Susan Solovic's Blog, page 4

Google Googled ‘What makes a successful team?’ – here’s what they found

Outsiders have been trying to unlock Google’s secrets for attracting and retaining top talent for the last couple of decades.

Is it the cafeteria food?
How about the ping-pong tables or video games?
Maybe it’s just that Google pays extraordinarily well.

All of these factors certainly play a role, but when Google decided to carefully examine what makes their teams successful, five qualities were revealed:

Psychological safety
Dependability
Structure and clarity
Meaning of work
Impact of work

Items two through five on that list probably look familiar to anyone in a leadership position. But I believe it’s worthwhile to examine them in two contexts:

How they relate to the group dynamic, and
How they relate to individuals within the group.

Let me start with that second point and make a statement whose truth is apparent to everyone, but is sometimes ignored: Individuals within work groups must shoulder their share of responsibility for the group’s success. Now let’s quickly examine those last four points in this light.

Dependability. This is the most obvious attribute where individuals must take a great deal of responsibility. All of us have been in situations where we’re waiting for someone else to finish their work before we can begin ours. You have probably worked with someone whose inbox seems to be a black hole. Not only does this kind of behavior slow the process, it poisons the work group. It fosters an attitude of “Why bother?” within team members.

On the leadership side, if teams can’t depend on follow through or implementation from management, it has an even worse effect on employee attitude.

Structure and clarity. Teams need a healthy amount of structure and to achieve this, communication must be clear.

Do you remember all the press Zappos received a few years ago when it bulldozed its org chart and implemented self-management through a system dubbed holacracy? I wrote about it here, ending my article with, “There are a lot of hurdles for Zappos to overcome as it makes this move and I don’t think success is guaranteed.”

That Google found structure and clarity necessary for success goes contrary to the philosophy behind holacracy, and it turns out the Google is on the right side here. A follow-up article in Fortune revealed that after adopting holacracy, Zappos fell off the magazine’s yearly 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2016. The company had made the list for eight straight years. More testimony to the fact that Google’s structure trumps Zappos’ “flat management” system is evidenced in Google’s command of the number one position in the 2017 100 Best Companies to Work For list (Zappos is still out of the top 100).

Providing structure and clarity doesn’t mean you have to burden your team with hidebound rules, regulations, and red tape. You should communicate goals, time tables, and provide direction. This could be as creative as “Bring back five off-the-wall, never-tried marketing ideas at the end of the month.”

You may have some folks on your staff who are founts of innovative ideas. You might want to cut the loose and have them sometimes operate with little supervision. But remember that it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a mad genius and a loose cannon!

Meaning of work and impact of work. I’m going to deal with these together because I believe they are closely related.

Members of your team need to find personal satisfaction or meaning in their work and they need to believe that their work has some lasting impact. If they feel they are merely cogs on the wheel of a meaningless commercial grind, your employees will become apathetic and unresponsive to efforts to grow your business.

When people sense meaning in their work and believe it makes an impact, it keeps them motivated to come in tomorrow and the next day and the next, contributing the best of what they have to offer.

There are, of course, certain positions where this kind of “meaningfulness” is difficult to achieve. When that is the case, make a concerted effort to let people in on the “big picture” and give them a chance to express their ideas in issues both big and small. When people know their ideas are heard, considered, and sometimes even acted on, their position in your company becomes meaningful and they know they have made an impact!

Also, individuals need to take some responsibility here. When they find themselves stuck in a position where they sense no meaning or impact, they should speak up and express their reservations to leadership. In turn, leadership should see this as a positive and not penalize employees who sense they aren’t in the right position.

I’ve left psychological safety for the end, but you need to know that Google considers it the single most important factor for successful teams. Above, I mentioned that even within structure, team members can contribute innovative ideas. However, stepping outside of the norm or your company’s tradition requires psychological safety. In fact, Google contends that the other four qualities are built on a foundation of psychological safety.

A friend told me once about working for several months under his company’s “fixit guy.” This manager was sent in to straighten out troubled departments or projects. He made it clear to everyone that as long as what they did was in line with his goals, he was fine with it – and he was true to his word. People discovered that they could try big things and even fail as long as they aligned with his goals.

