While there are as many detailed approaches to child raising as there are parents of children, here are two simple schools of thought that can adequately sum up the major approaches in teaching a child how to find their place among the world’s masses:
- Assurance Of No Limits: giving children expectations above their actual level of mastery with the hopes that having no limits will help them to surpass their expectations, and possibly even yours.
- Knowing Your Limits: knowing just how far along your children really are, and giving them expectation exactly on that level, to ensure they can reach their achievements with as little frustration from possible failure possible
While one would suspect ‘No Limits’ would be a more preferred philosophy than ‘Know Limits,’ there are pros and cons to using either approach, and the key lies in the individual child. Because eventually, they come to an age and level of maturity where their actual limits will play a greater role in the definition of their destiny, and their ability to overcome or circumvent these actual limits will make a difference.
Like say, in the work place, when they hit mid-twenties.
At that point, it will be their managers responsibility to make sure they are developing as well as possible in their career growth, or at least well enough to keep the manager from getting fired. This activity is a lot like raising an actual child, only the allowance and popularity contests that are now at stake are actually families, mortgages, career progression and possible lives, based on the nature of the occupation.
Here too, you can use the same basic approaches suited for raising children in hopes to lead your workers to fulfilled career growth.
The big difference here is that ‘No Limit’ is by far a more preferred philosophy over ‘Know Limits.’ But do keep in mind the exact dynamic you have to work with, and the abilities that actually exist in your company’s talent pool. You’ll probably not be lucky enough to have all-star talent to fill your entire work crew, and some employees will be adamant about how adequate (or not) they are in their performance.
Continuing business model innovation is the most valuable activity that any enterprise an engage in. But it's a problem for most leaders to take on this task. Why? They've never see anyone do it, and they have no personal experience.
To help overcome that problem, this article describes the key elements that such a process requires. With this template in mind, some leaders will be able to design and engage in the appropriate activities.
Here are the four elements in continuing business model innovation:
1. Understand and follow the current business model well. -- Employ the optimum way that goods and services should be supplied now, by informing all stakeholders about what needs to be done to deliver the most benefits.
2. Understand and install the next business model. -- Specify the next innovation to provide more stakeholder benefits through goods and services and how the transition will occur.
3. Understand and use a business model innovation vision. -- The ideal benefits to deliver to stakeholders in your industry, which is used to test the appropriateness of developing future generations of potential business model innovations.
4. Ongoing design and testing of business model innovations. -- Vision-defined probes and tests to elicit reactions to providing new benefits and various ways of supplying them.
A more valuable approach to continuing business model innovation also describes more than one future generation of innovations in terms of the second element.
For each of the first three elements of continuing business model innovations, you need to identify seven key elements -- the who, what, when, where, why, how, and how much -- viewed from the perspective of all direct and indirect stakeholders. Their combination defines either a business model or a business model innovation vision:
1. "Who?" defines all the stakeholders you are serving or affecting.
2. "What?" describes the offerings and their benefits and negative influences that affect each stakeholder.
3. "When?" captures the timing of offerings' effects on stakeholders.
4. "Where?" identifies the location for delivering the benefits and other impacts.
5. "Why?" gives the rationale for providing the stakeholder benefits you deliver.
6. "How?" explains your method of providing your offerings and being compensated for them.
7. "How much?" states the price customers and users pay and incur.
Why is it important to know what these seven elements are? By examining these areas, organizations will be able to focus on places where important benefits may be added.
About the Author:
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is coauthor of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. You can find free tips for accomplishing 20 times more by registering at: http://www.2000percentsolution.com.
Let’s say you’re shipwrecked. Assuming you’re free from any immediate danger (you’ve got a life raft and some supplies, there are no sharks or pirates lurking, etc.) would right now be the best time to debate with yourself if your nephew would rather have the Wolverine action claws or the Batman cape and mask for his birthday present next week?
You might think there are better things to focus on in a time of crisis, mainly surviving to the next moment. But what good is surviving to the next moment and the next moment and the next moment if you lose the sense of why you should be surviving. Otherwise, the alternative will start to feel more appealing and a lot less of a hassle.
When I when through my 2 days of survival training in the Air Force, the instructors knew that 95% of the cadets that were standing in front of them in the woods were basically on a camping trip and would never need any real field survival tips, but they taught us some mental tricks that would actually roll over well as basic life skills. The most important is the faith that you will survive, and the ability to keep those around you convinced of the same, despite the conditions you are facing. The common scenario for doom would be a group of survivors marching toward what they hope would be safety, where eventually, someone will start muttering “We’re all going to die...” Those words will quickly become a chorus in perfect lock-step harmony if not addressed immediately.
