I recently worked with a client to revisit the earlier organization analysis we conducted using the Tipping Point Strategy Template that I developed from the article by the same name. We were able to confirm that some changes had taken place in the last several months. We were also able to reinforce the areas still needing work, particularly in Jumping the Cognitive Hurdle. We were also able to identify areas where new initiatives were necessary. Part of the work in the future will involve doing some Key Influencers and Stakeholders analysis to check for movement in the preferred direction of change. While William Bratton was in a command and control situation, this client is more in the demonstration/persuasion arena. I am convinced that working through the Tipping Point model is a very useful tool in managing change in difficult circumstances. Maybe Jean Luc Picard could “Make it So!” but it takes a lot more thought, work and effort to actually affect change in an organization, it is a much longer term proposition than most change consultants and managers are willing to admit!
Tipping Point Revisited
There has been some recent interest in the Tipping Point Strategy Template blog I wrote a few months ago. I think it is because William Bratton, the subject of the HBR article on which I based the template, has been in the news recently. He made some comments about a move to recruit him to the Metropolitan Police Force in the UK to help deal with the riots!
Posted in Managing Change
Leave a comment
Customer Service and WebAssist
I met with Greg Ortbach and his staff at WebAssist today. They designed my new website several months ago so we got together for a review of what is working and what needs to be improved, how to link social media into the website, etc.
Greg and his staffers, Aaron and Fabian were terrrific. We sat down, looked at the website and the suggestions just kept coming. We made some changes on the spot and more to come.
The point of this note is to say that customer service is not dead but is alive and well at WebAssist. Great working with you!
Posted in Managing Change
Leave a comment
Engaged Employees
We did an event yesterday on employee engagement strategies and it was very well received by participants. One participant said it was the best event of its kind that he had ever attended! It was a no-cost briefing breakfast event with Nothers and CSI as partners. Contact me by email and I will send a copy of the presentation for your information.
Executive Recruiting Strategies for 2010 – Attracting and Retaining Top Talent
The field of executive recruiting requires an understanding of the importance of the employment opportunities being filled. Indeed, finding the right leadership is essential to the health of a business or corporation, and without applying the proper strategy to an executive recruiting campaign—without attracting the right leaders, that is—an organization could face a wide range of management dilemmas in both short term and long term scenarios.
Understanding the Executive Recruiting Scenario
Today, the market is nothing less than fierce when it comes to recruiting the most talented applicants for top executive positions. That’s because good, competent senior leaders are scarce and as with any scarce commodity, the competition for talent is fierce.
Thus an ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants approach to recruiting is to almost guarantee failure. With general management turnover rates of 40% within two years, and to paraphrase Mae West, “A good manager is hard to find,” it pays big dividends to take a systematic and carefully crafted approach to attracting and retaining top talent.
Ensuring Successful Recruiting Campaign
One of the first rules in the application of effective executive recruiting strategies is simply this: be creative. While ingenuity may not have always been one of the top qualifications for a recruiter of executives, it is a definite priority today. Creative solutions oftentimes involve looking for executives within the very ranks of the company itself. After all, why not bring on board those who already know the ropes?
One creative approach to recruiting that is gaining fast is the use of LinkedIn, the business social networking phenomenon. Executive Recruiters regularly use LinkedIn to unearth candidates and, knowing this fact, more and more senior executives are profiling their skills, abilities, knowledge and experience online.
Winning Strategies
One of the foremost features of a winning recruitment strategy is found in the application of a creative methodology to the recruiting strategy. With leading companies in all industries fighting tooth and nail for the best talent, it takes a shrewd and precise approach when it comes to actually winning over the best applicants. The executive recruitment process can also involve a lot of looking in unusual places—such as the company itself or as mentioned earlier, through such other sources as social network sites like LinkedIn and most importantly, tapping into the inherent network of contacts that inevitably builds up in the entrepreneur’s personal network—for potential talent that can be fostered and then placed into management roles.
Recruiting Executives – Guidelines to Follow for Success
When considering a recruiting strategy to attract and retain talent, there is always the worry that the wrong person will be hired. What’s the worst that could happen? The person won’t work out, or he will upset everyone and all of the employees will quit. This is a scary thought and one is right to be scared. If employees are the soul of a company, managers are its backbone. Managers are the embodiment of the company. They are what employees, new hires, the owners and customers look to for guidance, expertise and competence.
With so much at stake, certainly there must be some guidelines to help choose the right manager for the position. There are five basic guidelines that will help you hire the right manager nine out of ten times:
1. Determine Job Competencies and Requirements: The first step in recruiting and retaining talent is the development of a profile of the position. The profile consists of the requirements of the position and the competencies requisite for success. Interviewing a cross-section of company owners, managers, advisors and other important persons will help draw together a clear picture of these requirements.
