

Maintaining and Improving Daily Operations (not as boring as it sounds)

As I’m am becoming responsible for more and more websites I am realizing how much time is needed for maintenance. I am not used to this since my previous life was more about forging ahead and forgetting the problems. They figure themselves out anyways, right?

But now this is my show, and I am seeing the importance of looking around at the current situation and asking myself, “If I don’t address this now, what are the potential long-term effects it can have?”

Today we’ll talk about maintaining and improving daily operations. There are opportunities to grow our business right under our noses if we just stop to take a whiff of what’s going on internally.

WordPress Updates

If you’ve run a website you know what I’m talking about, especially a WordPress site. When creating a website and installing WordPress through the hosting package, I am basically installing a template that I am familiar with so I can build the site faster and easier (for me at least).

But WordPress (which is technically a company called Automattic) operates in a very unique way, I talked about it after I read The Year Without Pants. They make updates to their software on a constant basis. They don’t need to tell people about it, they don’t need to make announcements about it, they just do it.

Once they make the improvements and changes on the back end of their software, we (WordPress users) get a little notification that we need to update the site. We get these notifications anywhere from WordPress as well as all the plugins that we install on the site as well. These update notifications can happen anywhere from once a day to once a week, depending on how many plugins are installed.

With Improvements Comes Measurements

When these changes are made via WordPress on the back end of a website, sometimes nothing happens to the aesthetics and the user will never know. Other times, the entire format of the site gets shifted and something has to be done to correct it.

Since this is technology we’re talking about, nothing ever goes completely according to plan, there are always hiccups. So anytime I update my site, I always do a backup of all software. If something happens and I lose all my information when updating the site, I am covered and I can just re-install the files without starting from scratch.

So anytime I need to update my site it takes time to backup, then do the updates, and then I need to go and check to see what changes have been made on the back end as well as the front end. And in the worst case scenario, major “improvements” create more work for me to correct back to the way I designed them.

Lean Manufacturing

In the world of lean manufacturing, there are constant improvements being made. The beauty of the Kaizen philosophy (which literally means “improvement” or “change for the best”) is continuous improvement. This applies to lean manufacturing processes as well as lean startup principles I talked about yesterday.

If a company believes in Kaizen, they make constant improvements (not just change for change’s sake – very different) to their systems. They see an opportunity for change, they make a quick decision about it to test out the change, if it works they keep it, if it doesn’t they move on. Since they’re constantly testing, they are constantly monitoring and doing maintenance.

In most companies this is more along the lines of what it looks like: talk about change, and then have meetings about change, and then change the change, then implement half of the intended change, resulting in very little improvement to the process. And then the final step is to complain about the change that didn’t improve anything.

If you are going to maintain your business, make it purposeful! If your company resembles the latter of these, question the process. Why are we making these changes? Why are we doing this maintenance? What are we looking to improve/get out of this process?

If you (or someone in your organization) cannot answer that question, it’s probably a waste of time. I know for the websites I’m operating, when I do maintenance on them, I am keeping the sites running fast and looking for ways to improve the UX (user experience) on the front end of the site.

A Fresh Perspective

What I enjoy about updating my site is the way I am forced to look at it from a different perspective. As I said before, I come from a background of the “forge ahead, we’ll fix it later/never” mentality. This is totally different, and it challenges me.

Once per two weeks-ish I have to stop, take a deep breath, analyze what changes I’ve made and carve out an hour (or more) to look at my work. Do I like the new plugins? Is that page necessary? What can I do about this weird looking side bar? Is my site running too slow?

When I stop to analyze the site, I am analyzing the business so I can make improvements to it. This is an invaluable lesson that many businesses do not implement.

It may sound odd, but I’m glad I’ve had to slow down to do maintenance on my site. Too often we, as business people, get hung up on the daily work that we forget to improve what we have. Or we only look for opportunities externally, like new clients, instead of looking for ways to improve relations with current clients and cut costs internally.

What sort of maintenance do you perform on your business? Is it a routine or do you look to improve your business while maintaining it?

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Leave me a comment below or chat with me on Twitter about how your business maintains and/or improves its operations, I’d love to hear from you.

Have a great day!

How Managers Can Decrease Turnover Ratio & Increase Productivity

As I’ve recently been searching for jobs I’ve been contemplating the question, “What makes people want to work at and stay with a company?” Some companies have great pay structures, others great perk packages. The ones that get the most notoriety are those that have both. But I think there’s something else that plays into the equation.

