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Posts Tagged ‘High-Performance Culture’

Goodbye to “Sir or Madam” Marketing

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

“Dear Sir or Madam,”

“Have you heard about our new [product/service]? There has never been anything like it before. Best of all, it’s designed just for you, [prospective client name here]! Worry no more about [financial security/maximizing returns/funding college/on-time retirement]. Our [product/service] will fit your needs like a [glove/shoe/favorite T-shirt].”

Most marketing has gotten well beyond this level of obviousness, of course. But below the smoother surface of our mail-merges, much corporate thinking about marketing is still stuck in the one-size-fits-all mindset that should have gone out with legwarmers.

American Express was successful for years with the all-purpose slogan, “Don’t leave home without it.” But with the 1990s came the advent of a new consumer mentality, one that encouraged customers to feel that products and services were not generically designed for the masses but tailored “just for them.” American Express recognized this and retooled its approach, adopting its revised, targeted slogan, “The right card for the right people.” As Richard Weylman noted in Opening Closed Doors, AmEx had realized that “it is more important and effective to reach the right people than it is to reach many people.”

It’s one of the great insights of modern marketing. In today’s advertising climate, the wider you cast your net, the lower your marketing ROI. Instead, spend some time identifying and wooing the very specific fish that are most likely to bite on the bait you have to offer.

How do you identify these fish? Look around your tank. They’re already swimming in front of your nose. Your current happy customers are the best predictors of what your future happy customers will look like.

After all, your current happy customers are happy for a reason—they love what you have to offer. If you think of them as generic “customers” and go out looking for more “customers,” you are missing out on the golden opportunity to discover just what it is that brought them in and kept them with you. Do you have accounts belonging to young families? Realtors? Educators? Members of the Kiwanis? Golf-loving retirees? New homeowners? Each of these comes with specific needs and desires. Find out what they love and want, then build tightly targeted marketing around that subset of your local population.

And how do you find out what they love and what they want? ASK them! Remember that people love to talk about themselves. Send out a personal letter to every current client who recently bought a home. Tell them that you are eager to have more clients just like them. Who wouldn’t want to hear that? Ask what would make their lives easier—from actual financial products and services to a pizza delivered on Moving Day—then create it, advertise it, and reel ‘em in!

In the end, your marketing should consist not of one big blast of generic information, but six or eight smaller, more carefully crafted campaigns. Believe me—it’ll be the biggest bang for buck you’ve ever had.

Tags: High-Performance Culture, Marketing, Strategic Planning
Posted in Culture Transformation, Marketing Strategy | No Comments »

The Limits of Compassion (and yes, there are some)

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

I am human. And I’m willing to bet that four out of five readers of this column are human, too.

As humans, we come equipped with massive contradictions and imperfections. Our emotions battle with our intellect. Our community spirit wrestles with our selfishness. We think thoughts both lofty and low and emit smells both lovely and, uh…not.

But when we come together in the workplace, we’re making a deal with each other to bring our higher, stronger, better selves to the game. It’s not that our weaknesses cease to exist, but they do cease to ride shotgun on our day.

There are days when I’m running on two cylinders or less—not enough sleep, not enough breakfast, too many pressures, bad news, whatever. You have to figure at least one out of every four people around you feels about the same on any given day.

Now suppose we all had permission to give full expression to those feelings—you’d have 25 percent of the people in any given workplace whining, sighing, crying, or screaming their way through the day. The drain on productivity would be impossible. Forget about achieving anything great or being of profound service, even on your own good days.

A little expression of fatigue or frustration once in a while is fine, and we can all be there for each other at those times. But then there are the people who seem to have woven dramatic emotional displays into their job description, day after day after day.

Not okay.

Approach this carefully by all means, but for the sake of everyone’s sanity, DO approach it. Start by expressing genuine concern. Is there something going on in this person’s life that they’d like to talk about? Is there anything you can do to help?

If he or she waves off your attempts to help and continues to be a vortex of negative energy, ramp it up a bit. Ask Human Resources or your immediate manager if anything can be done to assist the person—and drop a mention of how long it has gone on and how difficult it is to work well in the presence of such displays.

