“Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.” –Henry James (The Ambassadors)
Want to boost productivity? Ramp up innovation? Reduce turnover? Attract better candidates?
Live all you can.
As true as this is for life in general, it is even truer for the sub-sector called work-life and you should make a point of embedding the wisdom in your company/group’s DNA.
For your people, living all you can at work means
having multiple opportunities to expand on all fronts;
taking on unfamiliar roles;
doing things outside their comfort zone; and
understanding the “big picture” and how their efforts fit, affect and support it.
For you, living all you can at work means
providing the above opportunities to everyone;
encouraging them to go for it even when they resist; and
providing the training, coaching and mentorship needed for them to expand successfully.
Doing so is the most critical part of your job description and all but guarantees you’ll accomplish the rest of it.
Live all you can—a worthy mantra as long as you’re willing to back it up with your own actions.
Much has been written about Gen Y, AKA, Millennials, in the workforce—the difficulty hiring them, the problems managing them and the much greater problems of retaining them.
“When they get to the workplace, they have a sense of entitlement, a need for validation, difficulty in really discerning what to do because their whole lives were managed,” –Christine Hassler, Gen Y career expert and consultant.
Not only managing them, but also fighting their fights—even at the office.
There are eighty million Gen Y, but not all of them fit this description; millions of them are ‘aMillennials‘.
The funny thing (as I’ve said before) is that when you look at a list of what turns Gen Y off you’ll find the same traits that turn off 90+% of the workforce.
Inflexibility.
Judgmental attitudes.
Close-mindedness.
Unwillingness to listen to and respect Gen Y’s opinions, ideas and views.
Intimidation.
Yuk! Nobody wants to work for someone like that; the difference is that Gen Y may less patient and quicker to leave—at least until they have a mortgage and kids to consider.
Ryan Healy, co-founder and COO of Brazen Careerist, attributes companies’ success to culture.
“The companies that are doing it well and right know that it’s really about the culture you create.”
Tony Hsieh is well known for creating a culture that both attracts and retains and it’s not just for Millennials.
Yesterday I had the displeasure of enduring multiple power outages for about 90 minutes. When the power finally stabilized and I turned on my computer nothing happened.
Nothing I tried worked, so today I dragged out a seven year old laptop and spent the time between phone calls getting enough running to be able to work—more or less. (don’t you just love technology?)
However, one of the calls was from a founder whose last three hires didn’t work out. They all had great skills, but none worked well with the team. All three fell in the category of “first outsider,” AKA, cold hire, in other words not friends or referrals.
He asked if there was a way to ensure a good fit with the current team.
I’ve been asked this a lot lately, so I think it is once again time to share the following post with you.
Don’t Hire Turkeys!
Use Your Culture as an Attraction, Screening and Retention Tool to Turkey-Proof Your Company.
All companies have a culture composed of its core values and beliefs, essentially corporate MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and that culture is why people join the company and why they leave if it changes.
Generally, people don’t like bureaucracy, politics, backstabbing, etc., but when business stress goes up, or business heats up, cultural focus is often overwhelmed by other priorities.
In startups, it’s easier to hire people who are culturally compatible, because the founders first hire all their friends, and then their friend’s friends.
After that, when new positions have to be filled the only people available are strangers.
So how do you hire strangers and not lose your culture?
Since your culture is a product of your people, hire only people with matching or synergistic attitudes. The trick is to have a turkey sieve that will automatically screen out most of the misfits and turn on the candidates with the right values and attitudes.
Here is how you do it.
Your sieve is an accurate description of your real culture.
It must be hard copy (write it out), fully publicized (everyone needs to know, understand, believe and talk about it), and, most important of all, it must be real.
Email it to every candidate before their interview and be sure that everyone talks about the culture during the interview and sells the company’s commitment to it.
Everybody interviewing needs to listen carefully to what the candidate is saying and not saying; don’t expect a candidate to openly admit to behaviors that don’t fit the company MAP, since she may be unaware of them, may assume that your culture is more talk than walk or consider it something that won’t apply to her.
Red flags must be followed up, not ignored because of skills or charm.
Consider the various environments in which she’s worked; find out if she agreed with how things were done, and, more importantly, how she would have done them if she had been in control.
Whether or not the candidate is a manager, you want to learn about her management MAP, approaches to managing, leadership and work function methods.
Probing people to understand what their responses, conscious as well as intuitive, are to a variety of situations reveals how they will act, react, and contribute to your company’s culture and its success.
