Up Your Business!

7 Steps to Fix, Build, or Stretch Your Organization

Dave Anderson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470068564
• eBook ISBN: 9781118039052
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Praise for the first edition of Up Your Business! "Dave Anderson has hit another home run! Up Your Business! is an invaluable, highly readable guide that should be on the desk--and in the mind--of anyone demanding top-level performance from themselves and others."
--James Strock, author, Reagan on Leadership and Theodore Roosevelt on Leadership "Up Your Business! is a powerful blueprint for companies looking to take their business to the next level. It is one of the most powerful books on business and leadership I have ever read and will be a major component of Saga Communications' leadership training."
--Warren Lada, Senior Vice President, Saga Communications, Inc. "Once again, Dave Anderson puts it all together in a way that almost makes you think he's been looking over your shoulder all these years. Chapter two alone, 'Abolish Corporate Welfare: Create a Culture of Merit, ' is worth the time it takes to read the entire book."
--Mike Roscoe, founder and President, Horizon Communications "Finally... a business book that gets to the heart of what matters and creates usable templates that could help any business thrive."
--Roxanne Emmerich, author, Thank God It's Monday!

CHAPTER 1

Always Remember, “It’s the People, Stupid!”

During the 1992 presidential election campaign, Bill Clinton’s inner circle decided that the troubled economy was the theme their candidate would hammer to win the White House. Whenever a Clinton staffer invested time, energy, or resources strategizing or articulating foreign policy, world trade, or environmental issues, a cohort would bluntly chastise him with the words, “It’s the economy, stupid.” This not-so-gentle reminder became a mantra that created laserlike focus and steered the campaign to victory.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

Leaders wanting to fix, build, or stretch their organizations must employ the same tenacious resolve and embrace the business version of this mantra — “It’s the people, stupid” — as the catalyst of measurable and sustainable growth. All organizations have goals, and most have strategies. Both, however, are irrelevant if the right people aren’t in place to execute them. In fact, a great dream with the wrong team is a nightmare because bold goals pursued by mediocre people still result in mediocre results. Grand plans designed at off-site meetings and facilitated by costly experts are rendered impotent when employed by the marginal, mediocre, or moronic. Most organizations suffer from a reality gap. The chasm between the leader’s forecast and the realities of his people’s abilities renders their goals unrealistic from day one.

Up Your Business! Bullet

If your dream is bigger than your team, you’ve got to give up the dream or grow up the team.

Business leaders have no control over weather, the economy, interest rates, or competitors’ actions; yet pondering or worrying about these issues often consumes much of their day. What a leader can control is who joins or leaves the team and how to develop those on board. Unfortunately, most leaders make poor use of this liberty. To fix, build, or stretch an organization, a leader must exercise one of leadership’s greatest privileges proactively and aggressively: deciding whom to keep and whom to lose.

Dave Maxwell, after being hired to turn around Fannie Mae in 1981, related how the mortgage giant was losing $1 million per day and had nearly $60 billion in mortgage loans underwater.¹ Naturally, the board was anxious and, when they met with Maxwell, they asked him about his vision and strategy for the company. Maxwell replied that asking where the company was going and how it would get there was the wrong first question; that before he made the journey his first order of business was to get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on the bus and to make sure the right people were sitting in the right seats. Then, he replied, they could focus all their energy on taking the bus somewhere great.

Soon after the board meeting, Maxwell met with his twenty-six key executives and laid it on the line.² He told them the trip ahead was going to be difficult, that there would be major changes and tough decisions to make, and that people would be stretched and held accountable — but that for those who endeavored, the rewards would be great. He also told them that if they didn’t think they could stomach the ride nobody would hate them if they left.³ Confronted with this challenge, fourteen of the twenty-six executives voluntarily exited the bus.⁴ The good news was that those who remained were totally committed, and Maxwell filled the vacant slots with some of the brightest minds in the finance business. Now he and his team were ready to take the bus on a ride to unprecedented heights. And what a ride it was. During Maxwell’s reign, the same company that had lost $1 million per day was making $4 million per day and beating the general stock market returns 3.8 to 1 between 1984 and 1999.⁵ Maxwell retired while still at the top of his game, and the dream team he had attracted and developed drove the bus to equally impressive peaks. With focused discipline, Maxwell corrected the board’s errant focus on vision and strategy, fixed his organization, and showed the world, “It’s the people, stupid.”

GET PROACTIVE: GO FROM HUNTED TO HUNTER

I sometimes wish I could find the man who gave me my first shot at management and apologize. I’d beg forgiveness for all the wrong people I hired who abused our resources, lowered team morale, and consistently broke our momentum. Don’t get me wrong; I did have a recruiting, interviewing, and hiring strategy. In fact, I can describe it in one word: reactive. My strategy was to wait until we were shorthanded, run a worthless ad, and hire someone I liked with little regard to whether the person could do the job required.