If you have offered personal concern AND attempted to get help at a higher level and no improvement is made, it’s time to call in that mutual contract, that unspoken but rock-solid agreement to bring our higher, stronger selves to work. Let the person know gently but firmly that something’s gotta give, that she MUST take advantage of offers of help, that the situation is impacting the work and attitudes of those around her.

If no improvement is forthcoming, it is incumbent on you to return to management with a stronger insistence that something be done.

Tags: Culture In the Workplace, Happy at Work, High-Performance Culture, Workplace Performance
Posted in Improving Morale, Personal Transformation, Self-Growth | No Comments »

Getting the marching orders you need to succeed

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

There are a few recurring nightmares that just about everyone has at some point. You’re trying to run from a monster and you’re stuck in slow-mo. You’re walking down the hallway of your school in your underwear. The classics.

Then there’s the one where you have to do SOMETHING but you don’t know what to do or how. Maybe there’s an odd-shaped racket in your hand and thousands of people in the stands shouting angrily as ten balls of different colors come flying at you. You’re expected to perform, and you want to do well, but you don’t know the rules of the game, so you have no idea what “doing well” means.

Fortunately we wake up from our nightmares. But some people live the “no information” nightmare over and over again while the sun is up. They want nothing more than to do what is expected of them and to do it well, but they are repeatedly handed projects with unclear parameters, fuzzy deadlines, and unstated assumptions.

Worst of all is finding out that, just like in the nightmare, the expectations DID exist, and time after time the employee is lambasted for not meeting them.

This is not okay. As an employee, you have the right to know what is expected of you. Holding you to unstated standards and expectations is every bit as crazy as handing someone a bat and putting him at home plate without explaining the rules of baseball—then booing angrily when he strikes out, as he inevitably will.

The good news is that the boss who gives vague instructions is almost always doing it unintentionally. In most cases she really wants to see the project done right and simply does not realize that she hasn’t given you the information you need to make it happen. Your job is to help the boss help herself by giving you what you need to do well. It’s a win-win.

Next time your boss says, “Hey, I need this done,” don’t just dive in. Take five minutes to see if you have the information you need. What are the exact tasks that need doing? What are the specifications? When are the deadlines, both soft and hard?

Ask the boss for a five-minute meeting. Start by saying, “I want to knock this project out of the park, and to do that I want to be sure I understand what’s needed.” State in your own words what you understand the parameters of the project to be. Ask if you’ve missed anything. Ask when the hard deadline is, and whether an earlier deadline would be ideal. Thank the boss for the clear guidelines and promise to be in touch with any needed clarifications.

Then knock the cover off the ball. When complete, make sure to go back to the boss and get sign off by asking, “Does this meet your expectations?” If that step is missed, you’re not complete.

If you get praise for a job well done, reply by saying how helpful the clear guidelines and deadlines were. The odds are good that your next assignment will come complete with the details you need. If not, ask again, reminding the boss how well the previous project went with such clear guidelines.

Tags: Effective Leadership, High-Performance Culture, Managing Employees, Workplace Performance
Posted in Culture Transformation, Managing Employees, Workplace Performance | No Comments »

The Shackleton mindset—a refusal to fail

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

For sheer jaw-dropping drama, it’s hard to beat the story of the three-masted sailing ship Endurance, which left England in August 1914 under the command of Ernest Shackleton with twenty-eight men determined to cross Antarctica by sled.

The Endurance ended up trapped and crushed to splinters by ice floes. The men lived on the Antarctic ice for another two years.

Total survivors out of the original twenty-eight men? Twenty-eight.

What if you approached every challenge in your life and in your work as if you simply HAD to overcome it? I’ll tell you what—you would do it. You would find a way, and you would get it done.

Whenever I hear the expression, “Failure is not an option,” I think of Ernest Shackleton and the men of Endurance. I picture them confronting these utterly impossible situations and saying, “Well, lads, let’s see what our options are.”

I then picture them reaching into a pocket and pulling out a scrap of paper. Under the title OPTIONS are two words: SUCCESS and FAILURE.

Like heck. Why would failure EVER be an option? So why not take it off the list entirely?

We’ve all heard the hundred or so reasons such and such a thing simply cannot be done, the many, many reasons failure is the only option.

Tell Shackleton about the insurmountable obstacles you face. Just let me watch.

Better STILL—why not just take FAILURE off that list of options?

