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The Good, The Bad and the Ugly!

The good news is you have a great new project to work on. The bad news is the state of the team you have inherited. To put it mildly they look like a bunch of losers, the left behinds, the people who would not leave.

They have their reasons…

For instance John is two years from retirement. Julie just loves complaining. Jack has headphones on all the time and does not talk or engage unless spoken to. Then there’s Janice who should by rights have your job and is well, superior to everyone in the room and the next room if not the whole floor.

Obvious problems!

As manager you have to take control and make this work. Clearly each has a different agenda and as long as this remains your job will be impossible. You need to start talking to them as a team as well as individually.

As a team you want to emphasise what they have in common, the sky above, the ground below, the overall mission and recognise publicly that each has their own special skills and talents and that is what they bring to the party. Then you need to ask for their help to work in support of the mission, collaboratively.

Chances are, without knowing what this really means your new team will agree to agree and to start to understand the focus and the mission. Next you need to ask them to explain to everyone else what they are passionate about and how this project will be part of achieving their passion. Draw out the challenges that might be holding them back so you can start to think about how these might be resolved.

At the end of this first step you will start to achieve the necessary bonds and build up some expectation and excitement. Soon however these new feelings will be forgotten and the issues they have with each other and work will resurface and take over once more.

Your task as manager

Is to talk with each person to find out some of the good things that they are doing and have already done. You want to engineer an opportunity when individual success can be celebrated both inside and outside the group by publicly thanking them for their achievements and focus. It will help the team realise they are needed and give them the recognition they deserve. Making them happy does not cost a thing and can go a long way.

In the case of John who is about to retire you need to recognise and tap into his experience about the way things are done around here and help him to show others how to make things happen.

In the case of Jack, the headphone guy, just having him attend meetings and asking open questions will get him talking and sharing.

Julie is obviously a detail person, you want to get her doing things for the team, so she can take pride in helping everyone. Recognition is big for her and if she continues to harp on, you need to pick her up on it and ask her to explain to you what she is talking about in order to get to the bottom of it, to turn those complaints into something more constructive.

You need to get Janice’s thoughts out and into the open. There’s a reason you got the job and she didn’t. You can explain that in the circumstances you are especially grateful for her contribution and that while some would be resentful, clearly she isn’t and as a result you are able to admire her for all she is doing and actually learn from her how things are done. The chances are that your gracious approach will defuse the situation and foster a better ongoing relationship.

About You!

Finally, you need to not worry about being new and even inexperienced. You are the manager and you are good. You must project confidence in what you are doing in order to inspire it. So assume you are the best and go out and prove it.

I once heard that members of a team tend to sit in silos. Silos are natural, usually to do with their domain of excellence,  each is different by design. You want to know are they grain silos or missile solos?

Magical Thinking is a term that is not only used in Anthropology and Psychology, it is also found in business planning too.

The term refers to fictitious causal links between actions and events. In business you will hear it in an investment proposal when someone takes an existing market and starts the presentation with if all we did was get 1% of that… Two things, first who only wants 1% of anything? Second: 1% of a large established market is a huge and and almost impossible market share expectation without some kind of trial or proof of concept.

Warning – To What Effect?

However, sadly it also goes on in most businesses on a day to day business too, causing much trouble and strife. The well known management process is to apply pressure on the juniors that amount to impossible targets in impossible time periods.

It happens in sales and it happens in software development too. The problem is that the focus can become so concerning that so much much time is spent in worry mode, that it leaves little time for success and in this way magic thinking can really kill a business.

Often you can see from the outside when magic thinking is in play when staff are forever working long hours, with overtime and weekends stacking up, just to keep on top of things.

Eventually all those texts “one more thing to do, then I’ll be home” to loved ones require balancing and while an employer can grab time now, it must be, according to nature, balanced out at some point in the future. To what real effect?

Practice Pairing

Yet oddly businesses that practice pairing can often produce more when two people are working as a team, sharing one desk and one computer. Although hunter intuitive it means that the pair constantly check each others work.

Mistakes are quickly caught and losses quickly recovered. There is always greater understanding, two points of view, two sets of vested interests. Oddly enough, firms who try pairing report higher productivity and due to lower overtime, less cost, less burnout and a lot more happiness.

There are other ways to get more from what you have. I am in the middle of compiling a series of reports fro you that you can download here. I have just added a series of short thought provoking videos too. I will keep adding more reports to this list until there are 12, then you can expect me to start taking them away. Click here to see what is available right away.

There is always more profit to be found when you are aware of people, products, process and practices. Increased profits and productivity are to be found in all of these four key areas that are present in all businesses. Those four words represent the path for the 99% of business owners who run good businesses to become great businesses.

The Case For B2C & B2B

Starting with People, most business owners lets say in retail don’t know who their customers are and simply presume that they are local, although they could be just passing by and from far away.

In non-retail: b2b, most business owners can tell you the address of their customers and what they might have invested in, this is because an invoice exists that provides key data.

However it is rare to be able to determine the why or how often a client makes an investment in the things you sell. Unless there is a product, process or practice in place to find out the business owner will rarely know this key information.

The Astonishing Truth

What is astonishing and something that I have always marvelled for years is that even those who do collect customer information, rarely do much with it.

When it comes to business growth I have always known that knowing the who, why and what is crucial. There is much value in this information and significant cost savings can be achieved.

With good information on your customers it becomes increasingly possible to spot who your best customers are and then a lot easier to go get more like them.

When you really know who you help and how you help them, you can focus your efforts on key areas and make more of what your customers want available to them, or better still custom deliver the goods and move into a premium priced space.

It’s A Process I Call “Who-ing”.

“Who-ing” directly affects the products that you sell in terms of how much, at what price point and at which volume.

Customer and prospect information takes the guesswork out of sales and prospecting. It will inform you of the products you should be selling and how to tailor the processes to employ and similarly you’ll find you will fine tune all your practices too. This all adds up to building a great reputation and great profits for you. Like a machine!

If you want to know more on this subject I have written a collection of free guides for you, the number of which are increasing every week. Hurry though as some or all of them will be locked behind doors in just a few weeks from now. Click here and choose one growth guide or more that suits you.

Graham Arrowsmith a direct mail specialist gave me a few compliments the other day when he interviewed me for his The Next 100 Days podcast. We discussed a couple of stories about how it all was “back in the day” and took a few moments to reflect on what was actually done and what others might learn from it and could do for themselves.

You can eavesdrop on our conversation here, click to listen in.

Graham was very happy that I was able to tell personal stories as story telling is the key to real communication. It is how people tune in and learn – much better than simply a set of commands telling you what to do. So go listen in! Hows that for a command…

In all the projects I work on, the most important thing to understand is the story. When I meet clients they always tell me the story of their clients and it is really important information to know, as when the customer journey is told as a story we can emotionally connect and more easily understand and empathise.

Have you ever heard the fable of the chicken and the pig?

A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.

The Chicken says: “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”

Pig replies: “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?”

The Chicken responds: “How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?”

The Pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”

That folks, is where the rubber meats the road.

Are you committed in what you do or are you a chicken?

The good thing about taking action is that you get to choose the direction. So if you go left and realise you should have gone right, you can always reverse! If you never start you will never get to where you want to be, it’s always a good time to commit.

I did not exactly say all I wanted to say to Graham, yet I am happy with what I did say. I could have prevaricated, I could have blocked it, or as I have done, I let it go, happy with the outcome, knowing that there is more we could have discussed left for another day.

There will always be another opportunity and all will be good with the world. I know this as I am as committed as the pig – all in!

The question is will you be the chicken or the pig today?

Have a great day.