Change isn’t easy, but if you do it right, you can minimize the long-term pain your team will go through as a result of the change.

1) Explain why you’re making the change – Why are you making the change? Your team probably thought everything was going well. Take time to explain the WHY behind the change as completely as possible, leaving very little to the imagination. The better job you do of this now, the better things will be long term.

2) Explain the impact of the change – Does the change mean a schedule change? More work? Different work? Less work your team hates doing? A new manager or leader? Explain as much as you can so folks know the nuances of the change and can better handle what comes their way.

3) Explain how the change plays into the mission of the individual/team/department/company – As a manager, it’s critical you help your team connect the dots, ESPECIALLY in times of change.

4) Explain how your team will play into the change (and if it’s a very positive change for everyone, explain this) – In the absence of truth, folks will tell their own story. Show them how they personally will perform better because of this change. Many are pessimistic by nature, so take time to explain how they will be able to leverage their strengths even more in this new environment.

5) Take questions – Answer as many as you can, as honestly as you can. Take notes for the rest and get back to the team with answers. Don’t BS the answers. You don’t have to know everything, but you do need to field EVERY question, even if it’s uncomfortable, and then get the answers back to your WHOLE team.

6) Give them your commitment to making the change work – Even if you don’t like the change yourself, it’s important to be committed to making the change work for your team.

After the meeting is done, during your one-on-ones:

7) Ask for your associate’s individual commitment to making the change work – You want folks to commit to making the change work, not merely comply with it and then rebel against it later. Get commitment to at least trying to make things work.

How can YOU help your team deal with change?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spursfan_ace/2328879637/

Post from: EveryJoe

Help Your Team Deal With Change

Those who want to lead at a higher level need to understand that to create a high performing organization, they need to aim for the right target.

Don Carew, Fay Kandarian, Eunice Parisi-Carew, Jesse Stoner, and Ken Blanchard

Marksmen will tell you that when you aim at a target, you should go for the bull’s-eye. The reason is that if you miss the bull’s-eye, you’re still on the target. But if all you do is aim for the target and you miss, you’re nowhere. Don Shula, who coauthored Everyone’s a Coach¹ with Ken Blanchard, always told his Miami Dolphins football team that the target they were aiming at was to win every game. Was that possible? Obviously not, but if you don’t shoot for excellence, you never have a chance of getting there. That’s probably why Shula’s teams won more football games than teams of any other coach in the history of the NFL. His 1972 Dolphins is still the only team in history to go undefeated for an entire season. So the target you aim for has a lot to do with your performance.

Wall Street and the pressures of business today make many people think that the only target that counts is financial success. Yet few, if any, businesspeople would want their epitaph to include their company’s bottom line—their stock price or profit margin. They might, however, want people to remember their contribution to the creation of a high performing organization.

Those who want to lead at a higher level need to understand that to create a high performing organization, they need to aim for the right target.

The Right Target: The Triple Bottom Line

In high performing organizations, everyone’s energy is focused on not just one bottom line, but three bottom lines—being the provider of choice, the employer of choice, and the investment of choice. This triple bottom line is the right target and can make the difference between mediocrity and greatness.² The leaders in high performing organizations know that their bottom line depends on their customers, their people, and their investors. These leaders realize the following:

Profit is the applause you get for taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people.

Provider of Choice

Being the provider of choice is increasingly challenging. Competition is fierce as new competitors emerge unexpectedly. Customers are more demanding, with many more options at their fingertips. The world has changed in such a way that today the buyer, not the seller, is sitting in the driver’s seat. These days, nobody has to convince anybody that the customer reigns. In fact, companies are motivated to change when they discover the new rule:

If you don’t take care of your customers, somebody else will.

In Raving Fans^®: Satisfied Customers Are Not Enough,³ Sheldon Bowles and Ken Blanchard argue that to keep your customers today, you can’t be content just to satisfy them. You have to create raving fans—customers who are so excited about how you treat them that they want to tell everyone about you. They become part of your sales force. Let’s look at a simple yet powerful example.

What’s the most common wake-up call that you get in a hotel in America today? The phone rings at the allotted hour, but when you pick it up, no one is there. At least they got the machine to call your room at the designated hour. The second most common wake-up call greets you with a recording. But again, no one’s there. Today if you pick up the phone on a wake-up call and a human being is on the other end—someone you can actually talk to—you hardly know what to say. A while back, one of our colleagues was staying at the Marriott Convention Hotel in Orlando. He asked for a 7:00 wake-up call. When the phone rang and he picked it up, a woman said, “Good morning; this is Teresa. It’s 7 o’clock. It’s going to be 75 and beautiful in Orlando today, but your ticket says you’re leaving. Where are you going?”

