Recently, I stumbled across some articles that made some interesting claims including the “The ten dumbest management trends” and “The ten worst business ideas ever”. It makes me want to write an article titled “The top ten management articles that make controversial overgeneralizations to drive web traffic”. I understand why people structure their articles around lists, and if you want readership, then it pays to be as dramatic as possible. Drama is entertaining. Also, it certainly sets the expectations that the article is going to be relatively short and what manager wouldn’t want to know the top ten of anything? People love lists. You see them everywhere on the internet from major news organizations to everyday blogs. Lists suggest both a level of research and authority. Initially, many lists were around interesting facts or well researched theory. Lists are easy to digest, make for good trivia and provide a level of entertainment. Lists can also provide important structure around management issues that can be difficult to define. My upcoming webinar incorporates “Five Sales Drivers” is one example of that technique. However, reading these lists on management practices gives me cause for concern. Lists that make sweeping generalizations are more about … Read More
Hiring For Drive
One of the most common questions I get from staffing managers is whether it’s better to hire experienced or green sales people. Leveraging my years of experience, I can confidently answer that I really don’t know. I have come to this conclusion because I have seen both profiles succeed and fail. In the end, it seems experience level is a poor predictor of performance. This assertion is supported by a study conducted by American Psychologists Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, who discovered that basing hiring decision on experience level had only slightly better results than a coin flip or hand writing analysis. Neither of which is terribly effective. I’m not saying that experience should not be considered, far from it, the level of experience an employee has should play an important role. However in screening candidates, experience should be balanced by those difficult to define qualities that drive the focus and perseverance of most successful sales people. In their book “Never Hire a Bad Sales Person”, Dr. Christopher Corner and Richard Abraham leverage years of data to capture personality characteristics that are consistent with top producers. The compilation of these characteristics is what they refer to as Drive. Drive is that persistent motivation … Read More
Are the Scales of Talent Tipping?
From my discussions with many staffing owners and executives, things are getting better. Job orders are up, clients are moving faster and it seems more and more likely that the worst of the great recession may be behind us. This uptick is especially true for IT staffing. This is good news, but it does bring with it issues that managers have not faced in a long time including hiring and retaining top talent. Staffing companies live off of the need for talent, but we are facing a bit of a crisis of our own. I speak with staffing managers every day and the common focus area is hiring top sales and recruiting personnel. The sales side can be particularly vexing for managers that are just looking for “A hunter that can bring in business quickly”. These people may exist, but I make a point in my TechServe Rainmaker article that it is less a hiring strategy than it is wishful thinking. Similar issues are found in finding recruiting talent. The fact of the matter is for the foreseeable future in order for companies to build competitive teams, they need to build three critical capabilities: Retain Existing Talent: These last two years have been … Read More
The End of Management
A couple weeks ago I was browsing through the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal and stumbled on an article titled “The End of Management”. Contrary to what it suggests, the point of the article is not to rid companies of management, but to challenge the perception of the role of management as it faces unprecedented change. One only has to look at the hyper-accelerated changes in the marketplace to realize that hierarchal or bureaucratic management approaches are outdated and in many cases are harmful to a company’s ability to adapt. This dynamic is captured in the following paragraph discussing creative destruction: “Yet in today’s world, gale-like market forces—rapid globalization, accelerating innovation, relentless competition—have intensified what economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of “creative destruction.” Decades-old institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns now can disappear overnight, while new ones like Google and Twitter can spring up from nowhere. A popular video circulating the Internet captures the geometric nature of these trends, noting that it took radio 38 years and television 13 years to reach audiences of 50 million people, while it took the Internet only four years, the iPod three years and Facebook two years to do … Read More
Budgeting Behavior
Staffing is a rapidly changing, people driven business, so I have always struggled with the role of the budget in managing the day-to-day operations over the course of an entire year. While I know budgets are necessary, they can also exert a negative influence on management decisions and employee behavior that can be traced back to the budget process itself. Jack Welch’s view on the budgeting process may seem a bit extreme, however; it does highlight the pitfalls of a poorly conceived budgeting process. “The budgeting process at most companies has to be the most ineffective practice in management. It sucks the energy, time, fun and big dreams out of an organization; it hides opportunity and stunts growth. It brings out the most unproductive behaviors in an organization, from sandbagging to settling for mediocrity.” Jack is not the only one to express those sentiments. Many companies have seen their budgeting process stifle innovation and undermine management collaboration. Does your budgeting process spend too much time negotiating and positioning future expectations, and too little time discussing how the business is actually going to grow and outmaneuver the competition? If the answer is yes, then I would encourage you to challenge your … Read More
