Adam Robinson's Blog, page 15

Desiree Vargas Wrigley, Founder and CEO of Pearachute

Desiree Vargas Wrigley joins the podcast tomorrow to discuss the team and culture she’s building at her latest venture, Pearachute, how her leadership has changed over time, and much more.  Until then, read more about Desiree and the great things happening at Pearachute below.

What’s your name?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley




What’s your title?

CEO and Founder




What is the name of your company?

Pearachute




In 100 words or less, describe what your company does.

Pearachute is a kids’ activity club that makes it easy for parents and caregivers to discover, book, and drop into the best classes, camps, and activities all at the touch of a button, all for one affordable rate.  Parents choose either 3, 6, or unlimited classes each month and they can book from thousands of classes across hundreds of providers across Chicago, Dallas, and KC.




Where is the company based?

Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Kansas City




When was the company founded?

January of 2016




How many employees do you have?

11




How can we find you and your company on social media?

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram 




Is your company bootstrapped, or have you raised equity financing (VCs, angels, etc.)?

Seed round investors include Hyde Park Ventures, Chicago Ventures, Corazon Capital, Builders Studio, Techstars Ventures, my former co-founder at GiveForward : ) and individuals through the crowdfunding platform Republic.




What company accomplishment or milestone in the past 12 months are you most proud of?

I’m most proud of the fact that we’ve helped generate nearly $500K for locally owned businesses. 




What’s the #1 company issue or area of focus for you right now?

How to scale what’s working and learn from the things that can be improved.




What else?

We’re really proud to be the biggest equity crowdfunding campaign to date in Republic.  Most of that support came from out members and the Chicago tech ecosystem. 

The post Desiree Vargas Wrigley, Founder and CEO of Pearachute appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Three Tips for Engaging Your Millennial Employees

In my work with organizations of all sizes, from the four-person startup to the global Fortune 100 businesses, I’ve found there is one common theme which predicts an employee’s engagement. It’s not the pop-a-shot tournaments at lunch, the employee incentive plan, the fridge of unlimited La Croix® or the flexible work schedule. It’s much simpler; it’s your relationship with your employees.

Gallup data shows at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement is attributed to the manager alone. As a manager, you were likely promoted because you are great at your job, you’re a top performer, or you are experienced and know the role like the back of your hand. However, taking on a leadership role is tough. You are suddenly given two jobs, the one you signed up for and one that is infinitely more complex and confusing; leading people. In addition, you’re being asked to engage the most disengaged of all in the workforce, millennials. Millennials, as a generation, are turning over at 3x the rate of all other generations.

Here are a few tips that will go a long way for engaging with millennials:

1) Take a new perspective

One of my clients, Craig, is in the first leadership role of his career. He’s spent the past 12 years as a top performer, and now he’s taken the next step, the responsibility of leading not just his performance but the performance of his entire team. In his first few weeks on the job, Craig saw a gap in the team’s sales process. The team was not tracking crucial prospect information and was losing potential clients because of it. Noticing the opportunity, Craig spent the time to draft a new process for addressing the gap. He scheduled a meeting with his team and rolled out the plan.

When he pulled the first months’ report on the usage of the new process, he found half of his team hadn’t used it at all.

Instead of sitting each of them down and berating the offenders for not following his instructions, Craig got curious; he asked them what about the process wasn’t working. In listening to his teams’ answers, Craig quickly saw the error in his ways. He realized he had lumped together several steps that had taken him years to master and expected his team to run with it after a one-hour presentation. It was only when Craig pulled back and took a new perspective did he end up discovering how to unlock his teams’ engagement.

To avoid Craig’s errors, step into your teams’ shoes. Work to understand their position, experiences, and resources and take a new perspective. Instead of creating a process FOR them, help them see the outcome, include them in the discussion and engage them in determining how to achieve success.

Tip: One easy way to do this is to ask, how do you currently accomplish x? What about it works for you? What doesn’t? What would you do to improve the process?

If you are genuinely open to what your team says, you’ll gain incredible insights in how to create a change that works for others. More importantly, you’ll gain your people’s buy-in for the new initiative, because you’ve included them in the process.

2) Open the lines of communication

Harvard Business Review reports 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their employees.

One very simple and often missed component of leading a team is taking the time to connect with each of your employees. Open the lines of communication by spending time getting to know each of your employees.

Tip: Take your employee to coffee or lunch – somewhere outside of the office – and have a conversation about life, not work.

For a quick guide, ask these four questions:

–    What do you do in your free time? 

–    What inspires you?

–    Where are you looking to grow?

–    How can I support you and your growth?

When you take time to get to know your employee on a personal level, you express appreciation for more than just her numbers. You let her know you care about her as a person and you create the space to share honest and open feedback.

3) Help them grow

In a poll of millennials in the workplace, Gallup found only 39% of millennials strongly agreed they learned something new on the job in the past 30 days.

As a manager, you likely hear cries from your millennials; for a promotion, a raise or simply a new title. Yes, millennials will ask for a new title even if you’re not giving them a promotion or raise.