Take a look at the various aspects of your life. Whether it is the fear of more cutbacks and layoffs at work, or the strain of a spousal or parental relationship at home, all the battle plans in the world you can devise to survive an onslaught will do you no good if you’ve got nothing to live for after the war has been won.
Assuming you are not currently in the act of dodging bullets or arrows, now is exactly the right time to be planning that moment you’ll be looking forward too once you step off the field of battle.
This is not the first time on this blog that I have taken on the time honored tradition of the customer always being right, but I believe it is the first time I actually offered a solution that involved dealing with the customer and not just reassuring the employees who deal with them that the abuse they take is worth it.
Once again, I will admit that I am a horrible closer in sales, but once committed to a client and product, they get 100% effort, routinely overshooting their expectations. But in the cases when you are not meeting the needs of the customer to their satisfaction, despite delivering exactly what they asked for and more, I offer three solutions:
- Sell Them At A Lower Price: Times are tough right now for all of us, and your clients are no exception. They are feeling just as much pressure to cut costs or get more for the money they are spending, and they are driving you insane with worry for loss of revenue I you can’t meet their panicked demands. Now is the perfect time to take a small loss with a loyalty discount for those long time customers, especially big spending customers. A limited batch of discounted goods and services might be to ticket to keeping them at bay.
- Sell Them At A Higher Price: Custom orders, rush delivery, and last minute changes are enemies to your bottom line, especially if your customers are coming to you discounted and not premium prices. If your customers are making requests that mean increases to your normal cost of service, you are well within your right to share some of that cost increases with those customers. If your customers are just annoying, well, make sure you can both justify and prove the necessity of the cost increase
- Stop Selling To Them: If you were no longer serving the best interest of a client, you would expect them to stop using you. It is odd that the opposite is usually not an expected option. If a client becomes too much trouble or expense, and you can come to no workable discourse, you have to fire the client. You would do better using the time and energy to focus on your profitable customers or finding a new replacement customers.
I’ve been talking to a lot of my friends who are stagehands lately, and as the summer concerts are beginning to be planed, and my mind got caught up in thinking about goals and planning.
When a band sets up a stage for a performance, they have to scout out the venue, determine their basic wants and needs for a show, figure out if the venue can actually allow them to do some cool extra things (more lights, split level stages, pyro, whatever), and then determine what the end result should be. If the band is comfortable with themselves and who they will be performing with, they know how well they move together on stage, and can easily set up a performance and tear down for a quick getaway once they know how much room you have to work with.
Take this to your work team or even personal goal planning. Think about yourself and the teams you work with, and take a closer look at the current level of talent in contrast to the limitations that have placed on you (budgets, time, authority, priority). Your limits make up the size of your venue, and whether it is the equivalent of a small club or outdoor stadium. That sets you up to gage the size of stage you can manage in the space, how much equipment and what type of equipment you can allow on stage, and the size of a crowd you have to pull into the venue to make your performance pay off. Your bosses may see a lot of potential for crowded theater shows, or they might not think your ready to come out of the garage. You’ve got to figure out what venue they’re trying to book you in before you try to negotiate a bigger room and more of the door money.
And you have to be especially honest about the level of talent you are currently working with. You can argue about the Beatles being the greatest band of all time, but they didn’t begin the British Invasion a few months after they formed. They spent years learning themselves and their audiences, and they started with humble beginning of playing in some of the smaller and more seamier dives all over Europe. They had designs on sellout arena crowds early in their career...but they to build themselves up to reaching their superstar status. And they had to build smaller steps and occupy smaller stages along the way until they could demand the biggest and the best. Don’t get fooled by your potential. Let your potential be your booking agent to bigger gigs in a timely manner.
Your first challenge is to see the venue for what it is, and plan the biggest possible stage and grandest show setup you can imagine for it. That becomes your target goal, and their is nothing wrong with taking that goal to an insane extreme. You might not sell out Madison Square Garden, but you’ll never come close if you don’t keep a few open dates in case the opportunity just happens to pop up.
Your second challenge, and what is the real hard part, is to be consistent in building the steps to that bigger stage, and not hope that talent or luck will allow you to leap from a smaller stage without the proper support. Having a team that is willing to do what it takes to sell out the Garden is great. Having a team that has the talent to pull off the show is wonderful. Having the team that has worked its way up, step by step, to grow its talent and fan base to sell out the show is what you really want. That is something special.