I have a friend who I dearly love but who always used to explain why something couldn’t be done. Excuses came easy to her. Then one day her boss gave her a priceless saying to remember: Don’t tell me about the labor pains—show me the baby.

Before a project begins, I don’t want to hear all the reasons it can’t be done. After the project is done, I don’t care how many hours you worked. I don’t care how many obstacles you hit. Save it for your memoirs. Just show me the baby.

Decide now that whatever project or challenge you currently have before you simply cannot be allowed to fail—that you must use the fortitude of the Endurance crew to make it happen. It’s a completely different way of thinking.

But be careful—this powerful way of thinking is addicting. Once you get a taste of achieving the impossible, it’s hard to quit!

Tags: Effective Leadership, High-Performance Culture, Motivating Employees
Posted in Culture Transformation, Motivating Employees, Training and Development | No Comments »

Acres of Diamonds: Show Me the Money!

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Last year I finally read Acres of Diamonds. It’s a century old, yet its truths are timeless.

This pastor, lawyer, speaker, politician, and university president – who collected $11 million from his speech by the same title and donated it to students – spoke of the riches that are available to all of us and how we search for them in all the wrong places. The acres of diamonds, you see, are in our own backyard.

He tells of struggling merchants who know nothing about the people living near their businesses, nothing about their families or their kids, their joys or sorrows or aspirations. They just plain don’t care about people – and THAT’s why they’re poor. They don’t see opportunities because they don’t know that people will show you how to help them—IF you just listen.

A metaphor for business? My thoughts exactly.

Here’s a thought. What would happen if you eliminated all the drama from your sales team? Work would no longer look like an adult day care because people would be accountable for their own problems and solutions.

What if instead of having to manage people, a sales manager could focus on improving sales? No managing the frail egos of people who complain about minutiae; every sales person 100 percent accountable for his or her results; no dealing with “hurt feelings” – because you’re dealing with grownups who know that their feelings are their choice. Just imagine it.

Stay with me here. In this little dream, the sales manager would spend:

•   a third of his or her time generating leads for the sales team;
•   a third making the sales operation optimally effective;
•   a third coaching the players on positioning, strategies, techniques, and sales skills.

How would that change things?

Are you ready for the change? It’s not that hard. Simply make sure that you instruct people to own their problems and find solutions fast. If anyone comes to you with a gripe or a whine, stick your fingers in our ears and shout, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening.” Tell them to come back to let you know what they did to create a quick solution.

Do this and sales will accelerate!

Tags: High-Performance Culture, Sales, Sales Culture
Posted in Employee Engagement, Motivating Employees, Sales Culture | No Comments »

Culture—The Ultimate Profit Tool

Friday, May 7th, 2010

For three decades, companies across the spectrum have talked about the need to convert to a sales culture. Talk, talk, talk. Yet for all the chatter, the number that has successfully converted to a sales culture is still well below five percent! Millions have been spent in an attempt to make the change. So why have so many repeatedly failed?

Sales and service skills do little to change results UNLESS there is a strong base of people who love what they do. It’s about the culture! Without the right spirit, no amount of training or hiring will get you headed in the right direction.

A survey by the Corporate Executive Board showed that employees who are “true believers”—who value, enjoy, and believe in what they do—displayed 57 percent more discretionary effort and were 87 percent less likely to leave, while Gallup says that for every $10,000 of payroll, $3,400 of productivity is lost due to “disengaged employees.”

That’s an ugly number.

So what makes people love their jobs, fully engage, and produce greater results? Contrary to what most believe, money has very little to do with it. What does matter is the three overlooked “must haves” to rejuvenate your people’s passion for extraordinary results.

1. Kick-butt Rituals of Celebration and Appreciation
Healthy cultures have appreciation as their cultural backbone. They create an environment where everyone, not just the managers, oohs and aahs over each other’s successes and contributions. They create daily, weekly, and quarterly rituals of celebration and appreciate and coach their people to be positive coaches to each other.

Maybe you have a daily huddle before opening where each person briefly shares an accomplishment while the rest of the team cheers and claps. Maybe you have a “positive” sharing at the beginning of each weekly strategy meeting and a quarterly awards ceremony filled with many awards and recognitions. If you create a childlike energy of people high-fiving with joy, you can expect people to thrive under the recognition.

