Passion, People and Principles
post # 149 — August 3, 2006 — a Careers, Managing post
There’s a fascinating (and possibly very important) study conducted by Nancy Rothbard (a Wharton professor) and Steffanie Wilk (an Ohio State professor) on call-center employees. It’s called Waking Up on the Wrong Side of the Desk: The Effect of Mood on Work Performance.
They report that the mood you bring with you to work has a stronger effect on work performance than mood changes caused by events in the workplace.
Think about that – if you come to work already in an optimistic or upbeat mood (because of things that have nothing to do with work), you are more likely to be productive, efficient and do better quality work.
This matches my life – if I start out right, I get a huge amount done; but if I start out grumpy I almost never turn it around. The start-of-day mood is disproportionately influential.
It also matches a phenomenon I wrote about 21 years ago in an article called The Psychology of Waiting Lines, where I offered a lesson learned by every waiter and waitress: – Its hard to play catch-up ball. If the customers sit down happy in a restaurant (or diner) it’s not too hard to keep them happy, but if they sit down disgruntled, there’s almost nothing you can do to please them – they are loaded for bear!
There are lessons here for self-management, and also for companies or managers trying to help employees become productive. As the authors point out, people rarely receive training from their employers in the problems they have in their personal lives, yet the moods they develop as a result of these problems may be (may be? – ARE!) a major determinant of employee performance.
So what does THAT say a manager has to be good at? Helping employees deal with personal problems, so that they come to work in a positive frame of mind?
There’s no escaping the fact that the pragmatic conclusion is yes – even though many of us would love to believe it’s not our place to get involved in employees’ personal problems. Ignore this at your peril!
And what about us as individuals? Should each of us develop “start of the day” devices (uniquely tailored for what works for us as individuals) to start the day off right? Some might go for a run, some might meditate, some might just play the following Bee Gees song sequence: “In the Morning” “Words” “Melody Fair.” “Islands in the Stream (Kenny and Dolly version)”( I said it had to be individual, right?)
Seriously, there are two questions for you to respond to: Do you have a personal device or approach to set up the day, and (b) what do you think managers can/ should do to help employees / team-members do so?
post # 148 — August 2, 2006 — a Careers, Managing post
Rachel Beanland (a PR practitioner from Amherst, Massachusetts) has just written a fascinating article called “Ten things you didn’t know about the grad you just hired “.
Here are her 10 lessons:
1. The grad you just hired didn’t have a hard time finding a job.
2. They know they’re underpaid, and they won’t put up with it longer than they have to.
3. It’s not taking them long to grow bored.
4. Even when they’re happy, they’re looking for another job.
5. Their bosses aren’t their mentors.
6. Getting thrown into the work force is turning them into experienced pros before their time.
7. Some don’t feel their universities prepared them for … (insert profession or industry name here)
8. They’re looking to find a balance between work and their personal lives.
9. Many of them would love to become independent practitioners or start their own firms one day.
10. They think they’ll stay in the (insert name) profession, but not necessarily in (the place they started.)
As Rachel writes when she quotes some of the 20-something’s she talked to: “If you’re not taking notes, there’s a great likelihood you’ll read some of these comments again anyway – in letters of resignation as up-and-coming talent goes on to bigger and better jobs.”
post # 147 — August 1, 2006 — a General post
It’s time to thank the community for participating. For the month of July, here are those who joined our discussions. They have my appreciation, gratitude, and thanks. I don’t know who to thank more — those who joined in for the first time, or those who have been loyal, frequent participants for some time. Obviously, it’s both equally!
Now, who is going to design the logo for the “club badge” that we can all wear? What should the T-shirt say?