Why is this happening and what can you do about it?

If you take a deep dive below the surface of these requests, you’ll see that each of these; a promotion, a raise or even a title change, are all external symbols of growth. They are all ways of telling the outside world, I’ve arrived, I’ve grown and in turn, for millennials, it’s their way of knowing they are continuing to grow.

By understanding the root cause of an employee’s request, you can serve them better. You might not be able to give them a promotion or raise, and I don’t suggest changing their title just for the sake of it, but what you can do is challenge them.

Tip: Your millennials want to grow, so give them the opportunity by challenging them to take on new projects, to work on developing new skills and to be owners of their own development. Entrust them with more responsibility and you’ll see the benefits.

When you open their world to new possibilities of growth, you’ll find your millennials have a new vigor for their work.

By embracing the millennial perspective, making the choice to engage vs disengage your people, you’ll not only be a better leader, you’ll unlock the powerful potential of your people.

This guest post is by Aaron Levy, the Founder and CEO of Raise The Bar Consulting . Raise The Bar helps companies retain their millennial talent by empowering managers with the tools, skills and training to be better leaders of people.

You can find out more about Aaron and his work at www.raisebar.co or by emailing him at aaron@raisebar.co .

The post Three Tips for Engaging Your Millennial Employees appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

How Accountability Improves Employee Retention

 

High-growth companies experiencing high turnover rates can become desperate looking for solutions. They’ve outlined and communicated the company’s goals, and they’re publishing KPIs for the entire company to see.  And yet, in exit surveys from departing employees, a lack of enthusiasm keeps showing up. Departing workers say things like, “I know the company is doing well, but I don’t feel invested in the outcome.”

What’s missing is accountability. Accountability, an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility for one’s actions, is the bridge between the company’s operating targets and the employee’s role in helping to achieve those targets.  Without accountability, these operating objectives start to lose their meaning for the employee. Engagement wanes and your best team members, most of whom are being constantly tempted by competitive job offers, start to reevaluate whether or not your company is the place for them.

Review this checklist to determine the degree to which you’re creating a culture of accountability:

Department-level management has translated company targets into clearly-defined, department-level KPIs.  Your ability to hit company operating goals is simply the sum-total of each department’s ability to hit their operating goals. It’s critical that your managers lead the process of distilling down the top-level objectives into department-level objectives. If you haven’t completed this process, the rest of this checklist is impossible to execute.
Team managers have taken their department’s goals and, working in partnership with the department’s leader, have created individual KPIs for their team that supports the achievement of those goals.  Whether or not your company is large enough to have this middle layer of management, tasking the managers directly responsible for line-level employees with the creation of individual KPIs is a must.  In this step, supervisors create the connection between the employee’s activities and the company’s overall objectives. If employees don’t have individual targets, you can’t hold them accountable for anything specific or measurable.
Employees know and understand their goals and commit to achieving them. This is the most important step and is where companies struggling with creating accountable workforce cultures often get off track.  It’s not enough to set individual targets. The individual has to opt-in to achieving them. Supervisors cannot merely hand a list of items to their team members and walk away. Instead, the supervisor has to ask the question, “Based on what I’ve outlined, do you have any reservations about your ability to hit these targets?”  Listen, adapt, and adjust if necessary. Once your team member has bought in, you’ve obtained their commitment.
Supervisors actively discuss results with their team members in real time.  This ongoing process creates an active and engaged dialogue between the employee and their manager. I recommend weekly meetings to review results, consider necessary course corrections and agree upon go-forward plans.  The supervisor’s mindset in these meetings should be, “what can I do to support you and your ability to hit your objectives?”.  The employee’s mindset should be, “what do I need from my manager to better perform in my job and to increase the likelihood that I’ll meet my commitment?”.

For those of you looking for the one-notecard version:

Translate company goals into department-level goals.
Use the department goals to empower your managers to create individual objectives for their team members.
Discuss those objectives with the employee and obtain their commitment.
Check in frequently to review progress and make adjustments.

If you manage high-potential, high-performing team members along these lines, you’ll see that engagement on your team increases. A high engagement workforce leads to greater retention, and it’s the direct result of the culture of accountability you’ve created.

 

 

 

The post How Accountability Improves Employee Retention appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Five Trends in HR Technology

This week I’m in New Orleans for the Society for Human Resources Management global conference. It’s a great time to learn about new trends in HR technology that can help small businesses. In this episode, I list my top five.

Listen to this episode on iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud, and Stitcher.

The post Five Trends in HR Technology appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Look for These Four Traits in Every Job Candidate

 

Click here to get your copy of The Best Team Wins today! 

Increase Your Team’s Visibility Quotient to Drive Employee Retention

One of the critical components of creating an engaged, high-retention workforce is visibility. I use the term to explain the degree to which the employee base has access to the information they need to determine whether or not the company is doing well. Let’s call that your company’s Visibility Quotient.

To increase your Visibility Quotient, follow these four core operating guidelines.