Taken aback, our colleague stammered, “New York City.”

Teresa said, “Let me look at the USA Today weather map. Oh, no! It’s supposed to be 40 degrees and rainy in New York today. Can’t you stay another day?”

Now where do you think our colleague wants to stay when he gets to Orlando? He wants to stay at the Marriott so that he can talk to Teresa in the morning! Raving fans are created by companies whose service far exceeds that of the competition and even exceeds customer expectations. These companies routinely do the unexpected and then enjoy the growth generated by customers who have spontaneously joined their sales force.

Employer of Choice

Being the employer of choice is equally challenging. With highly mobile, competent workers in demand, employers must find ways to attract and keep their best people. Good pay is no longer the only answer. It is true that some competent workers will go elsewhere for a higher wage; however, today’s workers generally want more. They seek opportunities where they feel like their contributions are valued and rewarded—where they are involved and empowered, can develop skills, can see advancement opportunities, and can believe they are making a difference.

You will get little argument today if you tell managers that people are their most important resource. Some even argue that the customer should come second, because without committed and empowered employees, a company can never provide good service. You can’t treat your people poorly and expect them to treat your customers well.

Several years ago, a friend of ours had an experience in a department store that illustrates this point well. He normally shops at Nordstrom but found himself in a competitor’s store. Realizing that he needed to talk to his wife, he asked a salesperson in the men’s department if he could use their telephone. “No!” the salesperson said.

He replied, “You have to be kidding me. You can always use the phone at Nordstrom.”

The salesperson said, “Look, buddy! They don’t let me use the phone here. Why should I let you?”

People who are treated poorly tend to pass that attitude on to their customers.

Another reason that your people are so important today is because these days your organization is evaluated on how quickly it can respond to customer needs and problems. “I’ll have to talk to my boss” doesn’t cut it anymore. Nobody cares who the boss is. The only people customers care about are the ones who answer the phone, greet them, write up their order, make their delivery, or respond to their complaints. They want top service, and they want it fast. This means that you need to create a motivating environment for your people and an organizational structure that is flexible enough to permit them to be the best they can be.

Investment of Choice

Growing or expanding requires investment, regardless of whether the company is publicly owned, privately held, government, or nonprofit. All organizations require funding sources, through stock purchases, loans, grants, or contracts. To be willing to invest, people must believe in the organization’s viability and performance over time. They need to have faith in the leadership, the quality of the people, the product and services, the management practices, and the organization’s resilience.

If an organization’s financial success is a function of revenue minus expenses, you can become more sound financially either by reducing costs or increasing revenues. Let’s look at costs first, because in today’s competitive environment, the prize goes to those who can do more with less. More organizations today are deciding that the only way to be financially effective is to downsize. There’s no doubt that some personnel reduction is necessary in large bureaucracies where everyone just has to have an assistant, and the assistant must have an assistant. Yet downsizing is an energy drain, and it’s by no means the only way to manage costs.

There’s a growing realization that another effective way to manage cost is to make all your people your business partners. For instance, in some companies, new people can’t get a raise until they can read their company’s balance sheet and understand where and how their individual efforts are impacting the company’s profit-and-loss statement. When people understand the business realities of how their organization makes and spends money, they are much more apt to roll up their sleeves and help out.

Traditionally, managers have been reluctant to share financial information. Yet these days, many organizations are responding with open-book management. That’s because they realize the financial benefits of sharing previously sensitive data. For example, in working with a restaurant company, one of our consulting partners was having a hard time convincing the president of the merits of sharing important financial data with employees. To unfreeze the president’s thinking, the consulting partner went to the firm’s largest restaurant one night at closing time. Dividing all the employees—cooks, dishwashers, waitstaff, bus people, receptionists—into groups of five or six, he asked them to come to an agreement about the answer to a question: “Of every sales dollar that comes into this restaurant, how many cents do you think fall to the bottom line—money that can be returned to investors as profit or reinvested in the business?”

The least amount any group guessed was 40 cents. Several groups guessed 70 cents. In a restaurant, the reality is that if you can keep 5 cents on the dollar, you get excited—10 cents, and you’re ecstatic! Can you imagine the attitude among employees toward such things as food costs, labor costs, and breakage when they thought their company was a money machine? After sharing the actual figures, the president was impressed when a chef asked, “You mean, if I burn a steak that costs us $6 and we sell it for $20, at a 5 percent profit margin, we have to sell six steaks for essentially no profit to make up for my mistake?” He already had things figured out.