Finally, it is up to the hiring manager to shield the candidate from external decision pressures, e.g., friends already employed by the company, headhunters, etc.
Above all, it is necessary to give all candidates a face-saving way to withdraw their candidacy and say no to the opportunity. If they don’t have a graceful way of exiting the interview process they may pursue, receive, and accept an offer, even though they know deep down it is not a good decision.
A bad match will do major damage to the company, people’s morale, and even the candidate, so a “no” is actually a good thing.
Remember, the goal is to keep your company culture consistent and flexible as you grow. From the time you start this process, you need to consciously identify what you have, decide what you want it to be, publicize it, and use it as a sieve to be sure that everyone who joins, fits.
Use your cultural sieve uniformly at all levels all the time. If someone sneaks through, which is bound to happen occasionally, admit the error quickly and give her the opportunity to change, but if she persists then she has to go.
For more help, download the CheatSheets in the right hand frame or give me a call at 360.335.8054.
Option Sanity™ is a great screening tool because it mirrors your culture
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation process. So easy a CEO can do it.
Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.
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.
Do metaphors fly free at your workplace? Do you find yourself using them in order to be heard?
According to Ceri Roderick, emeritus partner at business psychologists Pearn Kandola, while metaphors can be a kind of expressive shortcut, they can also have a detrimental effect.
“The language you use can affect your corporate culture.” Thus, if you spend long enough talking about “cutting the competition off at knees”, he says you are going to have a workplace where a kind of Nietzschean ethic rules and the weak are meat for bullies.”
I admit to using metaphors, although far less than I did a few decades ago. I find some are good ways to achieve focus, such as “the elephant in the room;” I may be guilty of the occasional 500 pound canary, but not of 800 pound gorillas. (Science writer Richard Conniff notes that “gorillas are vegetarians, not predators and the average alpha male spends most of his time passing gas, picking his nose and yawning; not the image a hard-charging executive wants to present to the public,” but actually a valid description of many executives.)
And while I know good culture fosters innovation, thinking outside the box has little to do with it, since it’s not possible.
The biggest problem with metaphors is that they are boring and limit people’s ability to effectively communicate.
If you don’t believe me play the metaphor game at your next meeting as follows:
choose a scorekeeper;
explain that the point of the game is to NOT use any metaphors;
attendees listen for metaphors and call the speaker on them by shouting ‘metaphor’;
the person who used the metaphor then restates their comment/point;
using a metaphor scores one point;
the person with the lowest score wins and
gets the prize (candy bar, lunch coupon, etc.)
It’s surprising how difficult it is for many people to discuss anything sans metaphors.
Jamie Jauncey, a business language trainer and author, says, “Business is ultimately about people and connecting and relationships. It should be using the real language of human exchange, not some Orwellian bizpeak.”
This is true whether you are in sales, engineering, finance or whatever. You and your people need to connect with each other and with ‘them’, wherever and whomever ‘them’ may be.
Are you one of the thousands of managers who spend your days trying to increase productivity and improve your company’s bottom line and you nights worrying that you aren’t doing it fast enough—if at all?
Does your company hire experts to teach motivation and employee engagement techniques?
Do you twist in the wind trying to implement complex, sometimes costly, approaches?
Why?
Why complex when some of the smartest CEOs, advisors and academics are all saying the same thing?
Simply put, in the words of Tony Hsieh, if your employees are happy they will make your customers happy; if your customers are happy they’ll spend more; if they spend more your bottom line will grow.
Saturday I gave you multiple links showing just how simple and inexpensive engaging your people can be—but not everybody reads Saturday.
So, instead of writing yet another post on engagement, I thought provide a video from Guy Kawasaki, who talks about how to “enchant” your employees.
His advice is simple and doable, although it does require the right MAP.
The only cost may be to your ego, since in order to implement it you need to change.
Tony Hsieh Has been beating the drum that happy employees provide the best customer experience and help assure success and sharing his wisdom on how to do it.
The other question I keep getting asked is how do you do it when you
aren’t the CEO or even a senior manager;
don’t have the budget for great perks; or
aren’t the touchy-feely rah-rah type (direct quote).
The short answer is in five words, you take time to care.
Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually.
$300 billion is a number that should get anyone’s attention.
The engagement issue is relatively simple and definitely cheap to solve.
The problem is that, as usual, employees and managers aren’t on the same page.
The research shows that for employees “the single most important [event] — by far — is simply making progress in meaningful work.”
Managers are another story.
“When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.”
What constitutes supporting progress isn’t rocket science, either.
