Get your attitude right! Yes, the last couple of years have been rugged! They have been rugged for everyone. So, get over it and start thinking like a leader. Concentrate on what is possible rather than why you can’t accomplish your goals.
Get your team’s attitude right! Identify everyone on your team with an attitude challenge and give them 30 days to make it right (it actually only takes a moment). Sure there are challenges but they are either on the team or not, they are either thinking about solutions or challenges.
Hire the best people for the job! If you are not matching behaviors, competencies and talents for each job you will suffer the consequences later. Stop drooling over resumes and interviews! Benchmark every job. Assess every candidate before falling in love with them during the interview, then match the assessment to the job. This will take all the emotion out of the hiring/promotion process and produce vastly superior results with far less turnover.
Hire slow and fire fast! If someone you hire or promote isn’t cutting it, you’ll know in 90 days or less. Don’t let your mistakes linger. Act on it. Step up and move on.
Get rid of all the micro-managers! Not only are they annoying but they are stifling creativity, motivation, morale, innovation and the development of future leaders. They may produce short-term results but it will be at the expense of the future of your organization.
Apply the Rule of 3! Have every person in your organization outline the top 3 tasks they need to complete in the next 30, 60 and 90 days that will contribute to achieving the organization’s mission and goals. Focus relentlessly on these 3 tasks and monitor, measure and celebrate the successes. Don’t let anything interfere with the accomplishment of these 3 tasks.
Stop doing those time-wasting performance reviews 2X per year! Have a 15 minute conversation with every employee every 30 days to check in on the progress on the Rule of 3. Focus on:What is working?
Why is it working?
What is the ideal?
What is not working?
What is needed?
What is the plan?
Ask your employees how you can help them achieve their 3 tasks, rather than telling them what to do.
Apply generous recognition! An authentic and heart-felt “Thank You” will keep most employees far more engaged for longer than you might think.
Love the employees and customers you have! Just for the next 30 days spend more time loving the employees and customers you have than trying to attract new ones.
Spend some time considering the culture you have created. Is it positive or negative? Do people lead or wait to be lead? Is the focus on solutions or challenges? Are you developing future leaders or mindless followers? Are people excited about the challenges or do they dread going to work?
However you answer these questions, ask yourself the same 6 questions as in #7 above.
What is working?
Why is it working?
What is the ideal?
What is not working?
What is needed?
What is the plan?
Developing a Contagious, high performance culture is not nearly as complicated as you might think. One thing we know for sure is that it can’t be done sporadically. Talking about your ideal culture and leadership once a quarter at the all employee meeting or once a year at the annual conference doesn’t cut it. Leadership development is an ongoing process, every day, every week, every month. Create an ongoing leadership conversation that every employee is allowed to participate in and you’ll build a productive, high energy culture that serves as a strong foundation for your future.
Many employees are feeling ignored, under valued and under appreciated. There is no big surprise here. Over the past three years many executives have systematically pulled in the reins, focused on survival and left themselves precious little time for engaging with our most important asset — our people.
At the end of the day that activity, engaging with employees, may well be the most important leadership activity of all. Yet, in our busyness we just don’t get around to it. Here is a coaching tip for handling our most important job responsibility.
1. Engage with 1 employee every day. Make it a priority. Schedule it. Ron Johnson, Senior Vice President of Apple and the chief architect of Apple’s outrageously successful retail operation makes it a habit to speak with one store manager everyday during his early morning exercise program.
2. Set everything else aside, be present to the conversation and be sure to practice listening.
3. Have a real 2-3 minute conversation.
4. At the end of the conversation recap what you heard the employee say and how much you appreciate them.
At the end of the month notice how great you feel, how happy your employees are and how energized they have become.
Here’s a passage from Today We Are Rich just released by author Tim Sanders on how to use words that will project confidence – a key to leading others.
“Stop using tentative words; they hedge conversation to the point of being meaningless. The unconfident person talks with qualifiers and commits to very little. Tentative words include maybe, perhaps, might, somehow, allegedly, no offense, just saying, should, ……, and so on.
“If you want to project confidence, say what you believe, and say it directly. You’ll find that once the namby-pamby words are gone, confident statements remain.
The greatest breakthroughs happen after major breakdowns.
Leadership bench strength will be a huge factor in the coming recovery. Those organizations that build strong benches will win. Every other organization will either lose of barely hold on. Allowing your leaders to take risks, try, and even fail on occasion will build strength from real experience. Micro-managing will build weakness.