He turned the department around.

Being able to draw on and experiment with diverse ideas is critical for success today. If you don’t create a culture where individuals feel psychological safety, they won’t come forward with ideas they fear will be criticized.

The negative not-invented-here attitude has no place in today’s business environment.

Now that you have an overview of these five items, if you were to grade yourself and your culture on each point, how would you do?

Further, why not conduct a survey with your employees and see how they would rate your company on these points? When employees find faults, encourage them to make suggestions on how to improve. This exercise will put you well on the road to creating a successful team.

Image: Charlie Chaplin, by Insomnia Cured Here, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

This week in small business: Productivity, management tips to make 2018 your best year ever

The emphasis this week seems to be on management and productivity, and with competition heating up to claim the riches promised by this growing economy, we can use all the tips we can find.

Leadership, management, and productivity

With hiring and retaining employees one of the critical challenges today, this article by Liz Greene on successful onboarding is timely indeed.

You’ll find practical advice in 4 Things to Know About Ecommerce Returns to Minimize Lost Profits and Keep Customers Happ...

A simple strategy to make more progress this year than ever before

Want to blast into the new year or the next season at your company with a real bang?

Consider having an “If only…” brainstorming session with as many members of your team as is practical.

Here’s what you do:

Announce a week or so in advance you’re going to have an “If only…” session.
Tell everyone to think of their jobs and your company as they complete statements that start with the words “If only…”
Give them some examples, such as, “If only we had a better system of logging customer service calls we could reduce mistakes,” or “If only we had enough money to buy a better printer we could send out great looking, updated product brochures.”
Get everyone together for a meeting to share their “If only…” statements.
Capture them all and put together a team to prioritize them.

Encourage your team to think both big, small, and in between. No idea is too big – or expensive – to be considered and no idea is so small that it doesn’t have the potential to make a positive difference in your company. In fact, the “bread-and-butter” progress in companies generally happens via a continual chain of incremental improvements. This isn’t to discount the big, bold moves you need to make from time to time – they are very important – but there is no improvement too small to be implemented…even if it something as seemingly insignificant as changing the brand of ball point pens you stock to one preferred by those on your team who are constantly filling out forms.

When you have compiled your list, circulate it or even post it in a place where everyone will see it. Then start working on it. Have a way to note when initiatives are in progress and when they are completed. Seeing that you actually follow up on suggestions from your team will improve employee morale and loyalty; these improvements alone will boost productivity. You see, this system pays off in two ways: by making the improvements themselves and by boosting your team’s commitment to the success of your company.

As you go into this process, let everyone know that you don’t have any sacred cows. Just because you’ve “always done things a certain way” doesn’t mean that you won’t consider another approach to accomplishing your goals. Encourage people to look at legacy operations from a fresh perspective. Encourage people to think across department lines.

Try it. What do you have to lose? You don’t want to be sitting at your desk a year from now thinking, “If only I had held that ‘If only…’ meeting, we might have had a more robust and progressive year…”

Here we go again: Facebook edges businesses out of news feed

Sometimes I think Mark Zuckerberg sees the people and businesses who inhabit his world – aka Facebook – like dolls at a 4-year-old’s tea party.

He sits us where he likes. He makes us interact with each other however the mood strikes him on any given day.

Currently, Zuckerberg is in the mood to decrease the amount of time you spend on Facebook (this caused FB stock to drop, costing Zuckerberg $3.3 billion) and to accomplish this, he ordered his people to feature less content from businesses, brands, and media in users’ news feeds.

The reasoning behind Zuckerberg’s decision is that he wants Facebook to bring us closer together with the people “who matter to us.” The boom in public posts from businesses and other entities started to claim too much territory on our news feeds, according to Zuckerberg.

Of course, we’ll have to wait to see what the ultimate impact of this may have. His pronouncement could be more PR than priority, if, for example, the decrease in public posts is very small.

On the positive side, Zuckerberg gives businesses a pretty good hint if they want their public content to work their way into people’s news feeds. The content “should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

He gives examples of how there are communities of Facebook users around TV shows and sports teams. You can probably relate to these kinds of groups. (As I’m writing this, the NFL playoffs are well underway and I imagine many Minnesota fans – after their team’s last-second win – are making comments to some public Facebook content posted by the Vikings organization.)