2. Ironclad Values
Your defined values are your “true north” and a powerhouse of results IF you do them correctly. If your values could be listed as the values of any other company in the country, you haven’t done a good enough job of creating values that will guide you powerfully. When you say “honesty” or “integrity” or “hard work,” you haven’t really said a thing. And if people don’t have their quarterly project plans built around the values, guess what? They aren’t really your values.

3. “We mean it” Behaviors
When an organization defines its behaviors well, then supports and coaches to those behaviors as if they really are to be followed consistently, miraculous transformations begin.

Besides sales and service behaviors, behaviors regarding how to treat and respect coworkers must also be defined, like “no excuses” or “no talking behind peoples’ backs” or “state things in the positive.” When you are clear in expecting the best in others, people bring their higher selves to work—that part in all of us that knows the right thing to do and the willingness to do it.

Most of all, remember that EVERYTHING is a leadership issue. If you want people to thrive at work and bring their passion for extraordinary results, you must, as a leader, create the environment in which people can thrive.

Tags: Company Culture Change, Culture Transformation, Employee Motivation Ideas, High-Performance Culture
Posted in Culture Transformation, Employee Engagement, Managing Employees, Motivating Employees | No Comments »

Planning for Certain Uncertainty

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

You’ve probably heard of the Butterfly Effect, where the beating of a butterfly’s wings sets off a chain of countless small reactions until you’ve got a hurricane on your hands. That’s the economy for you – an incredibly complex web of tiny causes and huge effects. It’s difficult to predict what the world will look like three, six, or twelve months out.

Given all that uncertainty, any minute-to-minute plan you carve in stone is doomed to fail. The move from Step 5 to Step 6 that seemed so logical and inevitable in January may be suicide in July, once the economy has shaken the ground beneath your feet a few times. What you need is a constant reassessment and reorientation to the end results you want, coupled with the skills to adapt and adjust your strategies as the world turns. And churns.

So when you meet later this year to plan your company’s strategic direction, put away that chisel. Instead, define the targets you intend to keep in your sights and build the shared commitment to reach them.

Be strategic. Speaking of your strategic plan, you might just want to put some…you know…strategies in it. You think I’m kidding? The fact is, if you were severely allergic to strategies, I could fill a swimming pool with the strategic plans of typical banks and throw you in, and you wouldn’t get so much as a SNIFFLE. Why? Because most strategic plans are scoured clean of strategies.

They might have goals—yes, lots of them seem to have goals. There may be some initiatives, too, or tactics. And fonts, and margins. But without strategies, world-class results will be something you read about in headlines about the other guy.

Be specific. Vague wandering in the general direction of results will get you vague and general results. Instead, create a plan that zeroes in on the results you expect with glistening, crackling clarity, and build in follow-through templates, making sure that everyone is aligned through weekly check-ins.

Be systematic. Good intentions are swell. A good start on your plan of action is peachy. But you will never connect the dots between Point A and Point Z unless you put a system in place. Not a system that is written up and forgotten, but one that you return to every week for realignment and one that is integrated into every employee’s quarterly plan.

These elements of a successful plan—strategies, precision, and a drum-tight system—are all optional. So is success. But if you choose to follow these guidelines, you’ll be well on your way to the kind of success that will have your old-school competitors running for their silver bullets. Let ‘em run—you’ve got things to do—and an uncertain world in which to do them. Best to have a flexible, dynamic plan to meet that challenge.

Tags: High-Performance Culture, Organizational Culture Change, Strategic Planning
Posted in Culture Transformation, Employee Engagement, Strategic Planning | No Comments »

Follow through to get the bang for your training buck

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

One semester in middle school, we had the option of taking a bowling class for gym. And I remember clearly, as my ball headed into the gutter time after time—the instructor kept harping on one thing: “Be sure to follow through.”

Follow through? Why? It never made a lick of sense to me. Once the ball is out of my hands, what difference does it make what my arm does?

Finally I got sick of scoring in the low peanuts every game and thought I’d try it. I let the ball go and allowed my arm to continue in a perfect arc.

I can still hear the sound of that strike.

According to the American Society for Training & Development’s Benchmarking Forum, the average annual expenditure per employee on training was $1424 in 2005 (the last year of complete data). But the most successful and productive companies invest $1616 per employee.

