Back when I worked for other companies I was considered “difficult.”

When I was young I was fired from one job for not taking my 15 minute breaks twice a day and from another for being too honest with a customer.

I spent 12 years working for a manager who never understood that all I wanted was acknowledgment and/or appreciation—without having to ask for it.

“Good job;” “congratulations, hell of a deal;” “good to see you back, we missed you.”

I was one of the top producers in his office, but the only time he said anything was when I brought whatever to his attention.

As most anyone will tell you, positive feedback or compliments are worthless when you need to prompt the source for them.

Often small efforts yield large results. My boss wanted me to move to the next level, but gave me no reason to put out the effort—the money wasn’t enough, I wanted to matter.

I recently told this story to a manager with high turnover in his department. He responded that he didn’t have time to “babysit” and expected his people to act like adults.

I told him he was a fool.

Stock.xchng image credit: arte_ram

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Who do you want to hire?

The person who passionately wants to work for a startup or the person who passionately wants to work for your startup?

Think about it.

Who will contribute more?

• The person who always wanted to work in a startup; whose passion is engaged by the mere thought of working in the startup environment; or
• the person who craves the solution your startup proposes even if she never recognized the problem; whose passion is engaged specifically by the idea of contributing to that particular solution no matter where it is done.

Some experts will tell you that it is the drive to work in a startup—any startup—that is most important.

I disagree.

Just as the person who joins a company for money will leave for more money the person who joins because it’s a startup will leave for a sexier startup.

But the person who joins because of a deep, driving passion to be part of that specific solution will stay and fight the good fight long past the time that Hell freezes over.

Option Sanity™ engages the deeply driven.

Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation system.  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.

Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

Last December a post entitled Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best appeared in Talent Forbes and about a month later another contributor boiled the 10 reasons down to one (with 2 parts),

1) Create an organization where those who manage others are hired for their ability to manage well, supported to get even better at managing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.

2) Then be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization – not only in terms of financial goals, but in a more three-dimensional way. What’s your purpose; what do you aspire to bring to the world? What kind of a culture do you want to create in order to do that?  What will the organization look, feel and sound like if you’re embodying that mission and culture?  How will you measure success?  And then, once you’ve clarified your hoped-for future, consistently focus on keeping that vision top of mind and working together to achieve it.

Yesterday’s Ducks in a Row focus was Greg Smith and his resignation from Goldman Sachs. Greg resigned because he felt the culture had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer ethically tell candidates that it’s a great place to work—Goldman’s focus is squarely on maximizing their own profit and clients be damned. (The story is all over traditional and social media.)

At the end of his resignation Greg says,

Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

The bold is mine and that thought fits the “if you learn nothing else…” admonishment.

But I will go a step further—

You can’t attract great clients without great talent, so even if you make money in the short-term you will die in the long-term—bereft of both talent and clients.

Great culture attracts great talent; great talent attracts great clients; great clients spend great money—over and over and over.

Flickr image credit: Samuel Mann

This list is from a columnist at China Daily in response to reducing high turnover and improving retention.

Six essentials employees want in their jobs

1. A great boss
2. Trust and respect
3. Appreciation and recognition
4. Career progression
5. Corporate culture
6. Communication

The list doesn’t differ much from dozens of similar lists you’ve seen under the title of “What Millennials Want’ or descriptions over the decades of what most US workers want.

And I’m willing to bet the list applies to any workforce in any country on Earth or elsewhere in this or other galaxies.

These are universal desires of both educated and uneducated people; what changes is their ability to articulate them.

It’s a list that managers and management should take to heart, because it isn’t going away.

The six are constants that every manager had better understand and provide or be prepared to staff a revolving door.

Flickr image credit: Joe Shlabotnik

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.

Why should you care?

The how is nicely summed up in this article about new research from Harvard Business School.

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.

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

Are you familiar with KISS? It stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid” and is the best guidance for developing your culture.

KISS culture is a product of the boss’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™.

KISS culture attracts the best people and is a powerful force for retaining them.

A few years ago I wrote about KISS culture and this seems like a god time to revisit it.

KISS Corporate Culture Instead Of Branding

A blog post from India caught my eye earlier this week. Its premise was that retention starts with hiring (absolutely true) and went on to explain how to create and use “employment branding” for recruiting.

Essentially, pretty much everything that falls under the banner of employment branding also falls within the company’s culture—call it corporate MAP—along with the necessary processes.

But corporate culture isn’t static, it’s a living organism that shifts and changes as you grow and hire.

So it’s about hiring to match your corporate culture and using your corporate culture to screen candidates, limiting your hiring to people who are at the very least synergistic with your it—something I first wrote about in 1999.