The Price of Excellence
Recently the last of US combat troops left Iraq and crossed into Kuwait marking a significant milestone in a long hard fought war. Regardless, of your view on the war, the support for our troops justifiably crosses political spectrums and is a unifying force for most Americans. I believe much of that appreciation stems from the willingness of our men and women in uniform to make sacrifices that most of us would not consider, but that we know are required for all of us to live prosperous and free lives. However, regardless of the level of our appreciation, we tend to underestimate the lessons we can learn from our military. PBS has a compelling documentary, simply titled “The Marines” that sheds light on the nature of what motivates these men and women and what they are willing to go through to achieve their goals. Early on, it becomes clear that many of the Marines are primarily motivated by two things. First, is they feel called upon to protect the country and second they want to become part of an elite group. As they arrive at Parris Island they sacrifice their individualism and put themselves through physical, mental, and emotional turmoil to … Read More
Pardon the Interruption
Most everyone these days has a DVR. I personally love the technology, mainly due to the fact that I can skip all the commercials pitching products and services I don’t need nor want. Fast forwarding through these advertisements makes me think of all the wasted time and effort spent on just trying to get someone’s attention. On top of that, we are inundated with other interruptions to sell us something including radio, magazines, newspapers, buses, subways, and movies to name just a few. This inundation is making us immune to traditional selling techniques, as buyers we are looking for more. This same dynamic can also be found in the highly fragmented world of staffing. Our buyers are inundated with calls from staffing companies. Leading many staffing managers and sales people to understand that we need to change how we market and sell our services to be heard by our clients. Seth Godin attempts to resolve this problem in his book Free Prize Inside. Gone are the days where companies can rely on “interruption marketing” (i.e. advertising) to build a compelling brand. Seth’s assertion is that effective marketing focuses on providing more value in the product or service itself to provide something … Read More
The Power of Habit
I was just reading a book called the Power or Habit by Jack Hodge. The primary narrative of the book is that we, more than anything else, are defined by what we do, and close to 90% of what we do is determined by habits both good and bad. I am not sure how he determined the 90%, but we all know that our habits are a powerful force in our lives. However, I would argue that we as managers may underestimate the power of habits in managing and coaching our teams. This make me think back on a conversation I had with one of my past employees a few years ago. She came into my office to discuss the relevance of my monthly training topic. Her point was that everyone already understood the best practice we were going to discuss. It was in her eyes a waste of time. It was then that the light bulb went off. I wasn’t training because they didn’t already understand the best practice; I was training because they weren’t doing the best practice. So in a way, my training was an infomercial on the best practice and a platform to explain my expectations to the … Read More
Jack’s Big Aha!
It’s never a bad idea to look at strategic principles through the lens of proven business leaders such as Jack Welch. Jack started at GE as a chemical engineer in 1960 and by 1980 he was promoted to CEO where he proceeded to grow the company from $26B to $130B with a market value of $410B. To learn more about Jack’s story, feel free to read more detail of his accomplishments here. In his book Winning Jack outlines three key success factors when crafting company strategy: Come up with a “big aha” for your business- a broad idea that’s smart, realistic, and able to deliver a sustainable competitive advantage. Put the right people in the right jobs to drive the “big aha” forward. Relentlessly seek out best practices to achieve your “big aha” from inside and outside your company then adapt them, and continually improve them. The “big aha” is the focal point of a company strategy, and every company regardless of size, benefits from a clear understanding of how they compete in the marketplace. However, company’s often think their “big aha” has to be a transformational strategy that radically changes how business is conducted giving them an overwhelming competitive … Read More
Building Trust
Trust is elusive, and it is one of most critical components of why people buy. Buyers must trust that what they are buying provides the expected value. However, trust plays a different role based on what the buyer is purchasing and how that purchase provides value. For example, when it comes to purchasing simple commodities value is often tangible and easy to measure. If I go to a grocery store to buy an apple I trust that it is going to be free of worms. If I find worms, outside the emotional distress how have I really been impacted? The cost of the apple is nominal, and I can just show the store the worms and get a refund. Sure, its possible that the store may deny responsibility, but now I know I need to take my business elsewhere and all I’m out is 79 cents. But most business to business selling is obviously not that simple. The ROI of many products and services are not immediate and can be very difficult to measure objectively. It is simply impossible for the buyer to really know the return of what they are buying. To make matters even more complex, larger purchases … Read More