commentors
Adnan, Alberen, Hugh Alley, Steve Arpano, Lora Banks, Chris Barrow, Rich Berger, Kent M. Blumberg, Eric Boehme, Bonnie, Leo J Bottary, Breakingranks, Duncan Bucknell, James Bullock, Tim Burrows, Shawn Callahan, Anita Campbell, Sebastian Carey, John Carroll, James Cherkoff, Clarke Ching, Eric Christiansen, Dan Crites, D, DUST!N, Jennifer Davis, Krishna De, John Dillard, Eric, Steve Farber, Brad Farris, Charlie Garrard, David Giacalone, Mark Gould, Charles H. Green, Dennis Howlett, Jaylpea, Jennifer, Jon, David Koopmans, Peter Kua, Ed Lee, Bruce Lewin, Tim MMF, MOHAN KRISHNAN, Bruce MacEwen, Peter Macmillan, Steve Matthews, Lex McCafferty, Patrick J. McKenna, Ann Michael, Matt Moore, Justin Patten, Bill Peper, Tim Percival, Bill Perry, Peter, RJON@HowToMakeItRain.com, Jeff Risley, Steve Rucinski, Roman Rytov, Brent Schlenker, Sebastian, Carl Singer, Starbucker, David Tebbutt, Fiona Torrance, Coert Visser, Curt Wehrley, Fred Wiersma
trackbacks
AccMan Pro (also: here, here), Adam Smith, Esq., Adventure of Strategy (also: here), Antitrust Review, Biz Growth News, Blog Carnival, Blogtrepreneur, Bryan C. Fleming, Burrows, Client Service – Leo Bottary, Coolz0r – Marketing Thoughts, Creating A Better Life, Direct Response Works, Fat Pitch Financials (also: here), Financial Freedom Library, Golden Practices (also: here), Law Firm Business Development, Law.com Blog Network, Legal Sanity, Marketing Babylon, Marketing Profs Daily Blog Fix, Matt Inglot’s Thoughts on Entrepreneurship, Money Thinking, morepartnerincome, musings from strategic leverage partners, Names @ Work, Natalie Solent, Reforming Project Management, Roman’s miles, Seeds of Growth, Small Business CEO, Success Connections, The Agonist (also: here, here), The Bell Curve Scar, the blogging boss, The Business of America is Business (also: here, here), The Coach Approach, The Expertise Marketplace, The Marcus Perspective, Tim Worstall, What’s on Mike’s Mind, Women@Sun
post # 146 — July 31, 2006 — a General, Strategy post
This week’s podcast episode, entitled Practice What You Preach, explores just what it is that the most successful businesses do to achieve doubled margins and doubled growth rates – appoint managers who know how to excite, enthuse and energize their people.
The podcast includes a discussion of statistical findings which yield:
- 9 Characteristics where Successful Businesses most outperform others
- 9 Most Important Factors for predicting financial performance
You can listen to this week’s seminar with the player shown just above this paragraph or download this episode. You can also subscribe to the podcast through my new Business Masterclass podcast page, or with iTunes, Yahoo! Podcasts or Podcast Alley .
Practice What You Preach
Regular readers will have already realized that the Practice What You Preach podcast is based on my 2001 book of the same name. In the book I present the results of a study of the factors that drive financial success. Surveying 139 offices of 29 firms in 15 countries in many different lines of business, I asked a simple question: are employee attitudes correlated with financial success? The answer, as the book shows, is an unequivocal “yes!”
The podcast also draws from ideas I discuss in these 3 articles:
and these 3 previous conversations on my blog:
I’d really love to get some reactions to the podcast episode. Did you like it? Did the findings of my study match your experience?
post # 145 — July 30, 2006 — a Managing, Strategy post
I keep hearing from large, complex firms something like this:
“We have several overall departments in our firm, each with a number of product/service/discipline teams. We also have industry groups dedicated to developing a better knowledge of (and marketing to) specific industries. Recently, we added ‘client teams’ targeted at increasing the level of service we provide to our best clients. And all of these groupings exist in (most, not all) of our many geographic locations.
With all this complexity (discipline, industry, key account, local office or region) a key player could (and does) spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings around here. There has got to be a better way to organize our firm!”
I don’t have all the answers to this complex problem, but here are some rules I would apply in trying to solve it:
Rule 1: Use different levels of organization for different things: lots of little teams for client-level relationships, one large central group for administrative services; it doesn’t all have to be (in fact, can’t be) one clean organization. As long as everybody at any given time (say in a year) knows which team they are on and what their obligations to the team are, you can have teams of many different types and sizes.
Rule 2: Some forms of organization are better than others: Most successful global firms are now organized with the following levels of importance. Most important is the target client industry (or ‘vertical’ as people seem to insist we call it nowadays). Before anything else, most people’s primary affiliation is with an industry team (or two).
Next comes, any specifically targeted client team. Third (now a lot less important) is to organize by produce / service or discipline (i.e. your specific technical specialty.) Firms need to have highly focused an skilled technical people, but few, in most professions and industries, are still organized that way.
Finally, (and this is a huge revolution from the past) geography is the least important band powerful dimension of the complex matrix. Organize (and market) by client or client sector, not by discipline or geography
Rule 3: It’s always better to get people feeling like they are (a) volunteers -self-selected to (b) small (c) mission-oriented teams. Rather than being “assigned to large departments.” (see my blog post from last Wednesday on this
Rule 4. Don’t consume the scarce time of valuable people by assuming that ‘key players’ should manage or be involved in everything – ask where their highest and best use really is. Get key players willing to let other people decide some things even when they’re not there. (This is easier of the firm members share an ideology, impossible if they don’t actually trust each other!)
Rule 5:. Apply all the well-known lessons of meeting management. For example, never have a meeting without a goal, not just an agenda.
Rule 6: Shut down all committees – assign responsibility for a task to an individual, charged with the responsibility of consulting, coaching and getting it done.