 

1. Publish and explain your operating targets

Management teams of high-growth companies spend countless hours huddled up in annual offsites to set top-level operating targets for things like revenue, EBITDA/net income, customer retention, product engagement, and the like. The issue is that, in most cases, the goals are not adequately communicated and explained to the employee base, nor are they understood by the team.

It’s not enough for your leadership team to set targets.  You have to publish them to the company so that everyone knows what is expected and understands management’s plan to get there.  And I don’t mean just post the numbers so people can see them; a number without a corresponding “why” is just a number. You need to explain your targets and goals to your company in a way that creates a shared understanding and unity of purpose.

2. Publicly commit to hitting the targets that you’ve set

Don’t just email the company’s annual goals to everyone with a “here they are!” email.  In doing so, you miss a critical opportunity to present the goals publicly, get buy-in and rally the company around the plan to hit them.

Call an all-hands meeting (or town hall, use your preferred term).  Start off by telling everyone that you’re excited to share with them the targets your management team has set for the year and walk them through the plan to get there. Treat this presentation like you’re presenting to the most important prospect to whom you’ve ever sold–because you are.

Tell the company that you, and every member of the leadership team, are personally committed to hitting these targets. Explain to everyone how they benefit when these targets are hit. Is there a bonus pool?  Profit sharing?  An elevated stock price?  You’ve got to show them where they have skin in the game and a reason to care about the outcome.

3. Post the data so everyone can see it

Once you’ve outlined the plan and communicated it publicly, reporting your results is a must-do. Post your progress against KPI targets on the company intranet.  If you don’t have an intranet, post it on the wall.

At Hireology, we report our progress-to-target with the entire company every Tuesday morning at our all-company huddle.  Here, managers will share their results and whether or not the company is on-track or off-track to meet goals.  We take it a step further and report the percentage of the bonus pool that will fund based on the progress we’ve made.

If you’re ahead of plan, awesome.  If you’re behind plan, don’t sugar coat it. This is your chance to rally the troops and bend that curve up and to the right.

4. Make leadership fully accessible

I’ve found that when employees have gaps in understanding about the nature of a particular issue, like why a metric is behind target, they start to fill in the gaps with assumptions. And typically not good ones. Why are we behind revenue targets? Customers must not like our product and therefore I might want to update my resume! We’re behind our profit target? I bet they’re getting ready to lay off a bunch of us!  You get the idea.

Don’t hide behind the numbers. As the leadership team, it’s your duty to make yourself accessible to the company so that they can ask questions or vent frustrations if things aren’t working.

 

If your team knows where they are going and why they are going there, it opens the floor for an engaged conversation about how they get there. Every opportunity to create buy-in from your team is another chance to create an engaged workforce.  Increasing your company’s Visibility Quotient is entirely under your control. Make a deliberate, intentional effort to drive visibility by following these four guidelines.

Building, Retaining and Developing the best team with Zawadi Bryant, CEO and Co-Founder of NightLight Pediatric Urgent Care

Zawadi Bryant founded NightLight Pediatrics Urgent Care with Dr. Anastasia Gentles and Connie Cazares in 2007 with a single location in Sugarland, Texas. It’s ten years later and they’ve expanded to seven locations across the Houston area. It’s this incredible growth that landed NightLight Pediatrics on the 2017 Forbes Small Giant list and on the Inc 5000 list. As CEO, Zawadi has put in place innovative people processes and has empowered employees to do what they do best: provide fantastic care. Zawadi and her team are in the people business and on this episode of the podcast, you’ll learn how they’ve been building their best possible team. 

Listen to this episode on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, and Stitcher.

Interested in learning more about the business side of NightLight Pediatrics? Read this fantastic interview with Zawadi Bryant in Forbes. 

Full show transcripts:

Adam Robinson:

 
Zawadi Bryant is here today on the program, CEO and co-founder of NightLight Pediatric Urgent Care, which currently has five locations across the Houston metro area and expects to open two more locations in the near future. NightLight Pediatrics was founded in 2007, has 71 employees, is bootstrapped and was recently named a Forbes Small Giant in 2017 — very cool. Zawadi, we are so excited to learn from you today. Welcome to the show.


Zawadi Bryant:
Thank you for having me.


Adam Robinson:

 
I am the proud father of four children, and I might be my local urgent care’s best customer. We’re on the first name basis and I have often said, “Man, would it be better if they had these dedicated to kids?” I can tell you in the Chicago metro area there’s nothing like what you do in Houston. Why don’t you start today, give us the 30-second pitch on NightLight? And, I know anyone with children will understand in three seconds exactly why what you do is so successful, but go ahead.


Zawadi Bryant:
Right. Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity. My business partner Dr. Anastasia Gentles was an ER doc in a children’s ER, and she realized while working the night shifts that a lot of the children that were sitting and waiting to be seen didn’t have emergencies, and so they were low on the totem pole. They could have been seen by their regular doctor had their doctor’s office been open. She had the bright idea. I give her all the credit because she’s the one who realized, “If these kiddos had a place to go after hours, they would not have, A) have the inconvenience of sitting in the ER and, B) the big expenses of going to the emergency room and, C) not clogging up our emergency rooms with non-emergent issues.” She came to me asked me if I thought it was a great idea.



