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July 17 - July 23, 2020
The Weekly Coaching Conversation: A Business Fable About Taking Your Game and Your Team to the Next Level by Brian Souza.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.
one-on-one coaching is the #1 factor linked to great management.
Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership, by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi,
Use these conversations to review individual KPIs, Priorities, and Critical Numbers from column 7 of the OPSP at each meeting.
give feedback on adherence to Core Values and, if necessary, develop strategies to correct behavior.
in order to grow people, you must expose them to different experiences (10 years of work experience is not the same as one year, repeated 10 times). Regularly modify an employee’s tasks and responsibilities to present new challenges.
Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni’s book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
“Great coaches consistently get the most out of their people, because they consistently put the most into their people,”
Managing people is difficult because people are complex.
it is good to remind ourselves that in business and in life, the journey, not the destination, is the reward.
“When all is said and done and we’ve completed this journey we call life, what will matter most is not what we have achieved — but rather who we have become.”
People are not resources that you consume.
The other way to know if you have a strategy? Do you say “no” 20 times more than you say “yes” — no to the increasing number of opportunities coming your way; no to the wrong customers for your business model; no to nineteen of the twenty people wanting to work with you (because marketing is getting you a steady stream of applicants!); etc.?
you say yes only until you have the luxury to say no
Hermann Simon wrote the definitive book on privately held growth firms called Hidden Champions of the 21st Century.
Salim Ismail’s breakthrough book Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)
Once the company gets larger than 50 to 70 employees — the size at which the senior leaders no longer know everyone’s name and start seeing “culture drift” — it is critical to codify the Core, articulate it, and reinforce it on an ongoing basis.
Core Values are the rules and boundaries that define the company’s culture and personality, and provide a final “Should/Shouldn’t” test for all the behaviors and decisions by everyone in the firm.
his biggest mistake was modifying the company’s five Core Values to accommodate a major acquisition.
the term “merger” should be eliminated from the business vocabulary.
Discerning the Core Values is a DISCOVERY process, not the creation of a wish list of nice-to-haves.
Once you have this starting list, do not carve it in stone,
Let the Values bake for a year, testing their validity at the next several quarterly planning sessions.
read the Harvard Business Review article titled “Building Your Company’s Vision,” by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras.
If the Core Values are the soul of the organization, the core Purpose (some call it “mission”) gives it heart.
The Purpose answers the ageless question “Why?”
Peter Diamandis’ “Massively Transformative Purpose.”
Mission: We prefer the term “Purpose,” which is more heartfelt.
Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad labeled them Core Competencies in their groundbreaking May 1990 Harvard Business Review article titled “The Core Competence of the Corporation.”
A Core Competency has three attributes, according to Prahalad and Hamel: 1. It is not easy for competitors to imitate. 2. It can be reused widely for many products and markets. 3. It must contribute to the benefits the end customer experiences and the value of the product or service to customers.
Don’t define Core Competencies too narrowly.
“What CEOs don’t realize is the access you have that other people don’t, and how you can create opportunities for people you never would have thought of,” says Ratliff.
Not long after Ratliff and his team launched the Dream On initiative, turnover dropped to 20%. While the initiative cost money, it paid a 20 times return on investment in terms of reduced turnover costs in less than a year.
“The overall sense of belonging, of being part of something bigger than themselves or their individual sites, and part of a community, has been one of the biggest changes I’ve seen in employees,” says Ratliff. “I felt more connected to our entire group, and the company became much more human to people.”
If you have clearly articulated Core Values and a Purpose that are part of your everyday experience, it helps direct that massive action around the right activities.”
A leader must go beyond merely posting a company’s Values and Purpose on the wall and handing out plastic laminated cards. The key is for you to align ALL of your HR (People) systems and processes around one list of your Values and Purpose.
Stories provide the explanation for Core Values that might seem unusual or cryptic on their own. Identify some “legends” and current stories that represent each Value.
“It was more rewarding for the person who wrote the story than for the person who was recognized when we told the story,”
Design your interview questions and assessments to test how candidates align with your Core Values
Your goal, after all, is to hire for culture fit.
a proper onboarding process makes new hires feel welcome and integrates them more quickly into the culture.
“We basically said, ‘You don’t have to live these in your personal life, but if you want to be part of the family we’ve created at work, these are the Values we’ve all agreed to work under. This is our shared language and commitment to each other,’
Core Values should provide the framework on which you hang your performance appraisal system.
organize your employee handbook into sections around each Core Value.
Employees’ performance was scored on how well they acted on the Core Values.
Organize your recognition and reward categories around your Core Values.
Highlight one Core Value in each issue, incorporating stories (yes, more stories) about people putting these Core Values to work for the betterment of the company.
takes one of its six Core Values and makes it the theme for the quarter, asking all employees to focus on ways to improve the company around the theme.