Understand, I’m not disagreeing with what Sourabh said, just with the way he said it.

Using jargon to cast it as ‘branding’ makes it far more complex than it needs to be—especially if you want the knowledge to permeate your organization from top to bottom.

If that’s your goal, then take the time to understand your culture, KISS* it and communicate it to your people through a Cultural Mission Statement; once they understand it they’ll talk about it using language and terms with which they’re comfortable.

The result will be a culture that sounds and is real—not one invented by the marketing department.

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

Whenever culture is discussed it often is in terms of perks.

Google’s free meals, concierge services, etc.; when Apple was new and hot interviewees were told about the in-complex swimming pool and Friday beer blasts.

SAS, which is number one on Fortune’s Best Places to Work list for the second straight year, offers on-site healthcare, $400/month childcare, a beauty salon, 66,000-square-foot gym and more.

All are lauded for their cultures, but is it the perks or is something else going on?

“People stay at SAS in large part because they are happy, but to dig a little deeper, I would argue that people don’t leave SAS because they feel regarded — seen, attended to and cared for. I have stayed for that reason, and love what I do for that reason.” SAS manager

Sure, the perks are important, but they aren’t the basis of great culture.

Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers… More than anything else, you want to create an environment where people are respected—and treated like they’ll make a difference…Jim Goodnight, founder and CEO.

Make a difference; that’s the key phrase and the key action.

That’s how talented managers in companies with mediocre perks or none at all build and motivate great teams. It’s also the reason why people who are stars at one company may not perform as well at another.

Popular wisdom agrees that people leave managers, not companies, and they leave them in spite of perks, benefits, stock and seniority.

Fabulous perks get lots of press and may attract candidates, but they can’t motivate or retain people if they feel used and unvalued.

Fickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

There is much talk about the need for “cultural fit” when hiring and rightly so, since being in the wrong culture is equivalent to a fish out of water.

But does fitting require total acceptance? Does it mean agreeing 100% with every value and the way each is implemented?

It’s not nitpicking; bad hires are only one outcome of a bad fit between candidates and corporate culture; bad cultural fits are also the culprit in most screwed up M&A.

Actually, there are many similarities between hiring one person and acquiring/merging two companies—no matter how complementary the skills, technology and experience, cultural incompatibility typically leads to disaster.

While culture may not seem obvious when acquiring or hiring, due diligence and good interviewing is eminently capable of identifying and exploring it.

The problem is that managers often ignore cultural differences, because they believe they that their culture is ‘right’ and those joining will change—much like the people who marry “in spite of [x],” believing that s/he will change because s/he loves me.

Consider Amazon and Zappos vs. Microsoft and Skype and then think about the candidates you “hired anyway.”

The problem is often not a matter of right or wrong, but of different—the things that float your boat don’t float mine or, worse, sink it.

And 98% of the time you should have seen it coming.

Fickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

I’ve written several times referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and it’s come up in numerous conversations I’ve had.

Each time I hear that Gladwell’s premise is flawed and that if a person is determined enough they will succeed blah, blah, blah.

They claim this holds true whatever the location, including gang-ridden inner cities or third world countries; work hard enough and you will overcome.

My typical response to their rhetoric is “bullshit.”

A few days ago TechCrunch published The Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment; a comparison between Ibrahim Boakye and Max Levchin.

It is elegant proof of what Gladwell says, as well as a warning call to the stupidity of wasting our world’s human resources.

On a much smaller scale managers waste their human resources every day through “positional deafness,” i.e., only soliciting and/or hearing thoughts, ideas and suggestions from those at X level or higher.

I’ve never understood why managers expect workers who were consistently ignored and shut down to suddenly start contributing because they receive a promotion.

• Nobody suddenly develops a brain as a result of being promoted.

• If they were good enough to promote then they should have been good enough to listen to in their previous positions.

• If they can’t contribute in the position for which they were hired, why hire them at all?

• Even new grads hired for their potential need to be heard; they are like eggs and like eggs they must be cared for if they are to hatch.

Managers afflicted by positional deafness often experience high turnover and lament the lack of loyalty, especially in “more junior workers.”

But the term ‘junior’ is very subjective; for some managers it refers to those with just a couple of years of experience, for others it’s a level within the company and for still others it’s relative, with the baseline how long it took them to finally be heard.

It’s easy to know if you suffer from positional deafness, just consider the sources of your input over the last quarter and what you did with it.

Better yet, ask the people you trust to tell you the truth, not just what you want to hear.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3740791077/