At the time, I was IT in oil and gas, and I just knew how to run numbers. I ran the numbers for her and helped her put it together, her business plan, and said, “Yes, this sounds like a fantastic idea. There’s definitely a need out there.” We did quick and dirty business case and ran that around a few pediatricians, and they thought it was a great idea, and so off we went to start NightLight.


Adam Robinson:
Fantastic. That’s just awesome. If listeners want to learn more, particularly those in the Houston metro area, where do they reach you?


Zawadi Bryant:
Our website is nightlightpediatrics.com. We’re located in the suburbs of Houston. We have five locations: Sugar Land, Pearland, Cypress, Webster, and Humble. Soon to be in Tanglewood and  Garden Oaks, which are neighborhoods within the Houston area, so we’re growing actually inside the city this summer.


Adam Robinson:

 
Fantastic. Congratulations. Well, I’m so excited to focus on the people side of your business. I want to start with the story or anecdote you told in your Forbes interview, and you mentioned there was this moment where you realized that going from one location to two locations, the second you or your business partner weren’t at the location, it wasn’t working as well and you realized the need at that time for structure and the right people and the right management. Talk about that moment where you realized the impact that focusing on better hiring and better people was going to be a benefit to your business.


Zawadi Bryant:
Yeah, that was a definite big aha moment for us as we were building the second location, which was 20 minutes from our first location. We realized that the first location although we had great people there, we hadn’t set up any processes, or policies, or expectations for them to work independently without us, and so when we went off to the second location, we got a lot of phone calls about, “Hey, the lights went out in exam room five.” Or, “The paper got jammed in the printer.” You guys are totally capable of doing these things, but they were so reliant on us being around and having access to us to ask us for everything that we hampered them. We hindered their growth and their productivity just by always being there. When we left, we realized, “Oh, my gosh. We’re going to have to empower these amazing people to do what they need to do independent of us.”


Adam Robinson:
How did you start to do that?


Zawadi Bryant:
A lot of documentation, a lot of training, and coaching, and development. Just encouraging them, telling them, “You guys got this. You can manage this clinic by yourself. The five or six people that are working on the shift, you guys are capable. You’re doctors. You’re nurse practitioners. You’re radiologists and front desk people. You guys are fully capable of answering your own questions.” We would have cheat sheets for them, just things that you would not even imagine. What I’ve learned over the course of being in business is common sense is not common.


Adam Robinson:
Absolutely.


Zawadi Bryant:

 
Writing every little detail down that I would just, immediately, I would think would do so something as simple as making sure that when you are putting the paper in the printer, you check that there’s not anything clogged in there. Just simple stuff. You guys can do this. With the manual, I think them having that crutch there after a while didn’t even refer to the manuals. “Let me think through this thing before I go to the manual.” Soon enough they were able to handle most tasks by themselves.


Adam Robinson:
I got it. You’re clearly a systems thinker, right? I’m getting that.


Zawadi Bryant:
Yes.


Adam Robinson:
The business is fortunate that that’s the case, it sounds like. Once you have these systems and processes in place and you know how to execute the business model, how has that changed the way you approach putting the right people in the seats?


Zawadi Bryant:
Right. We read this great book and I can’t remember the name of the author but it was The Energy Bus. It talks about putting the right people in the right seats. It was really helpful for us because as we were defining our culture and values -because there are three partners: there’s me, Dr. Gentles and our other partner, Connie Cazares. We thought we were living embodiments of our values and culture and people would just get it by osmosis, by being around us. But, what we realized is that as we became further removed from the day-to-day business that we had to encapsulate and write what our values and culture were so that even our managers and front desk people could communicate and articulate what our values were, and they could interview to those values and compare people while doing the interview to our values.


 

 

 
We decided or we realized we had to write down everything. Everything that was in our head, we have to write it down, which … It’s very helpful because what you have in your head may not be easily communicated to someone else until you write it down and you have a discussion about it. What does it mean to say “We do the best”? which is one of our values. What does that mean to you? Because I know what it means to me. What does it mean to you? Then when we’re interviewing someone, it’s interesting to hear back from them. What does it mean when we say or you would say “I do my best?” How do you exhibit that? Give me an example of how you do the best, how you went above and beyond and did the best. Having an engaged conversation with someone about what I believe to be core to our company, it’s very important to have these values written down because I can’t assume you have those values just by an interview unless I ask you these questions.


Adam Robinson:
This is so encouraging. There are so few people that execute these core values, exercise and make it real and authentic and then translate it into their interviewing process, which it sounds like you do. Now, who taught you to do this, or is this something you just figured out you needed to do?