The point is that what you post as a business should have the potential to create general interest and engagement within your desired audience. A mere business pronouncement of some sort would probably fall short of these criteria. Post content that starts a conversation.

Zuckerberg also points out that live video creates more interest than recorded video. That should be further encouragement for you to explore how you can leverage Facebook Live.

I wonder if these kinds of moves weaken Facebook and social media marketing because they make planning difficult for businesses. If your audience exposure can change at the whim of one person, how can you budget or measure results?

It’s not crazy to believe that investors and accountants are shooting Zuckerberg emails right now asking him what he thinks he’s doing. After all, virtually every move Facebook has made up to this point is to encourage more business involvement in the social media platform. If he weakens Facebook as a marketing channel, perhaps someday – although not soon – a competitor will rise up.

UPDATE: In this Bloomberg article by Sarah Frier she details some rather heavy-handed strategies Facebook is using to encourage logins by lapsed users. User growth is the foundation of Facebook’s success. It’s possible that the platform is reaching the point when acquiring new users is costing too much, so they are increasing their effort to retain users. In this light, it could be that rebalancing the news feed to favor personal posts rather than “page” posts is an effort to prevent user drop off.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: This CNBC article by Matt Rosoff details how Facebook has lost net daily users in North America for the first time. This may explain everything…

Mark Zuckerberg on stage at Facebook’s F8 Conference image by Maurizio Pesce from Milan, Italia [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The lesson of the 1-legged seagull

It’s easier to reach people today than ever before in history.

However, that is both a blessing and a curse. Why? Because if it’s easier for you to reach people, it’s also easier for everyone on the planet to reach people. This leads to email overload, sensory overload, Internet addiction, tech burnout, and all kinds of modern day problems.

For the business owner, the problem narrows down to the question of how to get noticed.

Have you ever been on an ocean beach where hundreds of seagulls were scurrying up and down the edge of the water doing that “Mine! Mine! Mine!” seagull scream? If not at the shore, I’m sure you’ve experienced something similar in an open field or school yard.

I remember one day like that, but as I scanned the flock of gulls – more like a herd, actually – one caught my eye. It was hopping around and keeping up with all the other gulls despite the fact that it only had one leg.

I had to look two or three times to make sure I was seeing it right. I thought maybe it merely had one leg tucked into its belly or something. But no, this gull was getting by with just one spindly little seagull leg.

Once I noticed it, I couldn’t take my eyes off the one-legged gull.

You need to learn a lesson from that bird and apply it to your online marketing. That gull captured my attention and held it for two very basic reasons:

It was different from all the rest, and
It had an emotionally appealing story to tell.

The other hundred seagulls “reached” me, but the one-legged gull was the only bird that “touched” me.

First, note that it didn’t take a lot to catch my eye. After all, seagull legs are pretty tiny. I think this gull’s hopping motion is what I noticed, and even that wasn’t too different from how two-legged gulls get around on the sand.

Here’s the point: Our senses are quite good. We are visually screening our environment virtually every waking hour and we notice little things. You don’t have to be radically different visually to stand out from the crowd. You just need to have that one noticeable difference. I’ve discussed this many times in regards to your product or service, but the same principle applies to your marketing materials.

Second, once you catch your prospects’ eye, you need to grab their heart. I’m using the word “heart” here in a very general way. Your appeal doesn’t need to bring tears to your prospect’s eyes; it just needs to connect on some emotional level. The promise or proof of superior quality might grab the hearts of people who have been suffering through less than stellar quality, for example.

These points are important to remember when you’re developing marketing campaigns. We all want our marketing campaigns to return hundreds of qualified prospects. You can do this by spending a lot of money on ad buys – or you can differentiate your materials and design them in ways that push the right emotional buttons and get just as many prospects with smaller ad buys.

The question you need to ask yourself is this: Are you “touching” people or merely “reaching” people?

A lesson from Pringles: How to promote your brand more creatively

It’s always a smart idea when you can get a practical (and free) marketing lesson from a multi-million-dollar ad agency.