I’ve worked with people who have looked at the big stage and shied away from it, despite great talent, and chosen to stay in the smaller venues or even get out of the business altogether because of the time and expectations of people who perform on the grand level. More frustrating are the people I’ve worked with who you have looked at the stage we are working on and the steps we had built so far, take a chainsaw to them, set them on fire, and then drive over the whole thing with a steamroller. Then, they would stand on top on the ashes and complain that were not building an even bigger stage than the one we had previously destroyed. I have worked with far too many of the latter types of people than I care to think about, because it drains my personal energy when I have to think about the time and energy wasted in the build up. But each experience is a learning experience that you have to take something good away from.
Your News Releases Need Work: Emailing Bad News Releases
After receiving a tweet from a friend asking for news release help last week, followed by was seemed like an entire day of emptying my email inbox of bad news releases, I figure it was time I took another shot and explaining the art of getting your release at least looked at, and hopefully used.
I want to attack the problems I dealt with yesterday:
Assume We Don’t Have The Latest & Greatest: Last Friday, I learned that according to Forrester Research, 60 percent of companies use Internet Explorer 6 as their default browser. That was the day I stopped whining to my IT folks about why we were using the old & busted browser of the past. Today I plead to all the PR folks to sent thinks out in the future. Web pages with lots of flash widget and browser optimized settings can not trump a simple webpage with a clean overall look and images set to just enough that it means something. My 5 year old office desktop running Windows 2000 would appreciate it.
Assume We Don’t Have The Latest & Greatest Part 2: As with the case in an office where I am running Windows 2000 for heavy audio editing, we’re also short on licenses for MS Office. ANY version of MS Office, let alone the latest and greatest. Assume that the person on the computer on the other end may be in the same boat, and don’t send them word docs typed on your brand new, shiny Vista computer with converting them down from .docx to .doc. Even better, try .rtf or a .pdf, both which are universal, and for the latter, you don’t have to worry about a change in font shifting the entire press release.
Images Can Ruin Everything: Our web based corporate email system allows every user in the corporation 20MB or storage space, unless you’ve been with the company over 8 years, whet they may be stuck with the old cap of 10MB. Not a serious problem for those who have machines with the MS Office suite and MS Outlook. I don’t have that luxury, and had to dump my email twice yesterday, after receiving an attached .mp3 from a new artist (5MB) and a two press releases from the same person because he forgot to attach a picture to the document (2MB for first email with large corporate logo, 8MB for email with large corporate logo and 7MB hi-res headshot in .docx press release). Sending news releases with links to download media, scaling down large images to travel reasonably through email, or just sending a .pdf would have made life much easier for me, the one you are trying to influence to cover your people and events.
How many times have you passed up a great personal opportunity, with the only reasoning being you figure you could live with the good thing you already had going? How did it make you feel in the short and long run, as you watched greatness continue and you flounder?
How many times have you watched as your bosses balked at the chance to go after a potentially great employee hire, get in on the bottom floor of a potentially great business opportunity, or expand on a potential great internal program?
There might be good reason (no sustainable capital, not enough physical resources or manpower, possible conflicts in our business model, contractual loopholes to battle out of, etc). Then again, there might not be any reason other than being able to live with the ‘good’ thing we got right now, even if that thing is more along the lines of ‘serviceable,’ or ‘adequate.’
How does that make you feel in the short and long run, as you watch greatness continue for other job sites and yours continue to flounder?
And in some cases, you will find not only opposition to the change that can take your good to great status, you will find much more effort and energy to keeping things status quo that taking your new initiative to greatest, especially if the current state of affairs is closer to the sub par than the par .range
Anytime you take a risks, despite how minimal you can make it, if there is no risk, there is no reward. Even getting out of bed has some risk involved, even if the much more pleasing alternative offers enough consequences to make the decision not to particularly silly.
If you get the opportunity to reach out and touch great, you need to take that opportunity.
To improve a team's effectiveness, it is first necessary to understand the factors that impact its performance. Once you understand these factors you can determine when and what team development is needed.