Autonomy, meaning no micromanagement;
sufficient resources, meaning valid scheduling and enough of whatever to get the job done without having to beg or being left to fail without them; and
learning from problems, meaning understanding the why and how, not just the what.
If you find any of the three difficult to provide you need to look in the mirror.
The problem isn’t about having time to support progress; the problem is that your MAP doesn’t support the concept.
“Thinking about how I can empower my employees to be a part of the growth and innovation of the company.”
While employee empowerment is acknowledged as of key importance, it is an elusive goal for many CEOs, executives and managers. What makes Hsieh different?
Security.
Hsieh is comfortable in his own skin; secure in his own competency and limitations, so he doesn’t need to be the font from which all else flows.
As he points out, one good idea a day from him won’t come close to matching one good idea a year from each employee and not just the highly visible ones.
Some of the best ideas come from places a CEO would never have thought of.”
But employee empowerment often hits a positional brick wall that starts with the CEO and filters down through the ranks of the company’s positional leaders.
There are thousands of executives and managers who are insecure and the level of their insecurity defines to whom they will listen.
Most CEO’s who look at their corporate culture from the top-down are really preventing their company to grow faster, better, and more profitably.
And Just as true for other positional leaders as it is for the CEO.
What is most ironic is that by empowering employees, listening to everyone, adopting the good ideas without prejudice and publicly acknowledging their source does as much to enhance you as it does to push your group/company to greater success.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Tony, a founder, called and asked why I kept harping on culture instead of providing real help to startups. He said that culture was all very well, but there was enormous pressure to get the product out, meet with investors and hire people, especially considering the high rate of churn he sees.
In short, Tony believes that culture is a rich CEO’s game; not something a hard-charging founder should be wasting his time on.
I sent him a link to David Hornik, a guy at August Capital who invests for a living, who had this to say in a post on his blog that I saw at Business Insider.
…why am I so high on company culture as an investor in startups? It is because culture matters. Companies with a strong culture inevitably find it easier to recruit like-minded employees. What’s more, a strong culture dramatically decreases attrition. Companies with a shared purpose are more efficient — they work well together in pursuit of a common goal. Employees can appreciate their company’s priorities and focus on the stuff that matters. And, at the end of the day, fun and games matters. People would rather work at a company that they genuinely enjoy and believe in than one that lacks any real sense of purpose.
There are dozens of others I could send, but after our conversation I doubt they would impact him—Tony’s mind is made up.
What about yours?
Option Sanity™ IS culture
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process. It’s so easy a CEO can do it.
Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.
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.
It’s funny how things work. I received this email the same day I read about a solution.
Hi Miki, I have a small company and would like to add some fun for my people. They tell me they love the culture and there is very little turnover, so I tend to believe that I’m accomplishing. I read about the extra perks companies offer like foosball, ping pong, massages and other stuff, but there are neither dollars nor space. Do you have a suggestion for something I can add that is affordable and fun? –Jim
Here is my reply.
Hi Jim, I do have a suggestion. I think they are fairly new, will cost you less than $100 and batteries are the only ongoing cost. They are called airswimmers and there are many ways to incorporate them in your workplace. For example, controlling the remote can be used as a reward for exceptional customer service or closing a difficult sale. I’m sure your people can think of some great uses once you have them. If you do get them please let me know what they think and how you use them. –Miki
There are actually many inexpensive items that can lower stress and lighten the workday; you just have to look for them.
At first it’s easy to share your culture because startup founders hire their friends and friends of fiends, which usually means that everyone shares similar values.
But if you don’t think your culture through and then embed it deeply in your company’s soul it won’t stick—to work culture must act like stain not paint.
Your work unless you are comfortable building your company based on someone else’s cultural vision or their interpretation of yours.
Culture is your present and your future; your edge to achieve success and its lack is the first step to failure.
Do you have time for culture?
Option Sanity™ is culture Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process. It’s so easy a CEO can do it.
Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.
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.
Want to boost productivity? Ramp up innovation? Reduce turnover? Attract better candidates?
Much has been written about Gen Y, AKA, Millennials, in the workforce—the difficulty hiring them, the problems managing them and the much greater problems of retaining them.
Yesterday I had the displeasure of enduring multiple power outages for about 90 minutes. When the power finally stabilized and I turned on my computer nothing happened.
Tony, a founder, called and asked why I kept harping on culture instead of providing real help to startups. He said that culture was all very well, but there was enormous pressure to get the product out, meet with investors and hire people, especially considering the high rate of churn he sees.
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