Today we thank Pringles for picking up the tab and giving us a great example of brand-based versus product-based messaging.

Recently Twitter published the findings of a study that looked at the marketing mix of branding and product advertising with an emphasis on video. They found – and this won’t shock anyone – that product advertising had a much higher short-term ROI than brand-only marketing: $2 versus 30 cents on their platform.

However, it was a couple of video messaging examples that I felt were interesting. One message was product based, the other brand based. Neither was intended to immediately sell a can of Pringles. Each was designed to get the viewer involved in a contest.

Here’s the brand-based Tweet with video:

Support your team & share your chants with #PringlesSuperFans for a chance to win the ULTIMATE football prize!https://t.co/jJQnqoZyoF

— Pringles (@Pringles_UK) June 15, 2016

I think this is the kind of presentation most of us would use if we were to promote a contest or something else of general interest – as opposed to promoting a direct sale of a product.

However, the second example below shows how Pringles (or their ad agency) featured products in a video designed to get people involved in a contest.

Join @ollyofficial at a private LDN show to help celebrate our 25th Birthday!

Here’s how: https://t.co/TdV8sEPBaQ https://t.co/e2EvGfvxy3

— Pringles (@Pringles_UK) March 8, 2016

I think the second video is very creative and demonstrates an approach that most of us wouldn’t come up with on our own.

Because the video is embedded in a Tweet, there’s no question about the brand; the familiar Pringles graphic is an integral part of every Pringles Tweet. And by using the Pringles cans with their flavors well displayed, there’s no question that Pringles products are also being “advertised.” Finally, because the video segues into a promotional pitch, the video does a good job encouraging viewers to participate in the contest or program.

As you design your graphics or produce videos to promote your products, services, and brand, don’t allow your thinking to be pigeonholed. Marketing assets that look like product ads can actually be used to increase overall brand awareness.

 

Join me for magical mystery tour of website analytics and SEO!

Do you like a good mystery?

If you do, come with me on a little journey. I won’t take much of your time and along the way we might solve an online mystery you’ve experienced.

I was reviewing a list of websites that had referred visitors to my site and I found that a few visitors had come from a Yellowstone area travel website.

I recognize most of the referring websites on the list, and of course sources like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are always at the top. But I wondered why and how were visitors coming to my site from this travel website.

I clicked on the link to find the backlink to my website. I examined the page and found nothing; there was no link to my site from this page that presumably sent visitors to my site. I wondered how are people traveling from a Yellowstone area travel website to SusanSolovic.com if there is no link connecting the two sites?

After doing a little research I found the answer: the Yellowstone area travel site hadn’t sent any visitors to my homepage. Zero. Zip. Nada. The “statistic” in my analytics that told me a couple of visitors had come from that site was plain wrong.

My analytics had been “gamed.”

But what is worse is that I fell into the trap set by these bogus “visits.” I clicked the link back to the Yellowstone travel page in my attempt to find the reference to my website.

In other words, while I originally thought the travel site had boosted my visitors, I had, in fact, boosted the visitors to the travel site; the Yellowstone site had pulled the old switcheroo on me.

The folks at the Yellowstone travel site may not even understand the situation. Here’s what I believe has happened:

The good people leading tourist groups at our premiere national park probably signed up with an agency (right now there are some based in China that are doing this) that promised to increase their web traffic. The agency then makes various websites (and Google analytics) believe that traffic is coming from the Yellowstone site. Finally, a curious website owner (like me) clicks on a link within analytics to find the referring link.

Ta-da! The Yellowstone travel site has one more visitor to its homepage.

This is one black hat SEO tactic that is being used today. There are others done by agencies that will send ghost visits to your site that will register on Google analytics and make it look like your traffic is surging. Unscrupulous website owners will then use this increased traffic to make their site look good to advertisers.

That’s not what the Yellowstone travel site was doing. I believe they just wanted to pull more visitors into their site. The problem is that the kind of visitors that come by a tactic like this are not interested in the product or service the website sells.

It’s better to have 10 qualified prospects a day visit your site than 1,000 random web surfers who end up on your homepage through some digital slight of hand.