Fortunately, I’ve learned a thing or two about building a team since then. In fact, I can sum up my current team-building strategy in four words: hire slow, fire fast. Leaders must be more proactive and deliberate in selecting employees. If you want great people you’d better be prepared to go find them yourself. You must go from waiting to be hunted to being a hunter. At the same time, you must remove poor performers more quickly. Both these concepts will be presented in detail throughout this chapter.

Unfortunately, much as I used to do, most managers don’t recruit, interview, or hire until they’re desperate. Soon, pressured by time and the need for coverage, they begin settling too early, too cheaply. Before long, however, they realize that a bird in the hand is not better than two in the bush if it’s the wrong bird. (If you haven’t read the book Hire with Your Head, by Lou Adler [Wiley, 1998], get it. In addition, go to Lou’s web site, www.powerhiring.com, where you’ll find one of the most valuable resources available to reinforce and coach you in the strategies for building a team.) Then, when managers realize they do have the wrong person, they cross their fingers, give a half-dozen second chances, and fail while trying to fix the unfixable for far too long.

Up Your Business! Bullet

As desperation rises, standards fall.

Personally, I can’t think of a better way for a leader to invest his or her time than in finding great people for the team. In fact, you have a choice of either investing time doing this or spending your time pushing the wrong people to do the right thing. Or, even worse, doing more of the work yourself because you have the wrong people. Since it’s going to take plenty of work regardless of which path you choose, it’s advisable to work in a manner that makes your future less frustrating and more productive. To build a team of eagles, you’ll have to get past one of the most pervasive cop-outs in business: “There’s a shortage of talented people where I live.” I deliver approximately 150 speeches or training presentations annually, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m in Manhattan, in Brunswick, Georgia, or in Devils Lake, North Dakota; every time I speak to managers I hear this whimper. Everyone likes to think their situation is unique, that finding good people is an impossible task reserved especially for them. I hate to be the one to kick the crutch out from under you but here is the fact: There is no shortage of talented people in any market area. The Creator didn’t suddenly stop churning out talented people. It’s just that the most talented people already have jobs! They’re not perusing the want ads or knocking on your door with hat in hand. I don’t say these next couple of sentences to be condescending or sarcastic, but your best job candidates are not the unemployed. I understand there are exceptions — focus on the rule. Some of these people have waited for their thirty-nine weeks of unemployment benefits to expire and are reentering the marketplace reluctantly and with a chip on their shoulders.

This begs the question: What is your strategy for attracting passive job candidates into your workplace? You know, the happy, productive people getting the job done for someone else. In the following pages, I describe six strategies to up your people and your business.

CREATE AN EAGLE ENVIRONMENT

The best performers expect differentiation. They won’t work where they are treated like average or bottom performers. They want to have more input, schedule flexibility, stretch assignments, fewer rules, increased discretion, and pay based on performance (not tenure, experience, or credentials) — and, most important, a great leader to work with.

What is your Eagle Value Proposition (EVP) to attract top performers? If a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 walked in to apply today, what is your compelling EVP that sets you apart from the competition? If you can’t be specific or impressive here, you have work to do, because eagles are attracted to mountaintops, not to landfills. Landfill environments are those with marginal expectations, equal rewards and support for top and bottom performers alike, burdensome rules, abusive schedules, and poor leadership. Landfills don’t attract eagles. They attract rats, roaches, pigeons, and buzzards. We’ll delve deeper into differentiation in Chapter 3. For now, suffice it to say that if you expect to attract more eagles or develop and retain the ones you have, you’ll need to build an environment where they can flourish. This also means you’ll need to eliminate from your workplace environment demotivators that break the spirit and momentum of your best people. Here’s a partial list of the offenders — what we’ll call “Landfill Symptoms”:

• Too many rules

• Poor training procedures

• Lack of feedback on performance

• Lack of differentiation for rewards between top and bottom performers

• Lack of stretch assignments and meaningful work

• Promotions based on tenure and experience rather than results

• Weak leaders

• Tolerance of poor performers

• Too many or unproductive meetings

• Nepotism

• No room to grow

• Rigid scheduling

• Unclear vision, mission, and core values

You must pay constant attention to this list. Keep weeding out these motivational land mines because just about the time you get things the way you want, one of them resurfaces. Unless and until you make the workplace environment your number one recruiting tool, eagles will keep flying over your landfill. On the other hand, life gets good when eagles come looking for you. It takes awhile for word to get around, but if you build it — an eagle environment — they will come.