I thought about my days at CSU playing football, many guys would have left the program had it not been for their individual position coaches. They didn’t stay because of the head coach of the program itself, they stayed because of the coach that believed in him and his teammates. The position coaches had a personal connection with their student-athletes, something that a head coach didn’t necessarily have. Let’s dissect how managers can decrease turnover ratio while increasing productivity.

What NOT to do

Sometimes managers take the stance that employees owe them something other than work. They do owe an employer a good day’s work, but they don’t need constant reminders of how lucky they should be to have a job in the first place. That’s like the unforgiving mother that reminds her kids of the pain she had to endure to bring them into the world, “Remember, I carried you for 9 months went through 14 hours of labor!” at every chance she gets. Some really awful people will use ammunition like this for years, a scarring tactic.

And some managers will use this tactic in an effort to ‘motivate’ their team. If you’ve ever used this tactic and you’re reading this, it’s probably about now that you realize this is pretty shallow and self-serving. Keep in mind that anytime an employer uses this tactic to ‘motivate’ their team, the exact opposite happens. Every time that reminder of ‘generosity’ to give them a job is brought up, those words go in one ear and out the other along with a little bit of their respect. The more it is repeated, the less they respect they give.

Investments

People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. I learned this early in my professional career and I preached it when I taught sales courses. Although that was for building rapport with potential customers, it is applicable to management as well.

When I had a team of guys that did sales I would get to know them on a personal level and ask how their personal lives were going when we had down time. I would sit down and review their goals with them. I would invest my time in them and when they did well, I would publicly praise them. I was not concerned about them taking my job or anything along those lines. I knew my position was secure and when they did better the organization as a whole did better.

Plus, the way the company was structured allowed anyone to come from the bottom to learn the business and eventually start their own store. I knew that there was no reason to beat people down or keep them in their place. That doesn’t work and people won’t stick around for it.

Start with buying your personal team lunch. Don’t expect anything in return, just buy them lunch one day and see what kind of reaction you get. It’s little gestures like this that strengthen the fabric of an organization. If you can’t afford that, write them a thank you note that lets them know you appreciate them and the work they do.

The other day I was asking my friend Rachel about her job and she told me how landed the job, what she did, and then she almost shouted, “And I f*cking love my boss!” What if all employees thought about their superiors like that? How different would your organization be?

Speaking of lunch…

If you do something for a co-worker that is out of the goodness of your heart, don’t expect or ask for anything in return. There is a difference in doing favors and blackmailing people into owing you something. But this sort of exchange happens often, someone asks a favor of us then offers to take us to lunch or repay us in some way. The key to it is communication and expecting to be repaid in some way.

We had a store owner that would buy lunch for his team nearly every day. As a new person came on they just thought it was a random act of kindness, a perk of the job. But then one day the owner hung those lunches over the new guy’s head. He had been paying for lunch because he expected some additional work out of them. It was not talked about ahead of time and it was agreed upon, it was just assumed.

My point is this, perks are perks, perks are not payment. A perk of the job means it’s in addition to the pay. If it was payment, well we’d call it payment. It may cost money to provide from the employer or managers’ standpoint, but that isn’t going into the pocket of the employee. Pay is a basic need, perks are icing on the cake.

I don’t want to defend all employees here, some take advantage of the perks of a job. Employees also need to do their part and work hard to be able to say they’ve earned those perks. Employment and management are two way streets, there has to be give and take on both sides or the relationship will never work.

But I’m not a Manager

It doesn’t matter. Leadership is action, not a position or even a title. If you feel strongly about the people you work with, do something for them. Do it out of sincerity, do it because you care, DO NOT do it because you expect something in return. This is a toxic practice. Nothing makes people want to run more than a manager or a boss that does things for others just because they want to be praised for their actions.

In football, if a running back or quarterback has a great season, they shower their offensive linemen with gifts. They show their appreciation for their teammates by giving them rolexes, suits, segways, and even cars (Tom Brady is always showing off). The lineman keep their teammates healthy and allow them to do their jobs, so they get rewarded for their hard work.

This is so often seen in football because there are clear lines about what peoples jobs are. Jeff Saturday and Peyton Manning were never competing for the same job in Indianapolis, so it was easy to praise each other publicly. However in the workplace, many people can be looking to get ahead and they don’t want to tell their peers how great of a job they’re doing. Or more accurately, they don’t want to acknowledge publicly how great of a job they are doing, that might put them in line to get the next raise or promotion.

I am a believer in full transparency and when we can openly and honestly praise each other in the work place, we will have a much happier and healthier environment. Don’t get me wrong, pay and perks are essential to keeping good people. But a great management team can keep an organization sticking together when the going gets tough.

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Has a manager ever made you want to stay at an organization? What did they do for you?