In order for teams to function effectively they must manage how they work together and how they interact with the rest of the organization. As a result of his studies, Richard Beckhard ("Optimising Team Building Efforts", Journal of Contemporary Business, Summer 1972) states that for teams to be effective they must manage four areas internal to the team: goals, roles, processes and relationships. Further research has identified a fifth factor impacting performance: how the team manages its interaction with the organizational environment. Within these factors is a hierarchy with some factors affecting all of the others. These five factors become the focus of attention for the manager who wants to raise team performance, because teams that effectively manage these areas function more effectively than teams that do not.
Environmental Influences - the impact of the organization and the outside world on team performance.
The organization creates the context within which the team functions. The policies, procedures and systems within an organization can either support or hinder a team's effectiveness. An excellent example is the impact an organization’s reward system has on teamwork. Organizations typically reward only individual contribution. Few organizations have found ways to reward teams.
Signs to look for: The team is physically distant, not given enough resources to do the job, individuals are not recognized for team effort.
Goals - What The Team Is To Accomplish
A team exists when members have responsibility for accomplishing a common goal. An effective team is aware of and manages:
1. The extent to which goals are clear, understood and communicated to all members 2. The amount of ownership of team goals 3. The extent to which goals are defined, quantified and deliverable 4. The extent to which goals are shared or congruent 5. The extent of goal conflict or divergence
Signs to look for: The goals are unclear or not communicated, everyone is doing their own thing and not participating in goal setting.
Roles - Who Does What On The Team
Do all members understand what they and others are to do to accomplish the task? Do they know their individual responsibilities and limits of authority? In new teams time should be spent discussing and defining roles and responsibilities. As the team develops it is typical for individuals to build expectations and assumptions of others which are seldom recorded anywhere. These should be discussed and agreed upon.
Conflict may occur as a result of differing expectations among team members. Overlapping roles can create conflict, especially when two or more team members see themselves as responsible for the same task.
Signs to look for: Responsibilities are poorly defined, there is a power vacuum, members act independently and avoid responsibility.
Work Processes - How Members Work Together
Once team members know what they are to do and who is to do it, they must determine how they will work together. Typical considerations are:
Decision making - how will each of the team members participate in decision making. Communication - what should be communicated within the team, to whom, by what method, when and how frequently? Meetings - what is the team trying to accomplish, what subjects are to be covered, who is responsible for the subject, how will the meeting be conducted, who should attend? Leadership style - the leader and the team need to agree the best style to meet the situation and the leader should be open to receiving feedback on their style.
Signs to look for: Meetings are unproductive or poorly attended, decision making is dominated by one or two people, actions taken without planning or communication is one way.
Relationships - The Quality Of Interaction Among Team Members
As team members work together, relationships often become strained. Members need ways to resolve problems and to assure that a good working relationship continues. Sometimes relationship problems occur because of a difference in values or a personality or management style clash. Managers may need to take an active role in soothing relationships during times of conflict. The more energy that is siphoned off because of bad feelings, attitudes or strong emotions, the less energy is available for the team's task.
Signs to look for: Personality conflicts, or members are defensive or competitive.
Team development is a process aimed at improving team performance in any one or all of the five factors in the team hierarchy. After examining your team's performance in these areas, your role as a manager is to identify where your focus for team development needs to be.
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About the Author:
Pam Kennett is Founder and Director of Chiswick Consulting Limited, a management consultancy which provides advice and direction to clients in marketing and human resources. Pam has more than 20 years experience working with teams and leadership groups to raise performance. Contact her at pam@chiswickconsulting.com or visit http://www.chiswickconsulting.com.
"Second place is the first loser." Ricky Bobby (aka Will Ferrell) from Talladega Nights
Today we’ll have a little bonus ‘Quote & Question,’ as my wandering mind came across using a foot race as another metaphor for life. You can throw plenty of old clichés and adages to it: “The race is not to the swift,” “Slow and steady wins the race,” “Life is a marathon and not a sprint”…but then that line for Talladega Nights popped into my head, and my mind was off to the races (pun intended).
One of the few things I know for sure is that in life, you are always either in the lead or playing catch up. Whether you're in the middle of the pack or far, far out the race, if you're not in the first place, you are not in first place.
That was exactly what I have been dealing with in all aspects of my life, as the current economic conditions here is the US has found a way to stymie just about every well laid plan I had conceived in the past few years, and is doing to same to many of my friends and associates. Not only are more people finding themselves out of first place, they are finding themselves getting lapped. It doesn’t matter how far behind you happen to be in the race, if you’re not in the lead, you only register if you’re a threat to take the lead, and you only seriously matter if you actually take the lead.
