As companies grow and managers build their organizations they frequently talk about “weeding out” low performing employees—Jack Welch was a ninja weeder.
If that thought has crossed your mind you might take a moment to think about James Russell Lowell’s comment, “A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.”
As with weeds, there are better ways to look at under-performing employees.
95% of the time it’s management failures that create weeds and those failures run the gamut from benign neglect to malicious abuse and everything in-between.
Weeds can come from outside your company, inter-departmental transfers and even from peers in your own backyard.
What is amazing is how quickly a weed will change with a little TLC.
“Weeds can grow quickly and flower early, producing vast numbers of genetically diverse seed.”
People grow quickly, too, and often produce innovative ideas just because someone listened instead of shutting them down.
And while trust that your attitude won’t change takes longer to build, the productivity benefits happen fairly rapidly.
So before you even think about weeding look in the mirror and be sure that the person looking back is a gardener and not a weed producer.
At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools…
Kids are smart and many of them find it easy to con the family doctor in to writing a prescription, which turns them into entrepreneurs as they keep some and sell the rest to their schoolmates.
How will these kids perform when cramming isn’t an option and success depends on more than correct answers on a test?
How will these kids build sustainable, long-term careers, let alone companies?
How will they raise their children?
What will their effect be on America’s ability to compete globally?
Obviously I’m running a bit later than my normal posting time, but that’s the way it goes on summer weekends.
I looked at many Father’s Day quotes and chose these by Martin Sheen. Any entertainer, who stays married to the same one for more than 50 years, beats alcoholism and raises four sons, Charlie Sheen, and Emilio, Ramon and Renee Estevez, also in entertainment, probably has something worth hearing.
“Obviously, be aware that your actions will speak louder and last longer than your words. A child absorbs through osmosis what the parents are feeling and what they do, far more than what they say.”
“If you have an honest relationship with a child, that is the greatest gift. Lead an honest life and be free.”
“Give them time. Time is really all we have.”
With adult children, “you have to be there for them. You have to support them and make sure they know that they are still loved and cherished and you’re still in their lives and you’re there for them.”
“We never get over our fathers, and we’re not required to. For good or ill, we’re stuck with these guys.”
“The most important thing is that regret is useless and faith is necessary and love is everything.”
You may have noticed that the June Leadership Development Carnival was missing from the first Monday this month. It happened because this month’s host published it the second Monday instead of the first Sunday as usual. The delay, however, had absolutely no impact on the extraordinary quality of information shared on it. Enjoy!
Those of you concerned with strategy, either because you set it or are just interested in how it works, will find McKinsey’s approach to crowdsourcing strategy an intriguing idea. (Free registration required.)
…“making the vision meaningful to employees at a personal level” and “soliciting employee involvement in setting the company’s direction.” If that’s right, it suggests that making more employees part of the strategy process should be a powerful means of aligning them more closely with the company’s overall direction.
Finally, cyberbullying is rarely a laughing matter even leading to suicide. But sometimes even bad stuff can be fought through a combination or creativity and laughter.
The comedian Isabel Fay and fellow artists just posted a YouTube video featuring a song that ridicules online bullies who have targeted them. (…)“Love ya,” Ms. Fay says. “Keep on trollin’!”
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Last year I reminded entrepreneurs that, like Roman generals, they weren’t gods.
But what about kings?
In an excellent article in U~T San Diego, Neil Senturia and Barbara Bry, serial entrepreneurs who invest in early-stage technology companies, explain why they ask anyone presenting to them whether they want to be rich or be king—those who want to be king are politely shown the door.
The concern is valid, since few founders are capable of scaling their company and that desire to control has a bad impact on the bottom line.
“Founders who kept control of both the CEO position and the board of directors held equity stakes that were only 52 percent as valuable as those held by founders who had given up both the CEO position and control of the board.” —The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman, HBS
Not to mention its effect on talent.
Being king undercuts the ability to recruit and keep good people making it impossible to build a world-class team.
People don’t believe authoritarian visions are trustworthy.
Option Sanity™ is not fit for a king. Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation system. It’s so easy a CEO can do it.
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Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.
How much has really changed for entrepreneurial women in the last 50 years?
Not as much as you might think or as much as meritocracy hype might lead you to believe.
In the actual world of advertising in 1966, when the current season [of Mad Men] began, the most talked-about figure on Madison Avenue was the trim and determined Mary Wells, who hopscotched over the era’s endemic prejudices to develop Wells Rich Greene, the iconic agency she would run for more than two decades.
One reason stories like Mary Wells are so startling is that there are so few of them.
Yet even these successful women entrepreneurs are disappointing when you consider that most are in fashion, cosmetics/beauty products, advertising, retail, media, etc.
Although funding a tech company is almost as difficult for women as it always has been they are having more luck getting web startups funded—but it’s still an uphill battle.
Would you expect anything different when high profile experts in the entrepreneurial community are still making stupid comments more suited to the 1950s.
One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. [emphasis added] But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon…Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with. –Paul Graham, prominent investor and co-founder of Y Combinator
Another potential backer invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes.
(And I doubt that he looked like a Chippendale.:)
The point of all this is that women aren’t going to slink back to the kitchen anytime soon.
They will keep overcoming obstacles to have babies.
Some of which will grow up to be IPOs, while others will be entrepreneurs.
(If you are hung up regarding women entrepreneurs next week’s post will show you why your attitude is sure to hang you out to dry.)