Zawadi Bryant:
Well, I like going to a lot of conferences, and I love connecting and networking with much smarter people, and so I believe we’ve been on the Inc. 5000 list for the last three years and I think it was the year … I believe it was 2015 that Tony Hsieh was there at the Inc. 5000 conference and he did his whole values and the Zappos delivering happiness talk. It was just like, “Oh, my gosh. That’s exactly what we need to do.” Because we were going through this transformation where it’s like: how do we find the right people? “That’s exactly how. We have to write our values down. We have to speak the language and values. We have to talk about our culture because if we don’t exercise our culture, someone else is going to come in and take over our culture. If we don’t create, define and promote our culture, then our culture is going to be kidnapped, taken over.”



That was a big aha, opportunity or moment for me when I went to his presentation. Since then, we’ve been engaged with that delivering happiness methodology and engaged with his consulting team and stuff like that. That’s helped us along the track of defining our culture and our values.


Adam Robinson:
Got it. Well, what you allude to is something certainly I’m a big believer in. You have a culture and it’s either by intent or it’s by default. It sounds like you’ve taken steps to take control of your culture and absolutely make it by intent. Let’s talk for a second about your process for hiring. It sounds like you have some core values, targeted questions. What other approach or approaches do you use that help you zero in on that person with the highest likelihood to succeed at your organization?


 

Zawadi Bryant:
We just went to a methodology of using the industrial psychology assessments because we’re hiring a lot more people. For me, we’ve gone away from references. We still do references but we don’t rely a lot on reference checks because that hasn’t always yielded us the best value. For me, I want to model or clone if I could our top performers.


Adam Robinson:
Sure. Don’t we all? Don’t we all?


Zawadi Bryant:

 
What we’ve done recently is we’ve utilized a company that has done an industrial psychology assessment on our top performers. Any new applicant that comes in takes that same assessment and it compares the candidates to our star performers and it allows us to see are they within the range of what we consider as a star employee? It’s hard to ascertain what those core competencies are and unfortunately, I’ve done enough interviews to realize that some people are really good in the interview.


Adam Robinson:
Oh, yeah. Yes, they are. They’re professional sales people.


Zawadi Bryant:
They are good. Even the best, even after 10 years of interviewing and I’m like, “Ooh. Wow. I missed that one.” We’re trying to define and narrow that scope of the type of person we’re looking for based on our values, based on our star employees and their performance.


Adam Robinson:
How many folks are on your management team that participates in the interview process?


Zawadi Bryant:
I would say each of our hiring managers for each of the locations is always involved in their hires. Then they are partnered with a peer, with someone else. We always have two people in the interview just because one person is asking, the other person is observing, and then they back and forth. Then they convene afterward and share notes, and I want it to be a shared decision if that candidate would then go forward in the interview process.


Adam Robinson:
You’re hitting off all the best practices on the list here. You have tandem interviews going off. One listening, one talking. You don’t need any … You don’t need any help at all with this stuff. Speaking about those managers then, what do you think is the most important quality for them as managers? You’re such a people-intensive business. You deliver service to parents with sick children. There’s no higher stakes or more anxiety-ridden conversation than what’s wrong with my sick child? Tell me about how you identify future leaders now in your organization. How does that differ and how does that change as you scale?


Zawadi Bryant:
It’s always been my dream, as the company grows, that there are more opportunities for these star employees to matriculate and to grow and develop. We have this one staff member right now who has since graduated and now has really graduated out of a job. We’re like, “We need to find her a job because we need to keep her and retain her because she’s going on for higher education of which we can then hire her back at a provider level.” We’re like, “How do we create an opportunity for her? How do we engage her and develop her management skills while she’s going to school for her clinical skills to retain this amazing employee?” Right now, we’re developing a pipeline management development track to identify where are you on the management scale or leadership, it doesn’t have to be managed but leadership, and what skills are you lacking so that we can train you, develop you for those and give you opportunities like projects?



I tell people we have so much on our plate right now as we’re growing. There’s plenty of projects for people to get their feet wet on leadership, time management, delegation, analysis, all of those skills, communication, spreadsheets, presentations. All of those skills we’re developing a pipeline for people to pick up modules in those areas along the way so that we can develop and identify the future operations managers, district managers and things of that nature because I would love for us to retain people and grow them as they develop and they want to stay with the company.


Adam Robinson:
That’s great. You are investing in the highest potential of folks that you have way ahead of time. Did you pick this up at any big corporate jobs or is this just instinctual to you? I’m fascinated. This is not something they teach you at big oil and gas companies.


Zawadi Bryant:
Well, actually it is. You’d be surprised. I have an engineering background and I have an MBA, but my partner always used to tell me, especially when we started, like, “You don’t know this?” I’m like, “They don’t teach you how to run a company in business school. They teach how to work at someone else’s company.” That has since changed. There’s a lot of great entrepreneurial programs in business school.