How’s your bench strength?
Gives us your comments so we can all benefit and build strong teams.
I witnessed something remarkable recently. After delivering the opening keynote speech for First American Equipment Leasing’s annual sales kick-off meeting, the Chairman and co-founder, delivered his state of the company address.
I have seen and heard these hundreds of times. The Chairman/CEO runs through the results from the previous year, acknowledges a few folks, talks about how important the upcoming year is and tells the audience they are the “best team in the league” and “together we deliver a huge years this year”.
That was only part of what the Chairman of First American did. After the review and the projections for the year he came down from the platform, among the people. Then, he asked if they could have a candid conversation. He went back to 2008 and reviewed 6-8 goals that had been outlined for the next 3 years. He asked the group for their candid opinion on what had been done well, which areas they had missed the mark on and which were not worth pursuing at all.
As the opinions and comments began to come forward he did not try to defend, convince or persuade. He actually listened. He noted what was being said, asking others if they agreed. An actual dialogue ensued the likes I have rarely seen. As the outsider in the room I was totally impressed while at the same time being somewhat envious. I had always wanted to work for or with a company like this.
The Chairman admitted that neither he nor the executive leadership team had all the answers and that the company was only as good as the great people in the room. As I looked around the room I could not help but notice a confidence, a belief, a commitment, an attitude of pride and determination. Each person, in their way, seemed focused on what they could do to help the company take on its mission for 2011. This is a company with a goal to revolutionize an industry. Now, that’s a big goal! Creating ownership in that vision is the first step to making it happen. The Chairman accomplished both, in my mind, in a 30 minute session. It was a pleasure to watch a revolution in the making.
It all started when he did not presume to know it all.
A good leader knows how difficult, in terms of money and time, it is to revive a dead customer or to get a new one out of a cold list, and a good leadership speaker and coach will tell you the value of a lifetime customer in terms of cash and referrals.
A true leader knows that the key to save money is to sell more to current clients, to the point that the salesperson becomes a part of the client’s team. Yep! This kind of positioning is priceless.
So, here we give you 5 tips to sell more to your current clients:
Slow down
Stop to evaluate and make sure you have done the best for your client and that you have earned the right to ask for referrals.
Get informed
Get as much information as possible about their referral style, if it is aggressive, fast-paced, optimistic, or detail oriented; and learn all you can about their business and their challenges.
Ask
Ask for referrals from key persons and from personal contacts in other departments.
Make a connection
Find a way to make an emotional connection with your client. Aim to make friends with them, and for this, forget about emails, voicemail, or direct mail.
You have to be there, it takes time and effort, but it is worth it.
People prefer to do business with friends, and true friends stick for life, even when the going gets tough.
Communicate regularly
Design a communication model to stay in touch regularly; one that builds top of mind awareness and that portrays you as much more than a salesperson.
Get in touch at least every 6 weeks, make it short, sweet, benefit driven, and if possible, with an emotional trigger. For example:
- Help them learn more
Create white papers, tip sheets, quick columns, or FAQ sheets to help your clients understand what you offer.
- Use a quote
Send an appropriate and inspiring quote to your clients and write a few words on it.
- Clip and send
Make it a habit to clip and send an article, cartoon or quote from any written source you read, or find something on the web that may help or interest your clients. Send it to them explaining why you thought of them when you read it.
- Books
Choose the right book for your client and write a note on the first page. Identify with a sticky note any special sections you find.
- Call them
It is always nice to receive a warm greeting call.
- Feel good things
Tell your clients about a success story related to your product or service that may inspire them.
And always remember to think of your customers as long time friends.
In the beginning, it is common and even necessary, for the head of a company or department head to be involved in everything, from project development down to each project’s fulfillment; however, at some point, this person will realize that there is only so much he can do himself.
Steve Brewer owns a technology development company and once he went on a sales trip to Baltimore.
The only hotel he could book had no Internet, and his iPhone’s battery had died, so he decided to find out what would happen if he were out of reach for twelve hours.
As it turns out, that night one of his company’s servers failed and hell exploded.
His staff called the hotel and he was up the whole night making alarming calls to various data centers. This was surely not the best way for him to spend the night prior to an important sales meeting.
That was the episode that prompted him to think whether someone else could have done what he had to do. He discovered that no, no one could, because he had never explained to anyone what steps to take if a server failed.
As a consequence, he returned from the trip and started working with his staff to document their procedures. They started creating a “contagious” culture where teaching others to do what you know how to do is a good thing instead of a bad one.