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FYI
The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) is conducting a survey that looks at social media regulation within organizations, such as how companies are embracing new platforms as a productivity tool as well as restricting access – or even asking for Facebook passwords.
Participants completing this survey will receive a free copy of the preliminary results, which will be sent to you once all responses are collected and analyzed. Privacy is important to us; your responses will be combined with others, and your personal information will remain confidential.
SUBMIT YOUR STORY Be the Thursday feature – Entrepreneurs: [your company name] Share the story of your startup today. Send it along with your contact information and I’ll be in touch. Questions? Email or call me at 360.335.8054 Pacific Time.
Over the last seven years of writing MAPping Company Success I’ve suggested limiting, and occasionally ranted about, the current 24/7 work style and how our over-connectedness is destroying creativity and innovation along with families and personal health (most recently here and here).
“Is our obsession with technology creating new kinds of potential hazards in the workplace? Is there something wrong with the way we work? What can we do about it? What do you think?”
As good as Heskett is at posing questions that make you think, the greatest value often comes from the reader comments.
Here are excerpts from two I found particularly cogent,
Cell phones, smart phones and any other electronic device that tethers us to the world are the new adult “binkies”. They are the new security trinkets that help people feel better about themselves. All the phobias and insecurities, the feeling of being needed or important, and the sense of belonging that come about from healthy relationships are filled by devices. –Phil Clark, Clark & Associates
This new type of work life disturbs me in two ways. First, it is destroying the art of pondering.
Great advances come from great thoughts, and great thoughts need pondering time. (…) …eureka moments come most frequently when you put aside work and let your mind rest in pleasurable diversions. –Gerald Nanninga, Principal Consultant, Planninga from Nanninga
Many more comments, stories and analysis will be added before Heskett closes the forum.
It will be well worth your while to make time to follow the discussion.
If you choose to participate, please post your comment here, also.
A few years ago I wrote about the value of learning to insult with class, instead of crass.
A few weeks ago I read a post that reminded me how much language reflects company culture.
But I found myself in the middle of a conversation about how a class of vendors would “rape” the company being discussed. There were 10 men in the room and me, and the word kept getting repeated, with intensity, from person to person as the discussion grew.
Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain, found herself “distressed and very uncomfortable.”
That reaction from a woman weaned on blue language and sexual harassment a la the semiconductor industry—not an environment conducive to shrinking violets or sensitivity—says volumes for the effect of language in the workplace.
Think about it.
Can you imagine Tony Hsieh, who created a culture that produced what is arguably the best customer service in the world and now teaches others how to replicate it, use violent language, whether raping a company or killing the competition, to get his point across?
Yet he succeeds admirably.
People with poor verbal communication skills often resort to four-letter words either from ignorance or laziness.
I’m not on Facebook, but Option Sanity™ is, so if I am forced to sign into Facebook to comment I sign in using the Option Sanity login. I rarely do it, because I have no trust in how Facebook might use it.
Turns out my distrust was prescient.
Typically, endorsements are a paid deal, i.e., company X pays whomever for saying publicly that they use or like the product.
Social networks like Facebook provided a way for people to tell their friends about their preferences by tweeting, sharing or liking.
Facebook is constantly looking for ways to increase revenue and they found it in millions of ‘likes’ and shared links.
Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of … personal lubricant. … he posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.” Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.
Of course, algorithms have no sense of humor, nor can they tell the difference between sarcasm or irony and simple statement.
I sent the article to a friend with a biting wit who posts hysterically funny comments about political candidates and other subjects—or he used to. I sent him the article and he said he’s going back to sending them by email, “I’ll be damned if I take a chance on Facebook algorithms twisting my comments into an endorsement.”
It [Facebook] matched its users political affiliations with where their physical locations. The map went far beyond the red state versus blue state divide, with far more fine grained information about where Facebook users checked in in various parts of the country.
Twitter has analyzed usage to figure out when users sleep, allowing it to maximize its advertising.
All this intelligence is potentially lucrative for a global communications business like Twitter. It can inform when to serve up advertisements on the site and potentially for what kinds of products. It also produces very cool graphs and charts.
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And while we’re on the subject of Facebook, don’t expect any help if your account is hijacked unless you go to the media—they seem to believe you would rather fix it yourself.
Fred Wolens, a spokesman for Facebook said that Facebook believes that its users prefer “self-remediation” — basically, online solutions they find without help — to dealing with Facebook employees.
But does Samuel Reed, the guy who was hacked, agree?
“Facebook makes its money from my personal information and the personal information of millions of other people,” he said. That creates an obligation, he went on. “My big thing is this — what kind of corporate culture does Facebook want to convey?”
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
As companies grow and managers build their organizations they frequently talk about “weeding out” low performing employees—Jack Welch was a ninja weeder.
Note that the following questions refer to high achievers and not the educationally disenfranchised.
Obviously I’m running a bit later than my normal posting time, but that’s the way it goes on summer weekends.
A bit of this and that again today.
Last year I reminded entrepreneurs that, like Roman generals, they weren’t gods.
How much has really changed for entrepreneurial women in the last 50 years?
Over the last seven years of writing MAPping Company Success I’ve suggested limiting, and occasionally ranted about, the current 24/7 work style and how our over-connectedness is destroying creativity and innovation along with families and personal health (most recently 
A few years ago I wrote about the value of learning to 
I’m not on Facebook, but Option Sanity™ is, so if I am forced to sign into Facebook to comment I sign in using the Option Sanity login. I rarely do it, because I have no trust in how Facebook might use it.