I think for me I’ve always been a researcher and super curious about stuff. Having an engineering background, a problem solver so I know enough to know what I don’t know and I will find somebody that does know it. I think for me, coming out of grad school, the best opportunity I could ever have had was working at Hewlett-Packard where they had rotation program for new hires that were coming in that were on the track to be managers. You went through a rotation in marketing, in research and development, in manufacturing, in finance. You got a great cross section of all those important departments in a company of how to run a company. A lot of people come to our company and they’re shocked at how many processes and design and systems we have in place. And that’s just because that’s how I was trained. Even though we’re small, we can still adopt a lot of those systems in our training, our development, our onboarding process. Just because we’re small it doesn’t mean we have to be mom and pop and thin in execution.


Adam Robinson:
That’s awesome. That’s great. What a difference it’s going to make for you as you cross into that next stage of growth. That’s great.


Zawadi Bryant:
Thank you.


Adam Robinson:
Let’s talk for a second about your philosophy about rewards and feedback. Now, you’re getting up to a relatively large employee count across the network. How are you approaching rewards, compensation, and feedback? Do you have a philosophy about that? Is that every location for themselves? Is it structured? I’m guessing there’s a system for that, too.


Zawadi Bryant:
Yeah. That’s actually an area, a gap for us that we’re working on right now. We just recently made a major hire for us. We hired a director of operations and that took us a long time to find the right fit for that job because essentially I was operating as COO and CEO, and we needed someone to do more of the operations, day-to-day operations, so I could do a lot of the strategic stuff that I need to do for our growth. We brought her onboard because we have some gaps that we need to address such as compensation, performance reviews, and rewards. She’s digging into that. She brings 20 plus years experience working at other clinical operations, larger operations than us so that’s helpful because I don’t have that healthcare background that she does, so she brings a lot to the team.



Where it comes with performance reviews, we’re working right now to streamline our performance reviews to one time a year. It’s been all over the place and then the raises had been all over the place and looking at how much we do in raises, it’s really expensive. By going to a one-time a year where we have not a bell curve but a pot of money that we distribute equally, fairly based on well-defined skills, and values, metrics, and people understand these KPIs for the company, like the number of patients. This is how that drills down to your specific performance plan, this is how you impact the number of patients that come in the door. When people understand that, then they don’t have any issues if I get a small raise or a huge raise because I understand individually how I impacted that major KPI of the number of patients coming in the door. We have not had that transparency before so that’s what we’re currently working on right now. I’m super excited about that.


Adam Robinson:
Wow. All right. You’re all over it as I would expect. Let’s talk big picture. You’ve been at this for a number of years. It sounds like you’ve learned and adapted. What’s the biggest lesson learned been as you’ve scaled the business related to people? What’s the thing that you’re sitting here thinking, “Boy, I wish I would have known that five years ago?”


Zawadi Bryant:
We’re in the people business and I think any business, as you grow, you will soon realize that you’re in the people business, people development business. For me, the biggest learning was people really want to grow. I believe the people that we hire, they really, really want to grow.



I’ve been surprised by when I talk to people about what we’re doing, the shock of people. They’re like, “You really invest in your people like that? You really spend that much time developing your people?” I’m like, “They touch our patients. They are the walking embodiment of NightLight. I’m not. They are.” Our patients experience and touch them, not me. I’ve been really blessed and very encouraged by the response that our team members have to the amount of attention and development we give them. That’s been the greatest blessing to me. That’s been the greatest impact to me is seeing them develop and seeing them light up when they learn a new task or push themselves to finish a project that they didn’t think that they were capable of doing. That’s just been the greatest blessing of having this business, not the financial rewards and all of that kind of stuff.


 

 

 

 

 
I was talking to our accountant today and she’s like, “Do you realize how much money you guys spend on this stuff?” I’m like, “I understand that. That’s never been a driver for me and my partners to take home the biggest pot of money.” As we continue to grow and develop, I’m just super encouraged by all of the new opportunities that we have to really blow minds, not only our patients but our employees via the opportunities for growth and development we have. As we grow, I’m seeing people that started off making $9 an hour have the potential to make 25, $30 an hour. That’s just amazing to me.


Adam Robinson:
That’s awesome. Well, listen, it sounds like you are offering a service that is sorely needed. You’ve got market pull. It’s great. But, I think the success is coming from your investment in people. I think you understand exactly the return you’re getting on that investment so that’s very cool.



All right. A final couple of questions here. What book are you reading right now and would you recommend it to our audience?


Zawadi Bryant:
The book we are reading as a company is I think everyone has heard about. I don’t know people have read the Simon Sinek book, Start With Why.


Adam Robinson:
Absolutely.


Zawadi Bryant:
We just recently went through a rebranding campaign where we were asking ourselves why do we exist? Why are we here? Not the how, not the what, but why? We did the values but we still didn’t have the why. Why do we exist? What makes us get up and get super excited about the service we provide? And, that’s been a great book that the management team has been reading. Once we read a book, we then put it out in the libraries for the team members and the different clinics to read as well. I’m excited for them to read that book but that’s been really helpful, not only just in the business, but we also have a Bible study. My business partners, we have a Bible study. We open and make it available to our employees and the community. We read Why on Earth Am I Here? by Rick Warren. The same thing, why are we here? A lot of people are asking the question: why? I think that’s an important question to answer for yourself.