This situation can be avoided if you remember some universal truths:

There is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to earn qualified prospects.
When it seems to be too good to be true, it is. Any SEO “expert” promising huge traffic is drumming it up in a way that, in the long run, you won’t want.

Don’t fall for any of these SEO scams. You’ll be wasting your money. Also, if you’re getting “visits” like these showing up in your Google analytics, you can filter them out. This way you can better judge what is really happening with your traffic. Zee Drakhshandeh has written a nice .

52 free self-paced business courses to fuel your success

“Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job. If you work hard on your job you can make a living, but if you work hard on yourself, you’ll make a fortune.” – Jim Rohn

I close my newsletter each week with a quote that I hope you’ll find inspirational. I featured this quote from Jim Rohn not long ago and it dovetails perfectly with one of my core beliefs: You need to continue to grow personally and professionally to achieve the level of fulfillment that you truly desire.

A new year always brings new commitments with it and I hope that the coming year will be one when you redouble your self-improvement efforts. As a small business professional or entrepreneur, I know that your schedule can be wild, long, and often unpredictable so I’ve compiled a list of 52 highly rated self-paced free online business courses.

Note: I’ve selected self-paced courses that have at least a four-star rating (out of five stars). However, some have as few as one review, so you’ll want to dig a little more deeply into the course content.

To get more details on any one of these, copy the course title, head over to Class Central and do a search. In virtually every case, you’ll get an immediate suggested search result before you hit return or enter to do a complete site search.

 

A Preview Course on The 5 Killer Risks of Enterprise Risk Management
via Canvas Network


An Introduction to Credit Risk Management
via edX


An Introduction to Success Factors Solutions
via openSAP


Athlete Career Transition
via Independent


Aviation 101
via Canvas Network


Becoming a Successful Leader (Inclusive Leadership Training)
via edX


Becoming an Entrepreneur
via edX


BI 4 Platform Innovation and Implementation
via openSAP


Careers in Media Technology
via Kadenze


Certificate Program in Public Procurement
via Independent


Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): A Strategic Approach
via edX


Digital Transformation and Its Impact
via openSAP


Economics of the Media
via MRUniversity


Enabling Entrepreneurs to Shape a Better World
via openSAP


eTourism: Communication Perspectives
via iversity


Evidence-Based Practice in Management
via edX


Experience SAP Cloud for Customer
via openSAP


Finance for Everyone: Smart Tools for Decision-Making
via edX






Get Beyond Work-Life Balance (Inclusive Leadership Training)
via edX


Get to Know SAP’s Innovative Enterprise Solutions
via openSAP


Global Human Capital Trends
via Canvas Network


How to Build a Startup
via Udacity


How to Start a Startup
via Independent


Increase Your Tips: Success in the Service Industry
via Canvas Network


Indexing Books as a Career
via Canvas Network


International Finance
via MRUniversity


Introduction to Actuarial Science
via edX


Introduction to Applied Investing
via Canvas Network


Introduction to Ariba
via openSAP


Introduction to Global Hospitality Management
via edX


Introduction to Investments
via edX


Introduction to Project Management
via edX


Introduction to the Music Business
via edX


Leadership for Engineers
via edX


Leadership in Digital Transformation
via openSAP


Leading With Effective Communication (Inclusive Leadership Training)
via edX


Management for a Competitive Edge
via Open2Study


Operations Management
via edX


Optimization Methods for Business Analytics
via edX


Planning Change and Innovation
via Open Education by Blackboard


Project Management Basics
via Open Education by Blackboard


Project Management for Business Professionals
via Canvas Network


Project Management for Designers
via Kadenze


Results-Based Project Management: Monitoring and Evaluation
via edX


Run Simple HR with SuccessFactors Employee Central
via openSAP


SAP Business Networks in a Nutshell
via openSAP


SAP S/4HANA – Deep Dive
via openSAP


Services Marketing – Selling the Invisible
via OpenLearning


Services Marketing – The Next Level
via OpenLearning


Six Sigma: Define and Measure
via edX


Social Innovation MOOC (EN)
via iversity


Stocks and Bonds: Risks and Returns
via Stanford OpenEdx