2. Determine fit to job competencies: Competencies are a combination of intellectual abilities, personality, skills, knowledge, and emotional intelligence. Competencies are what managers must have or develop to do the job. Make sure you measure the needed competencies with an independent and validated competency assessment.
3. Determine fit with manager, peers and employees: Retention research shows that 50 percent of employee turnover is caused by personality conflicts. Will the new manager be compatible with his/her manager? Can the new manager work with the management team to help grow the company as a whole and not just his/her department
Comparing personalities to spot key differences before the hire is made will jump start the new manager in his or her role more quickly and reduce turnover.
4. Determine fit with company values: Do the potential managers share your corporate values and ethics? If they do not, the company runs the risk of becoming the next corporate disaster. Create a values statement and assess candidates against it to find out if your applicants share your company’s values.
5. Spot management talent early: Begin a competency testing program today to spot potential managers after one year of employment. Succession planning is crucial to any organization. If you don’t have the management trainee pipeline full, scurrying to hire or promote a manager leads to costly mistakes.
Conclusion
A carefully developed executive recruitment strategy can yield dividends well into the future. Recruiting a senior officer such as a COO or Director of Manufacturing or a CFO for example, is just the first step in building a talent-filled work force. Assessing competencies at all management levels will uncover future managers. Professional development processes will ensure that these potential managers are ready for greater responsibility when the time arises. Retaining the talent you recruit is a key success strategy. Paying attention to building a strong work force is an essential management responsibility. The time to get started is now!
Managing Your Business in Turbulent Times – 2010
These are turbulent times in which we live and work. For most entrepreneurs, life in a recession isn’t a lot of fun. However, instead of pulling the blanket up to our chin, effective action can change the course of our business. These are ten things to do to keep your business growing and avoid the dramatic fall off in business that many companies are experiencing. We can differentiate ourselves from the rest of our competitors and some others as well if we do these things well.
- Use downturn as an opportunity to evaluate performance and plan for success. Think about what we are doing for clients. Which assignments are going well and which have to be re-evaluated. Think about adding value. Planning for success means driving your marketing effort.
- Expand the pond. Get a larger share of our customer’s wallet. For example, expand what we are doing for various existing clients. Review all clients for present and future opportunities. Make a plan to contact previous clients. Expand service offerings.
- Get out of the bunker. Make sure we consistently go out and meet customers and develop new ones. Target people that we have done business with or with whom we want to do business. This is primarily about marketing ourselves aggressively. To be very successful we have to get good at generating appointments, selling business. Add other elements of the way we go to market, e.g. announcements, press releases, small seminars, collateral advertising, etc.
- Be a hero to our customers. Build relationships and cement those we already have. Under promise and over deliver. Over service, contact, follow up, provide information, etc.
- Lower our B/E point. Review accounts and take them seriously. Manage cash flow upwards by more timely billing and expense recording.
- Focus on Nurturing New ideas. Have an idea conference. Elaborate on current services. Nurturing requires us to get the right people together, in the right social operating mechanism – a system of meetings, assessments, and communications that relentlessly conveys the values supporting the delicate business of bringing new ideas along.
- Keep up our investment in infotech. Manage the website better, get all our systems working perfectly. Create a good tech image. Print medium. This will accrue value to us.
- Overhaul our financial management. Do the proper work forecasting and prospecting. Keep the spreadsheet of Business Forecast up to date and use it. Make the Marketing process work for you.
- Keep track of early warning signals. Check with customers and get their reactions to the economy. Maybe employ someone to provide us with economic commentary. Use contacts to generate more contacts and more information on the marketplace.
- Keep Communicating. Develop a clear view of what we are building and keep on talking about what it is. We will all benefit from continued communication. Add communicating to our customers as part of the whole process.
Posted in Business Planning
Leave a comment
Social Media and Advertising
Recently I attended a seminar at WebAssist.ca on using social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube to advertise business or communicate with clients and colleagues. Today on LinkedIn there was a post for an UnMarketing event here in London, ON on November 23rd. Talk about going viral, I think that the tickets for the event will be sold out well before the deadline. Now, I just have to figure out how to use these social media tools in the consulting business! Any suggestions?
Using a Balanced Scorecard Strategic Planning Process
Balanced Scorecard Strategy for Not-for-Profits
What is “A Balanced Scorecard?”
Historically, organizations have placed a great deal of emphasis on financial measurements of long term success. However, according to Kaplan and Norton (1992) reliance on financial measures in a management system is insufficient. The Balanced Scorecard model measures financial performance but supplements these measures with intangible factors that drive future performance, factors such as customer relationships, Internal business processes and the skills and knowledge of the workforce, the information technology that supports the workforce and the organizational climate that encourages, innovation, problem-solving and improvement.
How Does a Balanced Scorecard Apply to a Not-For-Profit?
While the Balanced Scorecard approach to strategic planning has been pioneered in the private sector, it has also been used successfully in many not-for-profit organizations. In this sector, the financial perspective provides a constraint rather than an objective. While the not-for-profits watch their spending and manage to budget, their real focus is the achievement of their vision and mission as they represent the accountability of the not-for-profit to the society in which it operates.