Adam Robinson:
Absolutely. If you were to look out a year from now and think about where you want this business to be and what you have on your plate right now and the one thing that’s most important as it relates to the people side of your business, looking out a year, what looks different?


Zawadi Bryant:
I think what looks different is I think more of the team is elevated. We’ve gotten amazing kudos, amazing exposure but what I’m excited about is that we have these great managers that are doing amazing things, and I’m encouraging them to go out and speak and get expert knowledge on certain things. What I see is as we expand to other cities, which will happen over the next year, is just the amount of opportunities for growth and development that are going to explode for not only our managers but our team members to be elevated to managers and then district managers. This is the next year to two years. It’s going to be a huge explosion of growth for the people in our organization. Super excited about that.


Adam Robinson:
It sounds like a breakthrough in the making. Very awesome. That’s great. Well, congratulations on all your success. That’s the final word. You’ve been learning from Zawadi Bryant, CEO and co-founder of NightLight Pediatrics. Zawadi, thank you so much for being with us on the program.


Zawadi Bryant:
Thank you for having me.

Free Download: Candidate Scorecard

When you begin the interview process, it’s critical to use the same system of measurement for every candidate. It helps eliminate bias and keeps you on track in your process. I recommend using a candidate interview scorecard.

 

Click here to download the Candidate Interview Scorecard as part of the Select the Right Person Toolkit.

The Best Employee Retention Strategy Starts with Three Simple Words

It’s more difficult than ever to retain employees. With U.S. unemployment rates at near historic lows and with workforce demographics shrinking the size of the labor pool, main street businesses need to take a hard look at their current employee retention strategy and determine whether or not it’s getting the job done.

Retention begins with driving employee engagement; engaged employees are much more likely to stay with their current employer. Unfortunately, employee engagement is at an all-time low: the most recent results from the Gallup Employee Engagement Survey show that a staggering 67% of employees are not engaged at work.  The survey also suggests that companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers on an earnings per share basis by 147%.

So we know that 1) employee engagement sucks at most companies and 2) companies that #DoItRight significantly outperform their peers. There’s your motivation. Now, where to start?

Here’s the thing: you don’t need to hire expensive consultants to tell you how to retain employees. Retention begins with engagement because engaged employees exhibit lower turnover rates. Employee engagement is a function of many factors: shared expectations, mutually agreed-upon goals, culture fit, comp and benefits, peer interactions, and countless others. Since your employees are (most likely) actual human beings, your retention strategy can start with three simple words:

Giving a sh*t.

It sounds glib, but I’m dead-serious. If the CEO and/or management team doesn’t give a sh*t about employee engagement, engagement will suffer. Conversely, if they do give a sh*t, they’ll be compelled to do stuff that improves engagement. It’s not rocket science. And like any other business process where management actually gives a sh*t about the outcome, you need to have a pre-defined playbook that’s followed by all.

Hireology’s engagement playbook can be summarized in five parts:

Make day one great
Public introduction
Learn the basics
Earn your spot
Celebrate your success

Make day one great – When a new hire leaves work on their first day, their spouse, friend or significant other will inevitably ask, “How was your first day?”  We want that answer to be, “It was great!” We aim to accomplish this goal with a few specific tactics.  First, we have a scripted first day: our Director of People runs the same playbook for every Day One; from the welcome sign on the door, to the pre-stocked and established desk, to the previously configured computer equipment and phone, it’s all defined and designed to produce the desired outcome.

Public introductions – We introduce all new hires in front of the entire company at the weekly all-company huddle on Tuesday mornings at 8:35 am. They’re asked three questions:  What’s your name?  Where are you from?  And my favorite – What’s your spirit animal? (it’s a Hireology thing).  We want them connected to the culture as soon as possible and breaking the ice by asking them to share some fun but benign personal information begins the trust-building process.

Learn the basics – New hires are given two books that are incredibly important to helping them understand what we do and how we do it.  First, they get a copy of my book, The Best Team Wins, which outlines the hiring concepts and best practices that are the foundation for our software solution. Second, they get a copy of the book Traction, which explains the internal operating systems that govern the way we manage the company. If you read both of those books, you’ll get what we’re about.

Earn your spot – We believe that the highest-performing workplaces are managed as a meritocracy: pay raises, promotions and additional opportunities are awarded to those who do the best work. Goals and objectives are not only set, but they’re universally understood and visible to everyone on the company intranet.  If you want that additional opportunity, you know what it takes to get there because expectations are made clear to everyone.

Celebrate your success – Over the years, we’ve created a number of culture moments that celebrate successes and big occasions during an employee’s tenure.

Core Value Shout-outs – Every week, we open up peer-submitted “core value shout-outs” for submission and read all of the nominations out loud at the weekly all-company huddle.
Lab Coat Ceremony – When an employee hits their 90th day, they’ve earned their lab coat. We host an all-company ceremony and induct them as official Hireologists, complete with toasts.
Hireoloversaries – As the CEO, I hand-write cards to employees on their annual anniversary date and we celebrate with cake.