I’d love to chat with you about your great (or not-so-great) experiences with managers. Leave me a comment below or chat with me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading, have a great day!

Why Some Organizations Will Almost Always be Faster than Yours

When we think of the archetypal business model, we think of a pyramid with the CEO up top then tiering down to upper management, then the managers, then the front-line workers. The more difficult the decisions, the higher up it must be passed along to be decided. What we get with this model is an entire front line of people unwilling and unable to make decisions while forcing the upper tier(s) to spend all their time thinking for others instead of planning. So how do we avoid this?

Source: www.rossanaroja.com

Empowering People

When we examine businesses that thrive and those that collapse, we see some that are clinging to the hierarchy described above while the start-ups that seem to be taking over the world are thriving. We are seeing this because the start-ups are much more nimble, and now that they are able to attain cash up front from VC’s (venture capitalists) they can afford to bring on other great minds to work alongside them that share their passion.

When this happens, the smart people that started the company are able to focus on growth because they can hire other smart people to surround themselves with. Since they are surrounded by capable people, they don’t need to make decisions for them and the founders can focus on growth. They empower their people to make decisions and trust that they will make the right ones, allowing start-ups to make fast decisions. Meanwhile in corporate America, time is wasted passing the buck up the ladder like an a scene from Atlas Shrugged.

Hire for Quality, not to fill Space

So we know that fast organizations have few tiers and they empower their front line people to make as many decisions as possible. That’s great, but how do we get those people that are responsible enough for us to trust? Don’t skimp on the hiring process.

Spend some time and money up front to save headaches in the long run. Be picky about who you want to work with. Do they mesh with the team? Can they solve problems? Can they think on their feet? Be sure to have all these questions answered before they are brought on. It’s going to cost a little more, but it’s going to be worth it. The older I get the more I realize that the cheapest isn’t always the best.

Training

But Mike, it’s too hard, I don’t have that kind of time or money.

First off, yes we can, I guarantee that we haven’t used all the tools at our disposal. Have we ever dropped what we were doing and put ‘HIRING’ at the top of our to-do list above all else? Use some of that fancy internet I talked about above to find some online resources and dabble in social media since you’re now a master at of.

Secondly, if we can’t find them, make them. I spoke at length about investing in our people and the benefits of doing so (ironically, that came from one of the most stringent hierarchy systems, the US armed forces) back in November. What is it we want our people to know?

Effective customer service tactics
How to upload pictures to a website
Improved closing ratios on sales calls
Standard accounting practices
How to use Microsoft Excel

Most skills in the workplace are learn-able things, but we must take the time to teach people up front if we want to save ourselves the hassles in the long run. Set up work-shops and teach people on the job or give them paid OT to come and learn. They will appreciate the investment we make in them and will be more eager to perform for us. Most people are inherently smart, unfortunately we don’t give them the opportunity to prove it to us.

If it were too hard the entire collegiate athletics system outside of Division 1 would crumble. Coaches deal with this and thrive in situations because they use the resources at their disposal to the best of their abilities, they cannot make excuses. The only difference is that their success if much easier to identify: W or L.

Reprimanding

When we give our people this much responsibility, they’re going to make mistakes. They will handle something differently than we expect, they will drop the ball, and ultimately the company will take a step back because of it. BUT, if we are prepared for it and if we have built a culture of learning, we can learn from it properly.

It will be crucial for their development that we handle their mistakes properly. Second guessing their every move only after it is made is not the way to encourage growth. Giving them as much information as possible up front and then teaching as they go is the best way to build their confidence. Don’t just tell them what they did wrong, encourage them when they do right as well.

Using a ‘reprimand sandwich’ as I heard it referred on Dave Ramsey’s Entreleadership Podcast is the best way to keep spirits high, while pointing out mistakes. Sandwich a reprimand for a mistake in between two positives for the most effective way to teach a new person. Everyone reacts differently, but this is the safest when dealing with a new person that is still building confidence.

Take the time to learn how your people learn so that you can teach them best. And learn how they respond to criticism as well, some people thrive by being publicly reprimanded and others will quit on the spot for something like that. Everyone is different, it is our job as leaders and managers to figure that out.

Remember that the goal is to make our organizations fast by empowering out people to make decisions, this will allow us to spend our time planning for the future so we can grow our businesses.

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Does your organization put decision making in the hands of your front line people? What are the positives and negatives associated with this type of management?

Leave me a comment or connect with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this follow-up technique!

P.S. 7 Days till Christmas!

Learn to be more Effective AND Efficient: Monotasking vs Multitasking

Recently I have had my eyes and ears open to more and more business books, blogs, and podcasts to hear what the experts are doing to be effective and efficient at their work. At the same time I experiment with my own daily tasks and objectives to find out what works for me, so I can get the most out of my days.