Up Your Business! Bullet

Eagles and turkeys don’t eat the same food.

MAKE RECRUITING EVERYONE’S RESPONSIBILITY

Think about the last time a great salesperson blew you away with polish and professionalism. Or how about that special occasion when a dynamic waitperson made your night out memorable with personality and service. You can probably still picture these people, and chances are you’ve told others about the experience. Did you try to recruit these people? If not, why? Normally, the managers who would never think of adding these people to their talent pipelines are the first to lament that there are no talented people where they live. To take this a step further, think of how many people currently working in your company have had similar experiences and missed the opportunity to recruit. The prime reason no one recruits star performers like these is lack of awareness. Recruiting is never talked about, valued, rewarded, or encouraged. And until it is, you’ll continue to let golden opportunities slip away. If you’re going to up your business, you’ve got to make recruiting everyone’s responsibility. To go from hunted to hunter, give your best people Eagle Calling Cards they can put in the hands of superior performers everywhere they find them. An Eagle Calling Card is the size of a business card. Use the following example as a template to adapt to your own organization.

Front of card:

Congratulations!

I noticed your great service today! We’re always looking for eagles to join our team. Call me, Dave Anderson, at 650-867-9000 to discuss the opportunity in total confidence!

Reverse side of card:

Flexible scheduling! Top Gun Club for top performers! Our average employee made $60,000 last year! Full health and life insurance! Generous 401K! Paid vacations! Sign-on bonuses! Great initial and ongoing training! Promotions based on performance, not tenure! You’ll be surrounded with winners driven by a vision to be the best!

Another strategy that creates awareness of the importance of building a talent pipeline is to pay recruitment bonuses. Pay a meaningful bonus — at least $500 to any employee who refers an employee you hire. Pay it on the spot. Don’t wait six months to make sure the person works out. If you don’t think they’re going to be there in six months you shouldn’t be hiring them in the first place. Besides, the idea is to find reasons to pay the bonus so employees are encouraged to bring in referrals, not to attach strings to make it tougher for them to collect. Even if you pay some bonuses where the people hired don’t work out, the long-term benefits of higher morale within the person referring the candidate, increased awareness of recruitment overall, and the occasional breakthrough hire you’ll reap are well worth the dollars invested. Anyway, when you calculate how much you waste with conventional hiring methods through want ads or otherwise, the bonus you pay is a bargain.

Up Your Business! Bullet

The only way you can hire eagles is if you talk to eagles.

TURN YOUR WEB SITE INTO A RECRUITMENT POST

If your web site isn’t already a compelling recruitment post you’re blowing it! Every day you have passive job candidates using your site. They’re not looking for work; they’re looking into your goods and services. Many of these people are successful and productive for another employer. This is your chance to plant a seed, intrigue them, and recruit them — and once the initial web design is complete, it won’t cost you a dime! The majority of web sites waste this recruitment occasion with a mundane “Employment Opportunities” icon. Once you click on it you are greeted with a laundry list of job openings and are invited to call or e-mail for more information. To say this approach is weak and uninspiring would be kind. If you’re going to attract eagles in this decade you had better kick your online hiring campaign into high gear. Here are five strategies to up your chances of snagging a passive eagle candidate.

1. Use an oversized “Join Our Team of Eagles!” icon and ditch the formal and boring “Employment Opportunities.”

2. Once candidates enter the “Join Our Team of Eagles” area of your site they should be met with employee testimonials from your happiest workers:

“I’ve worked at Saga Communications for ten years and absolutely love it! We have ongoing training, special rewards for top performers, great core values, a dynamic leadership team, generous pay and benefits, and I belong to a supercharged team of winners!”

— Dave Anderson
Sales Manager
[email protected]

3. List compelling job descriptions. Try this one on for size:

“Sales Opportunity: We’re looking for high-octane winners to join our team of sales eagles. You’ll get the best training in the business and the support of a super team. The ideal candidate will be able to manage his or her own business-within-a-business, hit our high standards, and grow fast with our company. We understand that a compensation package needs to be very aggressive to continue to build our team of eagles. Apply...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 - Always Remember, “It’s the People, Stupid!”
• CHAPTER 2 - Abolish Corporate Welfare
• CHAPTER 3 - Develop Your Human Capital
• CHAPTER 4 - It’s All Right to Aim High if You Have Plenty of Ammo
• CHAPTER 5 - Look in the Mirror
• CHAPTER 6 - Survive Success
• CHAPTER 7 - Build Long-Term Vitality
• CHAPTER 8 - Close the Gap between Knowing and Doing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author