Coincidence? You wish. Training provides the best ROI of any investment you can make in your business, period. But there’s something else those high-performing companies do—they follow through after the training is complete. The best way to get results from your training dollars is to expect and measure immediate application of what is learned. Measurement and celebration of the results from the training program need to start within 24 hours of a session or the application of the learned material drops like a stone.

When you work with a training consultant, make sure they don’t pull up stakes and head for the hills five minutes after the last session is over. Good training ALWAYS includes a specific, detailed follow-up plan—or it’s not training. It’s flushing.

Tags: High-Performance Culture, Motivating Employees, Personal Transformation, Workplace Performance
Posted in Employee Engagement, Managing Employees, Motivating Employees, Personal Transformation, Self-Growth | No Comments »

Telling the no-kidding truth for no-kidding results

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

What’s WRONG with you?

When I ask it that way, your defenses probably go up in a heartbeat. Nothing’s wrong with me, you’ll insist, thank you very much. And you’ll have lost a shot at self-improvement.

When it comes to their own problems, people don’t often tell the truth. That’s why people with weight problems keep struggling with their weight and alcoholics keep drinking. They’re rarely telling themselves the truth.

In business, most of the problems we encounter result from not telling the truth about our own problems, preferring to insist that everything’s groovy even in the face of the evidence. We put our energy into deflecting blame instead of finding and asking the questions that can lead to a genuine breakthrough.

If you ask a VERY important question, such as, “Why aren’t we twice the size we are?” there are many potential answers. “We don’t have enough salespeople.” “Our salespeople aren’t skilled.” “Our sales manager isn’t following a solid process.” “There are no consequences for inaction.” “Our marketing is ineffective.” And the list goes on…and on….and on.

All of the answers should be entertained. And once they are, the hard part kicks in. Now, figure out the number one reason and decide to have a breakthrough in that area—no matter what.

Much of the $110 billion spent each year on training is spent chasing solutions to the wrong problems—the result of a dishonest self-assessment.

As with all things, the question is not how much you invest, but whether you are aligning your training with dashboards and other business measurement tools to gauge the results. And the best way to invest that money in the right kind of training is to ask the hard questions up front AND to invite someone outside the management loop—and preferably outside the company—to ask the hard questions as well.

Tags: Company Culture Change, Culture Transformation, High-Performance Culture, Personal Transformation, Workplace Performance
Posted in Culture Transformation, Employee Engagement, Personal Transformation | No Comments »

Create Better Results by Revisiting Your Company Values – Video

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

The core that everything else is based upon is your company values. Revisit the values that you stand for as an organization because as you grow and become better and different, your values change. Do you suppose Bill Gates has the same values today as he did when he was 19 years old starting his first business? No – he’s become much more philanthropic and had to grow as a human being. His values had to change to create better results. There’s always a need to go back and revisit your values.

You don’t have to have the standard values that every company has. Here’s a list of company values my team came up with a few years ago:

Extreme commitment to customer success. Customer satisfaction doesn’t matter. Customer Success is what it’s about. Everything anybody does should be defined by “Does this help the customer succeed more?”
Blue Vase. Watch the video to hear the whole story about the blue vase. Do you ever have people who are really busy telling you why something can’t be done when they could be spending just a little bit more energy to just figure out how to get it done? Blue Vase in our office is code for “I know this is impossible, but figure it out anyway because it needs to get done.”
No excuses. Excuses don’t replace results. Instead of making excuses say, “I blew it. Here is my massive corrective action so that this doesn’t happen again.” Making excuses to cover up mistakes really creates chaos in organizations. As soon as you start allowing excuses, you will see a decrease in your results.
Having and Spreading Fun!
Commitment to personal growth and commitment to professional growth. In order to have an organization that grows, you better have people who are committed to reading and learning. You should read at least one book a month in your profession so you can make yourself better at what you do.
Sense of urgency. One of the most limited resources that we all share is time. People’s time needs to be used effectively.
Positive reinforcement to fellow associates. People always think they don’t get enough appreciation from their manager, but the research show that it’s really from their fellow employees where it matters. So you better have people who are givers and always showing their appreciation for others.

What are some of your company values?

Tags: Culture In the Workplace, High-Performance Culture, Inspired Workplace, Managing Employees, Workplace Performance
Posted in Culture Transformation, Customer Service, Workplace Performance | No Comments »

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