Monotasking (the opposite of multitasking that requires us to focus solely on one task at a time without interruptions) has become a very popular trend. But, I’m not 100% convinced it’s the only way to get work done effectively and efficiently. On the other hand, multitasking forces us to split our efforts in order to get more done in a shorter period of time.

This is an audio version of this exact blog post:

Multitasking

When I entered the business world I continually heard about multitasking from superiors, from professors, and even some business books. I put this ‘art’ as some might call it, into practice.

I talked on the phone while I was typing emails, I texted colleagues while I was in meetings, and I had conference calls on speaker phone while I would continue to work on other projects. I divided my attention amongst multiple tasks in hopes of saving time to get more done in a day, like a well oiled machine… or so I thought.

Reflecting back on those days, I see that I was more efficient than I was effective. This was because those multitasking practices forced me to give 1/2 of my attention to each task. Giving them both a sub-par effort, but getting a lot checked off my to-do list at the end of the day.

Each of us wants to be effective at our work, but we also have long to-do lists, so we need to be efficient to get it all done. What I’ve found is that we need a healthy mixture of effective focused work mixed with efficient tasks to maximize our productivity. It’s not an either or question for multi or mono tasking, it’s a when and where question to maximize our effectiveness AND efficiency.

Monotasking

As I’ve talked about, I start my day no later than 6 AM to read and write, getting the most important task for the day knocked off my list. My day starts out monotasking, there is no music or podcasts in the background and my phone is on silent until 8 AM.

When I write, I have to practice discipline to not check email or Facebook before my daily post is published. It’s difficult to stay focused but it’s helped me stay disciplined in other areas. I eliminate all other windows and I’ve set my bottom task bar to disappear in order to give me as few distractions as possible on my screen. The only things on my desk (aka kitchen table) are my laptop (no power cord), my mouse, and my coffee. I don’t get up from my seat until my post is published, however long that takes.

This is monotasking, not allowing distractions to creep in. We have to do it in quiet space and time with as few distractions as possible or we won’t be as effective. Some people will go into extreme monotask mode and put on a timer, close their office door, and knock out their tasks. I would recommend putting on a timer for 20-30 minutes, putting the phone on airplane mode, closing the office door, and selecting one task to accomplish.

We amaze ourselves at how much gets done when we put all our effort into 1 thing and 1 thing only.

As I mentioned I used to juggle multiple tasks all day to get as much done in my quest for efficiency. That’s the way my mind works, “If I can do this while I’m doing that, I’ll be done in half the time!”

WRONG!

I have only learned the value of true quality work in the past few years. Too many times when we attempt multitasking we end up doing a piss-poor job of our work and we need to go back and fix it.

In the days I was multitasking my face off I would regularly (almost daily) forget to attach things to emails because I didn’t focus on the task at hand. I would have to go back and resend it with an attachment and a sheepish note saying I forgot it after someone replied all to ask about said attachment.

Monotasking AND Multitasking

I have definitely changed my ways since then, but I still believe there are a few times we can effectively and efficiently multitask to get more done in a day.

Today I listen to podcasts or audio books while running and working out, cleaning the house, or driving. I’ll check my Twitter feed (yes, this actually is work-related) on my elevator ride in my apartment or while waiting in line for coffee. And of course, I’ll talk on the phone while walking, driving, or riding/crashing my bike.

Notice I didn’t say emails, I batch all of those into certain times of the day, you can read more about that and seven other productivity tips here.

The bottom line is everyone works differently. I’ve found that the more I attempt to do, the less effective I will be at it. So if you’re in need of great work, eliminate distractions and get focused. If you have a mundane task like listening to a conference call, than listen. But take a walk or clean your office so you’re not just sitting and staring. Its OK to be efficient AND effective sometimes.

What Monotasking vs Multitasking examples do you have?

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Leave me a comment or chat with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear from you. Have a great weekend!

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Memorable is Bad

We have interactions every day with various businesses from coffee shops to hardware stores to beauty salons and everything in between. Many of these experiences are exactly what we expected, and some of the special ones are even memorable for a period. But what we don’t encounter every day are unforgettable experiences. Experiences that make us tell friends and family what it was like and why they should go experience it too, even years after their story happened.

Publix grocers are great. They have all the food we need, it’s fresh, and the staff is extremely friendly. And it’s always like that, it’s what we’ve come to expect. There’s usually a slight grin on people’s face as they walk out of the automatic doors pushing their buggies full of groceries and household supplies. But we rarely go out and continue to talk about how great Publix is to our friends and family. We rarely attempt to convince someone to switch from Harris Teeter or Bi-Lo to Publix because Publix is so far superior. Instead we go there each week and we get our groceries and we smile and have small talk with the employees and we go home. We have memorable experiences that fade out after time.