If you keep your people well informed and let them use their brains, you’ll be amazed at how they can help manage costs.

This is particularly important in uncertain times. If you develop committed and empowered people, not only will they help manage costs, but they’ll also increase your revenues. How? By providing legendary service that creates raving fan customers who will want to brag about you. These customers become part of your unofficial sales force or PR department, which increases your sales and/or visibility and makes your organization more attractive as an investment. Now you are a leader of a high performing organization.

This excerpt from Leading at a Higher Level is courtesy of FT Press.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/respres/3153378745/

Post from: EveryJoe

Is Your Organization High Performing?

What’s your one thing?

The one thing you need to do?

That if you do,

Will make a difference?

That if you don’t do,

Will make a difference?

What’s your one thing,

That only you can do?

You can’t delegate it,

You can’t avoid it,

You can’t ignore it.

You have to do it?

What is it?

Why are you still reading this article?

GO DO IT!

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkn/2057381520/

Post from: EveryJoe

What’s Your One Thing?

In God We Trust…All Others We Monitor

At the time, I thought it was the way things were. You trusted people, but you monitored them.

And now, as a manager, I guess that is the way things are.

I trust my team to do things…but I review their work to make sure it’s done right.

I attend meetings where people say they’ll do the right things…but then we check in at the next meeting to make sure they got done.

I expect my team to take care of customers, but then I ask them how we’re doing whenever I see them.

Now that I think about it, I trust but monitor just about everything with my team.

Do you trust but monitor or am I just a micromanager?

Image source from Phil Gerbyshak’s personal collection

Post from: EveryJoe

Trust But Monitor

Miki Saxon has my favorite article of the week, Ducks in a Row: Cut Them Some Slack, offering a powerful lesson we all can learn from:

But the older I got the more successful I was and I never regretted it. If the behavior continued I look for reasons and more often than not I found them.

Sure, there were times nothing was wrong and the person was just taking advantage of me and others, but more often they were under the gun, whether a derringer or a bazooka, and I was glad I didn’t make it worse.

So the next time someone lets you down, think about Jenny and cut them some slack; you’ll be glad you did.

Jim Estill explains how to keep your energy high after lunch:

This is one of most common energy problems that most people have. Solve that one and you could make a fortune.

Lisa Haneberg offers Happy Bosses Day: Five Thoughts for the Future:

So let’s all raise a glass (or Krispy Kreme) to our managers! They have thrown themselves into the the corporate snake pit wearing a smile and bringing determination, passion, and selflessness. Even if the delivery of their words or deeds is not yet fully developed – management is a craft – it is an amazing endeavor they have taken on and a humbling responsibility they have accepted.

Thomas J. Lee shares 4 Warning Signs of Disengagement:

How can you tell if your organization is teetering toward disengagement? Here are four common warning signs. None of them will surprise you, but from time to time you should remind yourself just how ominous they are. If you notice even one, you should take action. If you don’t act, you will soon notice another one, and then another, and eventually all four.

Bob Sutton reminds us You Better Start Treating Your People Right or Your Best Will Be Leaving Soon:

…if you have treated people like dirt during the tough times (for a horror story, see here), have been inept about how you have implemented tough decisions (see here) or have simply been clueless about your people’s perspective during these tough times (see here), you may have been able to keep great people working for you during these tough times and to hire some of the best. You can be sure, however, that they have told their friends about how much your company or you suck.  They are waiting for things to get better, and perhaps encouraged by the signs the labor market is coming back, are probably doing their jobs extra well these days to enhance their reputation for that coming job search.  So you may be fooling yourself into believing all is well when it is not.

Rosa Say closes out my Sunday Six Pack with We Learn Best from Other People:

New technology communications and talk-story conversations have something in common: They are only as good as what you are willing to devote to them. No input, no output. However talk-story conversations have a big advantage: You don’t need to buy something, plug it in, program it and learn to use it. You aren’t limited to others who have the same tool; for instance I am fully aware that I only reach others with Twitter accounts when I tweet, and they largely have my same habits.

What were YOUR favorite posts for the week? Share a link in the comments so we can all learn more together!

Photo credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/groundzero/289959556/

Post from: EveryJoe

Sunday Six Pack: 10-18-2009