There are numerous department-level awards and events, too. In my opinion, the more celebrations of success, the better.

This entire playbook exists because we give a sh*t about our people, our culture, and leveraging both into a source of competitive advantage. Engagement is high, and therefore retention is high.  Some of our competitors approach their people strategy this way, but most don’t come anywhere close. It gives us a leg up in recruiting and hiring, and it reduces our costs due to turnover. Our customers get better service because they see and hear from the same people year after year. Our sales team wins more deals because they’ve built relationships with prospects over the years.

Lots of benefits accrue to companies who give a sh*t about driving high employee engagement. They’re yours for the taking.

 

 

Episode 31: Ryan Leavitt, CRO and Co-Founder of LearnCore

 

This episode is available on iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud, and Stitcher.

Show Notes:

1:00 – What is LearnCore?

3:06 – On the first LearnCore hire.

” As a startup, you need two things in finding great early employees. One, you need someone to take a risk. You need to be able to sell the dream to them. A lot of times, there’s not a lot of revenue. There’s not a lot of customer. You need people to buy in and really want to be part of that and really take that risk. Number two is something we learned early on especially with that first employee. I learned this from talking to a lot of folks who had been there before. It’s that we weren’t looking for people with specific experience for a specific role. At a startup, my first employee, that role could change literally every day. We needed people that were nimble, that were agile, that were very good decision makers and they embraced the challenge, but also tried to solve it and wouldn’t sit there and watch the challenges happen.”

4:49 – The team at LearnCore learned how to build the best team for their startup by failing first.

5:50 – Favorite interview questions and accountability.

“We really focus on building a culture of accountability at LearnCore. People, of course, are accountable for their own performance, their own actions, but what they do is accountable to their team, to the company as a whole. When we build that type of collaborative environment where everybody has that ingrained belief in what we’re doing and is passionate about the success, then they’re let down if someone else on their team doesn’t want to be there or isn’t working as hard or doesn’t really have the same passion.”

8:15- Ryan discusses core values at LearnCore.

 “What we realized is that there wasn’t necessarily great alignment in our values, because we had determined them as a leadership team. We recently did is during a lunch activity over a couple hours as a team, we broke up into groups and did some sort of team building in an activity where we would come up with all the core values that were important to everybody across the team.”

12:38 – Ryan’s philosophy on leading and managing people.

“I think that all goes back to listening and communication. Without that, I think it’s hard to be a really good leader. That’s something that doesn’t necessarily come naturally, especially to people that are running all the time and going a million miles an hour, but it’s important to slow down and leverage that when you’re trying to be a leader.”

14:17 – Compensation Philosophy at LearnCore

“We always want to be competitive with the market and give people the opportunity to earn even more. Because of that, we want to make sure that ever role has some sort of performance based comp. What it does is it helps to align incentives and make sure people focused on succeeding for themselves and performing well and for their team. “

16:49 – Performance management and employee/employer feedback.

“When there are people that we’ve hired that their performance is not up to par, and that could be maybe they don’t have the skills and we need to coach them. Maybe they don’t have the right attitude and they need to be coached. Maybe they’re just not a good fit. Whatever it is, if their performance is not at the same level and their passion and their dedication is not at the same level as the other folks on the team, they feel that. It frustrates them as well. What it does, it forces us as leadership to have those feedback conversations earlier and more often. We need to be able to quickly realize: how do we solve this? Is it a performance plan? Is it coaching to specific skills? Maybe that person is a great fit for the company, but they need to be in a different role. Maybe they’re not a good fit for the company and we should let them go. We need to make those decisions quickly because again we’ve created this environment where it does impact other people on the team.”

19:43- Greatest lesson learned about the people side of your business.

“People management, when it comes to either managing or making sure the team is happy and productive or finding new people, is really, really difficult. For us, I’m spending now probably about 40% of my time on recruiting and hiring because we need to have an absolutely great team. A good team doesn’t cut it. We need to have a great team, especially as I mentioned before, each person is really two to three percent of the company. We need to really boil it down. It’s on us as leadership to build that team.”

21:39 – What is LearnCore best at when it comes to the people side of their business? Learning and getting better.

23:30 – What’s keeping you up at night?

24:43- Ryan is currently reading Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willinks and Leif Babin, two former Navy SEALS.

“What was a goal that you set that you failed? Was it their fault? Did they own up to it themselves or was it external factors? A lot of this is around how that focus and expectation and communication is really important from a leadership standpoint. They also combine that. They mix that message with some battlefield stories. That makes the book a little more entertaining too.”

26:26 – What is your greatest challenge in the next year?

“It’s this idea I think of compounding. That’s not just revenue growth. That’s not just number of clients but in our team. If we achieve the goals that we’ve set out to build this really great, really dynamic team of passionate leaders at LearnCore, the recruiting and our brand in the marketplace and the number of fantastic candidates that come in will hopefully also compound.”