Rule 7: Adopt modern meeting techniques (everybody has to stand – no seats)
Rule 8: Use as much use as possible of modern technology tools: internal blogs, wikis and ‘jams’ to get collaboration and participation around issue, without having to meet
Rule 9: Make sure every team leaders’ mandate, objective and accountability is agreed to up-front, and that team leaders receive training in how to be effective coaches.
Rule 10: Pete Friedes’ Rule. (Pete Friedes was CEO of Hewitt associates.)
One practice I had was to remind all those who reported to me that part of their role was to have my role in relation to their group. One way was to say that they should wear a CEO hat in managing their group. That change in perspective is significant. They were not to just be an advocate for their group or their people. They had to have a “whole entity” view. If one or two managers didn’t exhibit that approach and tried to gain advantages by doing things that didn’t serve the whole, I could gently remind them that part of their job was to have a CEO view of their part of the business.
(Peter’s a gentleman, but implicit in his remarks are the implication that if the various group leaders didn’t take that view, they might be asked to play a different role in the firm.)
Rule: 11: Remember, even if you have an ideal structure, there will always be problems with cross-boundary, coordinated behaviors. Beyond structure, you need to examine whether you have the right processes in place, not only better structures. You don’t get people to collaborate better by changes the boxes they’re in
And, finally,
Rule 12: Never forget that it’s always about personalities: getting the right individual people in key managerial roles is the essential lubricant in all of this.
Brendan Gaynor, a trainer based in Ireland, wrote in to agree with my article Why (Most) Training is Useless . He said:
I totally agree with the content of this article. However if we as trainers insisted on only proceeding with courses where the appropriate senior commitment was given we would find ourselves a lot poorer and very shortly out of a job.
I was genuinely impressed by the candid comments. It’s refreshing to know that someone in the business does have the courage of his convictions and insists on delivering only effective training. Well done and keep up the good work. It’s good to hear that somebody out there is baulking at the wastage.
And I am. If a client comes to me asking for a pill, I’m going to ask to discuss the symptoms, the ailment and the best means of recovery before I agree to dispense the pill. And, yes, that often means that (some) clients walk away and go to the person who’ll provide the pill.
I have a hard time selling colored water and patent medicines, even if my clients have faith in the efficacy of those things. I may not know completely how to cure them, but I don’t want to treat them with things that we know don’t work. When you’re younger and less established, it’s tempting to just do what the client asks for. I’ve reached the stage of my life when I want to help my clients more than that.
Many of us need to address this issue in our work lives. Brendan is telling nothing but the truth (and he speaks for a lot of people) when he points out that if we refuse to participate in meaninglessness things (or fight to make them otherwise) we would likely be poorer or out of a job.
But how cynical can we allow ourselves to get? How much are we continuing to participate in things that we (ourselves) believe have no impact, that (in our own estimation) contribute no value and accomplish little?
I do have more of a shot at having the “courage of my convictions” than most people do. I’m 59, I have an established business and reputation, and I’m not at the “have to put kids through school and pay off the mortgage” stage of life.
But I hope I’m not alone in struggling to engage in meaningful things, even if it means I lose work (and I do.) I just want my work life to have meaning.
How about you?
My latest article ADVENTURES IN MODERN MARKETING is now up on my website.
The article contains both the lessons I have learned in my own online marketing, as well as the generous and helpful advice I was given by those who participated in my blog discussion of this topic in June .
Among the topics I discuss are:
- Helping busy people search
- Online tracking systems
- Nurturing the core community
- Helping people help you
- Gathering input
- Becoming a more valuable resource
- Word of mouth
- Website navigation
- Serving multiple constituencies
- Participating in the broader marketplace
- The role of traditional off-line marketing
I’m delighted to report that, since renewing and committing to my web presence in January 2006, site traffic and downloads have been growing and the results have been quite exciting. For example, by the end of July 2006 (i.e. in six months) visitors will have downloaded a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of resources from my site.
In plain, non-jargon English, that’s the equivalent of 42,000 videos , or 74,898 podcast episodes , or 6,168,094 PDF articles (although, realistically, it’s actually a mix of each of those).
I really appreciate the contribution of my blog readers and their generous advice to this success.
post # 142 — July 26, 2006 — a General, Managing post
There’s a couple of new interviews with me on my website.
The first is from a magazine called BUSINESS MANAGEMENT US (Q3, 2006). Here’s an excerpt:
“The best way to form teams in a business is not to say: ‘you guys are in the same department, therefore you will cooperate with each other’, because giving orders like that is just not very effective in human terms.
“However, if you go to your people and say: ‘I’ve got the following six projects that need to be done superbly well in the next year, does anyone want to volunteer for any of them?’, then the fact that people all joined in to the same team and put themselves in voluntarily is much more likely to get them to want to get on with each other – they self-selected to be interested in similar things.