With so many people unlucky enough to have lost a job recently, the people who are lucky enough to have jobs look like winners well ahead of the pack. In reality, most are just unlucky enough to be stuck where they are because of the lack of jobs out there. They are stuck in jobs they don’t like or jobs with no forward motion for the foreseeable future because of the overall lack of jobs. People are being given new and extra duties on their jobs that are not only insisting that they come out of there comfort zones at work, but some people flat out don’t want to do. It’s becoming a workplace reality for more employees to be overloaded with additional duties that need to get done, but have completely gotten in the way of their career pursuits.
And now, everyone seems to be behind, and all fighting just to place or show, not even targeting the person who is truly in the lead.
And that guy in first place is wondering why there are no threats to his top spot, and why he’s even running so fast anymore…
In a land where everyone loves a long shot, and the leader of the pack will often embrace the role of the villain, we have seemed to have lost it. No one wants to be on top for fear of having to defend their spot, and many racers are too far behind in laps to even make the race interesting anymore. We seem to all be fighting hard for the right to claim first loser than to be the actual winner.
I was looking to challenge myself today in my writing, and found myself surprisingly fixated on wrestler Ric Flair's Space Mountain quote for most of the morning. Not sure exactly way the aging wrestler was in my thoughts, but somehow, inspiration struck because of it.
What you have below is the wisdom gleaned from words of the Nature Boy, one of the greatest athletic and theatrical performers I have ever witnessed. Give it a quick read, and see how much knowledge you can gain for use in your business or personal life.
"This ain't no garden party, brother. This is wrestling, where only the strongest survive."
Make sure what you are getting to is exactly what you want to get into, because chances are, you're going to find the path it takes to get there has plenty of surprises waiting for you just past your line of site. And by surprises, I mean obstacles to your progress and problems that will take you off course. Just know they will appear, and prepare yourself for the journey. Just make sure it is a journey worth taking.
"Girls, you can't be the first, but you can be next."
The world is full of pioneers. You don't necessarily have to be one to be successful and prosperous. In fact, you will probably be doing yourself a favor by following in the footsteps of someone who took the time to blaze a trail ahead of you.
“Space Mountain may be the oldest ride in the park, but it has the longest line.”
Once you’ve established yourself as the bonafide leader, everyone will want a piece of you. And you might be as great as you’ve convinced people that you are, but you are still only one person. Forget the myth of multitasking, you can only handle one request at a time, leading to a slow and plodding process of people constantly trying to work their way to get a little closer to you a little faster then you can handle. Let them wait.
"I'm a limousine ridin', jet flyin', kiss stealin', wheelin' dealin' son of a gun. WOOOO!!"
You've got little choice in your life but to sell yourself, your ideas, or you actual product to the world. If you’re going to sell yourself, you might as well be bold about it as possible. As long as you're not lying about it, sing your own praises to your hearts content.
"To be the man, you've gotta beat the man.”
This has to be Flair's most famous quote, and my second favorite of his (edged out just slightly by the Space Mountain quote). Put plain and simply, if you want something so badly, step up and try to take it. Talk is talk, but only those brave enough to put forward the action needed to make it happen will ever make it happen.
"Whenever they feel like it, the door's wide open."
Oh, and by the way, once you've scratched and clawed your way to the top, your role changes. You are no longer striving to get there. You are there. Now is the time to start striving to stay there, with plenty of up-and-comers looking to take you out, and has-beens looking to take back the spot they used to own. They're coming for you, like it or not. Might as well make them fight for it.
“As long as he understands this is Flair country, it is.”
As long as you’re at the top of the mountain, it’s your world. As long as someone else is at the top of the mountain, it’s their world. Pouting and complaining won’t get you anywhere. Hard work, determination, a little or a lot of time (most likely a lot) will get you somewhere. With a little luck, you’ll actually make it to the top of the mountain. But until you get there, make sure you give plenty of respect to the current king. They’ve earned it.
“My God, thank you. Thank you very much. I'm almost embarrassed by the response, but when I see this, I know that the twenty five years that I've spent trying to make you happy every night of your life was worth every damn minute of it.”
This comes from Ric Flair’s retirement speech to his fans, and the message here is simple. Be courteous to those who offer you support along the way of your journey in business and in life, and be sincere to everyone. Yes, EVERYONE! You can never give to many ‘Thank you’s.’
I used to sell electronics for a chain store, one that actually still exists, but had long standing trouble with where its identity was taking it at the time I was working there. I was hired as a seasonal worker and assigned to an inner city store because the hiring manager I interviewed with thought my maturity from my past work experience would help balance out the new manager they assigned to the store. The store was failing, but the new manager had proven an ability to move a lot of product, so they were giving him a shot.