Their ‘Project Organization’ turned out to be much more than a manual for putting out fires, they included their procedure to bill clients and how to hire new employees, and there were some exciting surprises too.
One Monday, an employee came to work holding a new code manual he had written during the weekend. It was not asked from him and Brewer was not even aware that they needed one, but as soon as he studied it, he wondered how they had been able to grow so much without it.
But this was just the beginning. When they started, they just began writing things down and ended up going in many different directions. The systems were over-documented and didn’t tie together, so they had to take each part of the document and turn it into one set of interconnected procedures. But it was not over yet…
Once the document was revised, they hired a new person and handed her the documentation saying, “This is how we do things here.” She lasted 6 months, because they had not put the information in context. She had the manual, but was completely isolated.
You see, when the processes were not documented, there was a lot of talking between old employees and the new hires to explain how things were done. This was not an efficient process, but made the new employees feel a part of the team and helped them fit in.
A written manual can’t do that, so they had to look for balance.
Today, Brewer talks to his new employees regularly to find out how they are doing, and most importantly, everyone participates in explaining to them why doing things they way they do them helps the company be successful, instead of just saying, “this is how we do it here.”
The process is open, everyone can review and revisit the procedures, and people feel like they are a part of it.
Now, the business runs more smoothly. Employees first review the document when something happens. If they can sort things out 70% of the procedure before they ask for the owner’s or division head’s help, that is very valuable work. Afterwards, they can add more or clearer information to get the procedure closer to 100%.
Brewer thought that an informal structure would make them stand out and be successful; but soon enough he discovered what every good leadership speaker and coach knows, that there is a thin line between flexibility and improvisation.
Each week, we will be highlighting someone we think demonstrates the actions, thoughts and mindset of a Contagious Leader. Franco Graceffa is our contagious leader this week.
Those who have heard us speak probably know about our friend and his restaurant, Dolce Vita, in the North End of Boston, Ma. Franco is our hero for exemplifying the concept of CUEing, creating unforgettable experiences. He does it in spades and because of that his restaurant has been around for years while other ordinary restaurants just come and go. He knows the experience is not just the food and clean linen but creating a feeling, an emotional connection with his customers so they feel they belong, that they are family.
Franco is a leader. He knows that to be distinctive, to be unforgettable, to treat each guest with enthusiasm and joy for seeing them again. He hadn’t seen us for years yet……..A kiss on each cheek (for John too) and a warm “Ai, YAi, YAi (or something like that) you guys look like movie stars.”
Now how would that make YOU feel?
If you would like to nominate someone, feel free to send us an email by clicking here, and we would love to consider them! Please tell us a bit about them and what makes them Contagious in their leadership.
Each week, we will be highlighting (or “spotlighting”) someone we think demonstrates the actions, thoughts and mindset of a Contagious Leader.
This week we want to acknowledge the Mayor of Fountain Hills. All our municipalities are dealing with adjusting to the ‘new normal’. Mayor Schlum has brought his ‘A’ game in collaboration to bring diverse and opinionated citizens to the table to negotiate the best solutions possible in navigating this rough patch in our economy. Contagious Leaders do not strive to be right, they focus on being effective and collaboration is a powerful tool in achieving that. Contagious Leaders listen and translate and encourage dialog. By studying the remedies that are suggested by all contributors a contagious leader knows (s)he can stand firm in the ultimate decision.
In business today with so much information being delivered in such a rapid manner, it is imperative that our leaders collaborate with others so they are well versed in all the options available. We are being forced to collaborate to accomplish this and Mayor Jay Schlum is a master.
Here’s is a brief video interview of Mayor Jay Schlum. You can see that his charisma and leadership is immediately apparent.
If you would like to nominate someone, feel free to send us an email by clicking here, and we would love to consider them! Please tell us a bit about them and what makes them Contagious in their leadership.
A good leader knows how difficult, in terms of money and time, it is to revive a dead customer or to get a new one out of a cold list, and a good leadership speaker and coach will tell you the value of a lifetime customer in terms of cash and referrals.
In the beginning, it is common and even necessary, for the head of a company or department head to be involved in everything, from project development down to each project’s fulfillment; however, at some point, this person will realize that there is only so much he can do himself.
Each week, we will be highlighting someone we think demonstrates the actions, thoughts and mindset of a Contagious Leader. Franco Graceffa is our contagious leader this week.
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