“The trick of it is to unbundle the larger purpose of the total department and turn it into short-term, temporary projects, asking for volunteers, and then at the end of it, when the project is done, you redesign the next set of challenges for the business.”
***
The second interview is called “60 seconds with David Maister.” Here’s a snippet of that:
Q: I believe you love listening to music. Who is your all-time favourite artist?
A: The Bee Gees. Totally unhip. In and out of fashion. Determined to keep trying. I can relate.
Whenever a superior, a customer or client gives you something to work on, you have their affairs, their reputation and their future in your hands. If you mess up, the embarrassment you will feel is nothing compared to the mess you will land them in. You are being trusted with someone else’s baby. Deserve it. Being good is important, being trusted is essential.
You might view a project as small; perhaps a fee at the lower end of what you are used to, or not as exciting as other projects. However, the project could be the largest and most important thing the individual at the client company has handled in his/her career.
It can be difficult to accept the “server” mentality. Dale Carnegie once wrote that “You’ll have more fun and success by helping other people achieve their goals than you will by focusing on your own goals.”
When I first read that, as a college student in England, I was shocked. It sounded like communism, or at a minimum, a self-sacrificing religious principle. However, as I progressed through the real world, I realized Carnegie was right. His principle is actually the vary core of exchange capitalism: I will give you what you want if you give me what I want.
To make this work, you must be sincere in trying to help the other party. It’s not just a bargaining process (“You give me this, and I’ll give you that, and then we’ll go our separate ways.”) Human beings don’t work like that. We look for relationships, even in minor transactions.
If I hire somebody to do something for me (clean my house, handle my divorce, do my taxes, diagnose and cure my ailments), I don’t want them to focus only on the bare minimum of fulfilling the contractual terms. If they do, I’m going to focus on paying them the bare minimum – and no-one’s going to be happy.
What I’m looking for is someone who wants to help me, and will deal with whatever arises. Such a person will get paid well, hired again, and promoted, and referred to others. If I hire you, never forget you’re there to serve me. If you’re not willing to do that, I don’t want you.
Another key attitude is commitment. Commitment is not numbers of hours you work, the sales you generate or the rates you charge. It means placing other people – the client and your colleagues – first in your professional life. Commitment means attention to details, not because you might get caught, but because you want to provide the best product or service available and you relish the opportunity to step up and take on responsibility.
It’s the paradox of professionalism: the more you put yourself first, the less people want to work with you and the less of life’s rewards you get. The more you focus on serving others, the more they want to be with you and give you what you want. People (bosses, colleagues, clients, subordinates) can spot immediately those who bring a truly professional attitude to work, and reward those who do.
post # 140 — July 24, 2006 — a General, Strategy post
Today I’ve added to my podcast page the second episode (Strategy and the Fat Smoker) of my new series on strategy.
That episode is based on the 2005 article of the same name, while the first episode in the series (How to Create a Strategy) dates back to a 1990 article I wrote. For me, part of the challenge and the fun of putting my podcast series together has been the chance to reorganize material from my five books and other articles into what I hope is an internally consistent sequence of thoughts and advice.
So, in addition to serving those who like to listen rather than read, the new podacst series also creates a new way, not previously available, of obtaining all my ideas on a related subject all in one package.
You can listen to this week’s seminar with the player shown just below this paragraph or you can download this episode or subscribe to the podcast through my new Business Masterclass podcast page. You can also subscribe with iTunes or Podcast Alley.
Unlike the two previous podcast series (on Marketing and Managing) which were designed to help individuals in their individual role, this latest series is about the challenges of guiding an organization. Over the course of the series, I’ll talk about values, collaboration, geographical expansion, diversification, mergers and adaptability (not necessarily in that order, though).
Many people have been kind enough to suggest that my ideas apply beyond the boundaries of the professional sectors on which I previously focused, so in this series I have tried to modify my language to be as inclusive as possible.
For those of you who have already experienced my podcasts, you’ll notice that I have made some changes to my podcast page to try and enhance the experience. For each episode in the seminar series, there are now “notes for the episode” in which I’ll try and include things like lists I go through, so that you won’t have to take notes furiously. There are also links to other materials on my site (articles, blogs, videos) that are related to each specific episode.
For the series as a whole, there is a 39-page set of handouts downloadable here. (Actually, you don’t need to sign up for the podcast series to download the seminar handouts. And, if you go to that same link, you’ll see free downloadable seminar handouts on Managing, Client Relations and Careers as well!)
I have also redesigned the podcast page to allow you to provide feeback by writing reviews on iTunes, Yahoo, and vote for the podcast on Podcast Alley. I appreciate your support and help in spreading the word about what you think might be helpful to others (if you think that.)
Finally, I hope I can beg your forbearance and indulgence (I didn’t go to college for nothing!) if any glitches occur in implementing all these changes.