The workers were on salary, but received commission bonuses on the dollar value of sales, accessories and service warranties added on to purchases, and various specific items.
It wasn’t long until I figured out what the young manager did to make his numbers look great. He targeted a high bonus product--cell phones--and sold a lot of free upgrade phones. Obviously, as a sales person, it’s not your job to worry if a customer can afford the new plan that was bundled with the upgraded free phone, but as the supposed customer server oriented sales people we were told to portray ourselves as, it should have mattered if the upgrade was needed, and if the new phone was worth it. And since we were a failing store that would get the minimum amount of good merchandise since the store could never really prove its worth, the phones we had available really weren’t worth it.
This same manager taped cables and batteries to our Christmas door buster items that came with cables and batteries, ringing them up as they came to the register to boost our accessory count for the day, then shifted the category numbers from the returns of the unneeded accessories to other sales clerks.
So the store was pretty well known across the city as a cell phone turn around location, with no other products on hand worth selling to repeat customers whom we had gained trust. Oh, and they called us for help setting up electronics they had purchased elsewhere.
The hiring manager who interviewed me was from another region, and was just there to help out the seasonal hiring for the city. A little research into his region found that the antics we pulled wouldn’t fly in his territory. My actual regional manager, who I didn’t meet until after I was kept on staff after the holidays were over, didn’t care what we did as long as we kept the cheap cell phones flowing, and only got rid of the young manager after an inventory showed that he was awful at keeping up paperwork. He was reassigned to a new store where he could use his learned tricks on new customers as just a regular salesman, and continued to do just fine.
A new manager was assigned to my store that brought in some truly old school salesmen. While they didn’t operate on as many questionable practices as the young manager did, you would have been amazed at what a veteran sales guy would do you keep up his numbers. I was let go fairly soon after the new manager came in.
I will tell anyone who will listen that I am a horrible salesperson because I don’t know how to effectively close a deal. But I make up for my lack of working up a proper transfer of money for goods and services by creating quality goods and providing over the top service. That was what was hoped would have rubbed off on the young manager. Only in an environment where hard, fast dollars what the only thing getting our regional manager’s attention, ‘the right way’ to do business didn’t stand a chance.
Maybe now that the light is starting to shine on the business tactics of our failing financial services and banks, a new emphasis will be placed on business getting done right.
Maybe you will put a new emphasis on your employees doing the right things for the right reasons, not just getting the job done as quickly and cheaply as possible to inflate profit numbers.
Nothing is better than hearing a ‘Good job’ encouragement from co-workers when you are struggling through a troubled project. Gaining a sense of admiration from those whom you slug it out with in the trenches daily is often all the motivation you need to convince yourself all the trouble you are going through will actually be worth the painful amount of effort you have put into your project.
Noting is worse than giving a co-worker a ‘Good job’ encouragement that frankly isn’t doing a good job. You end up doing the same thing that people who keep giving their dogs treats after they keep peeing on the carpet do—giving positive reinforcement to negative behavior.
Motivation though positive reinforcement is awesome, but make sure you're not motivating someone to continue to do something you rather have them change. If a subordinate is doing a horrible job producing after-action reports, don’t give him kudos for at least getting the report turned in on time. If your teammate is bringing down your department with sarcasm, don’t encourage him by telling him his jokes are consistently funny.
You do want to raise the spirits of the long suffering and struggling employee. You just don’t want to raise their hopes beyond a level of reality. Do not give positive reinforcements that would suggest a negative action is acceptable, especially if it is just to raise up a person's spirits.
A lesson you learn pretty quickly in the military is that when the people who are supposed to take care of you take care of you, you focus on the results achieved and not the method used, because sometime you really don’t want to know.
I picked that up as a young Air Force officer, and was blessed to have dedicated staff of enlisted airmen and civilians that knew how to get things done and how to keep me out of trouble. I just had to give them the outcome preferred, a list of resources I knew I had available, and a timeline I wanted to pursue. Then, I could just sit back and let the experts at their jobs do their jobs the best way they knew how. I was really blessed early on to have teams that rarely failed, noting that that they actually overachieved about 85 of the time.