The successful application of a Balanced Scorecard approach to strategic planning lies in creating a “living, breathing document” that pervades the entire organization and aligns the day-to-day activities of all units into one overall strategy. Thus, in developing a strategy for the organization, the Consumer perspective is as important as the Financial Perspective. Operating efficiencies, the ability to review internal processes to gain efficiencies without cutting expenses also rises in importance as does the importance of developing a motivated, prepared and satisfied workforce, the Learning component of the Balance Scorecard.
Why a Balanced Scorecard Strategy Interests A Not-for-Profit?
Many Not-for-Profit organizations have used an informal balanced scorecard approach to strategic planning in the past. However, more and more they are moving to formalize this approach as stakeholders are increasingly asking for outcome performance measures. A Balanced Scorecard is consistent with the demands of transformational agendas put forth by government ministries and funders.
As well, the Balanced Scorecard Strategy Map complements the Carver Model of Board Governance model in that the Carver Model requires Boards to focus on results through addressing fundamental values, mission and vision; and enable an outcome-driven organization and force the organization into forward thinking in addition to other results-based governance principles.
Not-for-Profit and Public Sector Organizations should study the Balanced Scorecard approach to strategy development and implementation as a way of moving a sterile strategy into the real world realm of the whole organization. Makes sense to me!
Exhibit 1: Not-for-Profit Balanced Scorecard Strategy Map
| Consumer Perspective: To achieve our vision/mission, how should we appear to our clients/consumers?Objectives/Measures/Targets/Initiatives |
| Financial Stability Perspective: To succeed financially, how should we appear to our stakeholders?Objectives/Measures/Targets/Initiatives |
| Operational Perspective: To satisfy our stakeholders and consumers/clients, what business processes must we excel at?Objectives/Measures/Targets/Initiatives |
| Learning and Growth: To achieve our vision/mission, how will we sustain our ability to change and improve?Objectives/Measures/Targets/Initiatives |
| Vision and Strategy form the anchor point for these four quadrants |
Posted in Strategic Planning
Leave a comment
Dealing with Difficult People
Lots of things have been said about dealing with difficult people but an advice column letter in today’s Globe and Mail struck a chord with me. The gist of the matter is that the difficult person was an excellent manipulator and that as long as people put up with the manipulative behaviour, it would continue. The answer is simple, develop some backbone and face into the person and deal directly with his or her behaviour. Too often we let disrespectful, mean-spirited and nasty people get away with it because we are afraid to confront them or they hold some kind of power over us. Well, the bad news is that the behaviour will continue as long as you let it. The good news is that confronting the difficult person, who will never be open to reasonable discussion or feedback, will actually stop them in their tracks, particularly if it is done in front of other people.
You do not have to be harsh, strident or angry, those are behaviours that the Manipulator loves to evoke. Instead, be straight forward, use “I” messages and stick with how that person’s behaviour affects you and is inappropriate. For example, when someone in a position of power over you makes a snide or nasty comment, you might respond by saying something like “I do not appreciate the way you speak to me.” “I would be happy to respond to your comments if you would rephrase them” It sounds namby-pamby but it actually works. Why does it work? Because the Manipulator doesn’t get satisfaction from “hookng” you into the kind of behaviour they are expecting, tears, anger, etc.
It may take awhile for the Manipulator to catch on to the fact that you won’t respond but when they do they will usually move on to another target.
My advice, pick your situation, develp some backbone and push back, “I’d like to talk to you but not this way!” is a good response. You might even try something like explaining to the person the things you like and appreciate about them and the things that you find bothersome. You can also suggest what you would like them to do more of and less of in their interaction with you. For lots more good insights, read Dealing With Difficult People by Roberta Cava, Key Porter Books, 2004. Good luck!
Posted in Managing People
Leave a comment
HR Trends from Canadian HR Reporter
The May edition of Canadian HR Reporter has some interesting trends. For example, Diversity is a popular option with Canadian companies. The top reasons for this interest are to include alternative talent pools (64%); have the workforce reflect customs (46%) and to address chronic skills shortages (32%). I suspect that the last two are in the end more important. It makes good business sense to recruit and build a workforce that reflects the communities in which companies do business. The big banks realized this years ago when they started to recruit staff in areas that were ethnic enclaves like Kensington in Toronto. Sometimes reflecting customs is a really good thing to do. I remember being invited to a hotdog and hamburger BBQ sponsored by one of my clients and watching in horror as over half the staff stood around, unable to eat the food because of their dietary customs! It was a major faux pas.
The othe major trend, recruiting to address serious skills shortages, will only increase as the Baby Boom generation reaches retirement age. The Canadian workforce is not producing enough skilled trades to satisfy demand so encourag your kids to consider opting for a skilled trade instead of a white collar job.