There is nothing wrong with this, Publix is a great company and has a great model. They have one very loyal customer in me, but they don’t stand out head and shoulders above the rest. Many people go to Harris Teeter or Bi-Lo and experience the same thing, it often comes down to preference and geography.

Then there are companies that create unforgettable experiences. These are the places that we walk out of with an open mouth because we’re in awe. These are the places that prompt us to call friends and ask, “Have you been here before? Why didn’t you tell me about them earlier?” These are the unforgettable experiences that people talk about, not just smile about.

When I did sales training I would preach about a ‘wow experience’ for customers from start to finish. Since it was not a traditional furniture store the possibilities were endless, people did not know what to expect so the bar is relatively low for newcomers. The sales people had great influence on how to create that experience and the best ones took advantage of it; combining personal charm with a bit of smart-aleck customer service, and great values in the furniture. This paired with the methods people would find the stores like Craigslist, word of mouth, and even seeing paint markers on someone’s back windshield made for an unforgettable story that customers could tell their friends. Plus when people find a great bargain, they are ready and eager to boast to their neighbors about how much money they saved. This made for the perfect storm of referrals for the company.

So how is that replicated in large stores that have been around for years? Or in places like Publix whose customer base might frequent the store multiple times per week. How can they continue to create those ‘wow experiences’ for customers?

Continue to push the limits. Continue to experiment. Continue to make our organizations stand out. The risks are worth the reward to create something that is unforgettable.

What if Publix gave out “Customer of the Month” to the person they see the most or the one that spends the most? Will that be a customer for life? Will that make some people want to win that and frequent the store more often? What if the furniture store sales people all wore bright green polo shirts to work EVERY day with no exception? What if they then added bright green hand-written thank you notes in the mail to their customers after every sale to reinforce their experience? They would begin to stick out even more to customers and encourage them to keep talking. These types of things reinforce the experience and can turn a memorable experience into an unforgettable one.

What can we add to our businesses that will make us unforgettable?

Informational Bottlenecks

Any piece of general information we could ever imagine needing is readily available with the click of a button. It’s easy and fast for us to get the answer to anything we want, just by pressing “search” on a screen. So it stands to reason when we’re in a position of managing others that we have the inclination to want any and sometimes every piece of information at a moment’s notice. Since technology is so advanced we have become accustomed to this urge, but it is a quick path to slowing down the processes of a business.

When we demand to know every detail of a person’s job that reports to us at a moment’s notice, we slow down the flow of work. In manufacturing a bottleneck is the the slowest performing area in a series of operations that affects throughput. Throughput is how many widgets can be completed in a given time period from start to finish. In turn, a “bottleneck” sets the pace for a manufacturing process since it is the slowest process. The fastest that a manufacturing process can move is the slowest operation. If we are the informational bottlenecks in our organization, we are inhibiting the daily throughput of the company.

For example, if a principal wants to know each and every lesson plan of every teacher prior to instructing their kids, the teachers cannot begin to prepare until they have their lesson plans approved. And if they have to wait in line to be approved by the principal one by one, the principal is holding up throughput and the teachers aren’t able to do their jobs effectively, lacking the proper time to prepare.

This type of behavior is often seen in micro-managers. Often times they don’t necessarily do anything with the information, they just want to feel important and exercise their power. Sometimes the check-ups are needed, but the very act still slows down productivity. Fortunately there are ways to combat this if we’re the ones doing the micro-managing AND if we’re the ones being micro-managed.

First off, pinpoint the areas that are the most often identified as the most coveted information (in the teacher analogy it would be the lesson plans) and make this information readily available on some form of multi-user platform such as Google Drive or Evernote. These platforms, and a number of others like them, allow multiple users to view the same document(s) simultaneously and leave notes to each other without having to email or transfer them back and forth. Begin working on one of these types of platforms and “share” the work with the people that are always asking for the information. When this is done, the person in need of the information (whether it’s us or someone managing us) can easily and immediately access the work to “check up on things” without being a bottleneck to the process. The manager gets the information they’re seeking and the workers can work with fewer interruptions, everyone gets what they want.

Utilizing the technology available to us is key in today’s work world. We live in a fast-paced society and speed the speed of our organizations can be a competitive advantage. Micro-managing can and will always happen, but this is one way to slow it down and keep our throughput at a premium.

How do you prevent bottlenecks in your organization?

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