When I took me first position that allowed me to really take point on projects, I got a reinforcement of the basic tenants of ‘I got it done, but don’t ask me how.’ I now had a general presenting me his plans that he wanted executed, along and the desired outcome. His staff, knowing the general, stressed the importance of following his plans. Twice I follow the general’s plans for a project given to me, and presented the results that were well below the expected level of results. The first time the plan was blown off, but the second time, the general asked me why I would follow such a stupid plan in the first place. As tactfully as possible, I let the general know that I was given the rough parameters that I had to follow, although I really wanted to say he had given me the stupid idea that I knew wasn’t going to work, but was told has to be followed anyway.
From that point on, I stopped listening to ‘orders’ and starting listening for ‘outcome.’ Whenever that general offered up a plan, I ignored the plan completely, but I made sure that what the general said he wanted and what the troops in the field were expecting were one in the same, and deliverd that. I would put a plan into play that was solid, and ensured that I had over performed on the task when it was time to present. And I always gave the general credit for ‘his director in the formation of our plan of attack.’
I was able to impress myself with the ability make things happen when left to my own devices, and learned quickly to respect the output you can receive from subordinates when you give them a mission and then just let them achieve it with constantly meddling.
Since leaving the military, I have worked for several different managers, some good and bad. I am constantly amazed by managers who push a personal agenda that from the outside looks like a losing campaign. Their insistence on having high achievers do it ‘their way’ quickly becomes a problem, and the projects and tasks almost always come up as failures. And if the manager is spiteful, they’ll usually destroy the moral of the high achiever for failing to live up to some loftfull standard, even thought that standard is wholly unachievable, and should be blatantly obvious to most. If the manager is just foolish, the high achiever will usually ignore that person until they are replaced, or just leave the company to suffer their own fate without him.
If you’re a manager, do yourself a favor. Give your veterans and high achievers their assignments and then back away and let them do amazing work for you. Give your rookies a little guidance and instruction on a way to get their work done that works, but assure them if they find a better process, give it a try.
Last night’s Super Bowl between the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers will have to go down as one of the greatest championship games in the history of the league. And despite fourth quarter and final minute heroics from both teams, the fact remains that the team that scored the most points in regulation time won.
The game ending play was an interception by the Steelers, leaving 5 seconds left on the clock to run out before they could officially start their celebration. The Cardinals’ dream season ended right there. Had they not given up an interception for the longest touchdown in Super Bowl history two quarters earlier, the outcome might have been different.
Then again, if the Steelers didn’t cause a penalty on themselves, giving up a safety instead of getting a first down, the score might not have been that close.
Arizona knows that they put forth an effort they can be proud of, but they know that they lost the game because they we’re unable to score enough point FIRST, and allowed the Steelers to score more points than they did SECOND.
There is a saying that most will stick to in football that defense wins championships, but your offense has to do its job and get the ball past the goal line to make the points.
Look at your business and compare your offense to your defense. The way you play on both sides of the ball is important, but you’ve got to make the moves to advance your business, even with our current economic crisis, or your defense won’t mean much. Make sure you are not only working on your best defensive moves (saving cash, cutting spending, working toward more lean and flexible operations), but you have the most powerful offense plays you can execute practiced and ready for game time (recruiting fresh talent, prospecting new businesses, putting your money in early for the right emerging technologies).
These are four questions you should be asking yourself when comparing your products and services to that of your competitors:
1: What is it that we do that our competitors also do?
2: What is it that we do that makes us come out better than our competitors?
3: What are we doing to make sure we stay better than our competitors?
No, you don’t ask yourself what the competitor is doing better than you. In most cases, when you look at a category where you are trailing behind the completion, you look to see what they are doing and then scramble your forces in an effort to attempt to out do them. It is extremely difficult to beat the established leader at their own game.
I call this living by an “Advantage: Us” standard. When you know your strengths, you have the advantage of working to ensure they continue to be your strengths. This viewpoint may seem a little short sided, but an “Advantage: Us” playbook will easily push back any pretenders to your throne in the eye of the customer. Just make sure you really are better than your competition for the reasons you are stating.
That doesn’t get you off the hook for the areas where you are at a disadvantage. You must acknowledge your company’s shortcoming and make note of areas where you are trailing the competition. But don’t get overly stressed. Unless your company is at the brink of going under, you will continue to get much better results by knowing why you are the leader in your field, and by doing what you can to ensure you stay that way. Just deal with the areas where you are lagging behind the competition by working hard to grow and improve, until you find yourself on par, or even better, than your competition. Then you ask yourself questions number 2 or 3 for that area.
Three common fears that plague small business owners (and Type-A people in general) are the fear to dream big, the fear of accepting baby steps to success, and the fear of admitting you’re having a down day.
Dreaming big becomes a problem when your big dreams fizzle out somewhere along the way. Have enough big dreams that don’t come to pass, and you’ll stop dreaming altogether. You face this fear by dreaming big anyway, although you first set some realistic goals that you should be able to meet with just a fair amount of effort. Then you are free to set your dream goals at an insanely obscene level that truly surpasses your conventional thinking goal. Publicize you lower goals, prioritize the big goals, and you may find that your performance projections will consistently hit somewhere in the middle.
To explain the need to accept baby steps and small victories toward your success, I’m going to use two American sport analogies from baseball and football. Businesses want to see home runs, because they mean instant results and a big lift in spirits. But the reason why a home run is so exciting is that they don’t happen for every at bat. Their scarcity makes them so exciting and motivational, helpings the teams move along through the mundane art of single and doubles to just get on base (and in business to just get things done daily). A business should operative on the mindset of a football team. A football team has to move the length of the field, 100 yards, to score. But to keep the offense on the field, the team just has to advance 10 yards in 4 tries. That’s baby steps and small victories daily, not home runs and hail marys.
And nobody ever wants to feel down, and when they are, they don’t want to admit in. But you usually don’t have much of a choice if your personal energy is visibly waning or you business is showing public signs of decline. Man up and admit your not doing so well at the moment, then do something to improve your situation. And do it immediately. There is no shame in being knocked down, but staying down or lying down are inexcusable.
Reviewing What I Said: A Potential Star Employee's Wish List
In working on my new writings, I've been reviewing lots of old writings to see if there are strings of pearls of wisdom that I can claim...or if I have been a classic flip-flopper. Submitted for your review and approval, and article I put on the Cool Corporate dot COM Blog in October of 2007. I actually got one comment on this, and if memory serves me correctly, it was spam...
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If you are a manager, every so often you will come across an employee in your organization, hopefully under you supervision, that just shines above all the rest of their peers without much effort. That star or potential star employee is a gem you may have lucked upon, but it will take more than a little luck to keep them working for you and your company. And even worse than them leaving for your competition, they could get sullen and just stop putting forth any effort, and are no longer working 'with' your company.
How do you keep your stars happily working in their cubicles and shining for your company? If you were to ask any of these employees, I bet the following items would all be on their wish list:
* Give Them Co-Workers Who Can Keep Up - Nothing is more frustrating to a highly motivated, highly mobile worker that being partnered with a slug who just simply can't keep up. Chances are your star is not stuck up or conceited, but if you place them in teams that aren't performing because they truly can't perform or just don't care all long as the checks don't bounce, you’re just showing your star that you don't care about their level of effort. They'll find a place where movement at their speed matters.
* Give Them The Resources They Need - Just like being placed with bad people, having poor or no resources available to get the job done means it will be harder--if not impossible--to get the job done. Make the jobs easier to get done, and they'll get more jobs done.
* Give Them The Time They Need - Micromanagement is awful. Insane deadlines are awful. Not letting your stars get their job done, or rushing them to complete tasks sooner than they need to be completed will frustrate, confuse, and infuriate.
* Give Them A Chance To Screw Up - If Jack Welsh gets to blow up a building and still become CEO of General Electric, a star employee in the making could surely survive a missed deadline, target, or even bombing a presentation. They're not screwing up on purpose. They'll learn a valuable lesson from the occasional failure, and especially from a huge failure.
You've got a star employee, or a potential in the making. You've got a prime chance to directly effect the career and life of person who could be an eventual rock star CEO, or just another business burnout. Most of their outcome will truly be up to time, chance, and their own efforts. Don't be the jerk that makes it harder that it needs to be.
Welcome to my new blog. This is where I will chronicle the next phase of mis-adventures of my life. Thank you for staying on the ride, and for you newcomers to the inside of my mental mania, I will do my best to make sure the trip is both entertaining and educational.
Life In Fast Forward: The Blog is still a bit of a work in progress. Keep checking in for new posts and site updates.
About Blog
This blog supports some of the thoughts and interjections from the folks at Fast Forward Business Properties. Our ideas, things we test, and a few random thoughts will show up here.
Name: J. Cleveland Payne
Home: Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
About Me: News is my profession, so it only fits that I am a news junkie. I'm a radio show/segment producer for a news/talk radio station in Little Rock, Arkansas.
