More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 8, 2017 - January 30, 2018
It’s important to revisit and examine one process every 90 days as part of your quarterly planning process. Like hallway closets and garages, these processes get junked up and need to be recleaned periodically. With four to nine processes, each will get examined roughly every 12 to 24 months, which is sufficient to keep your company running drama-free.
Take a look at Paul Akers’ “2 Second Lean” videos on YouTube, including how to set up a “lean
lean
This requires the active participation of the marketing function in the recruiting process and the use of Topgrading methodology in the interviewing and selection process.
Job Scorecard details a person’s purpose for the job, the desired outcomes of this individual’s work, and the competencies — technical and cultural — required to execute
An A Player, by the Smarts’ definition, is someone in the top 10% of the available talent pool who is willing to accept your specific offer.
While a job description tends to list what people will be doing (e.g., coaching sales reps, building client relationships), a Job Scorecard describes the outcomes you want from such activities ($8 million in revenue, seven new S&P 500 clients, a 100% contract renewal rate among the customers the trash collector serves). This is a critical distinction between the job description (hope you’ve not wasted time creating these) and the Topgrading Job Scorecard.
tapping the diversity of talent, backgrounds, and personalities needed to drive the fruitful debate, innovation, and differentiation that powers growth.
your competitive advantage depends on your people creating something valuable and distinctive, then your workforce can’t be normal.”
best candidates are probably working somewhere else and need a reason to consider your organization. And because budgets are always tight in growing firms, you must find clever marketing approaches to attract the specific kind of “strange” talent
placed an ad for a CFO on Treehugger.com, a green-living and environmental news site.
Making it onto Best Places to Work lists, even local ones in your region or city, is a clear sign of an attractive workplace that will draw applicants to your company. A book written by the CEO (something we strongly recommend); a regular column in the local biz journal; a popular blog; and/or regular LinkedIn Influencer posts are great recruiting (and marketing) tools and ways to grab attention in an industry.
MOM’s, the online job application asks questions such as “What companies do you admire?” to get a sense of a candidate’s values. “That gets us to a place where we know what is important to them,” says Nash. The company also asks why applicants are interested in MOM’s. “Some
The company will go through each candidate’s entire work history, as recommended, and ask questions about whom they reported to at each job — including the spelling of that boss’s name, to show that the company is serious about checking references. A typical follow-on question is, “What will so-and-so say about you?” “It’s a real truth serum,” says Nash. (This process is called TORC — Threat of Reference Check — in the Topgrading methodology. It works!) Interviewers will also ask candidates to discuss a time that they had to deal with a difficult boss or when someone said something painful to
...more
Zappos requires all new hires, no matter what the position (executive, programmer, marketer), go through a four-week training program that includes extensive time working in its call center serving customers. During this trial period, they offer these newbies a $3,000 bonus (besides their salary for the month) if they quit, guaranteeing that only those who really want to work at Zappos stay. Since acquiring Zappos, Amazon has adopted something similar for fulfillment-center workers called Pay to Quit.
it becomes crucial for the leadership team to build a capable team of middle managers (coaches).
Through rigorous selection (i.e., Topgrading), they get the absolute best talent in the door, pay employees above-market rates, and then invest heavily in training and development to make them more productive. Take storage-product retailer The
Look to your Core Values, your business model, and your Brand Promise, and let them instruct you in the design of your compensation plan. Don’t copy somebody else’s system.
experience positive interactions (appreciation, praise) vs. negative (reprimands, criticism) with their manager in a ratio of at least 3:1.
Great managers explain how their people’s work contributes to the greater objectives of the company and then help them align their individual priorities with those of the firm.
“line of sight,” an important concept to create engagement and a sense of purpose. Can your employees explain how what they’re doing helps deliver on your company’s purpose, strategy, and Brand Promise?
great managers set clear and consistent expectations about the outcomes of their team’s work.
Feeling the liberty to figure things out for themselves and apply their own style is very important for people, since autonomy is one of three main drivers of human motivation, as Dan Pink explains in Drive
more concerned about NOT demotivating them. They consider it their job to prevent the hassles that block their team’s performance. Such demotivators are usually related to issues with people or processes.
them. Nothing is more frustrating for A Players than having to work with B and C Players who slow them down and suck their energy. In that sense, “The best thing you can do for employees — a perk better than foosball or free sushi — is hire only ‘A’ players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else,” explains Patty McCord, former chief talent officer at Netflix, in a recent Harvard Business Review article
yup
Unreasonable clients who mistreat your employees and disrupt your business can become an important energy drain. Firing such clients can gain the manager huge respect internally. The negative financial impact is usually counteracted by the immediate rise in the spirits and productivity of your team.
fire bad customers
On the process side, do your people have the appropriate tools and resources they need to get the job accomplished? Are there lame policies and procedures frustrating your team? Do you need to bring in a Lean expert to help your people design new processes or streamline existing ones? Where might they be spinning their wheels because of unnecessary delays? Focus on ways to make your team’s job(s) easier — a great definition of an effective manager.
A strength isn’t just something you’re good at; it’s only a strength if it literally gives you strength, gives you energy
weakness, is something that, though you may be good at it, drains the life out of you.
key function of great managers is helping individual employees refocus and prune their jobs over time so they focus more on activities that give them strength and less on activities that make them weak. Though there will always be parts of anyone’s job that are draining, the companies that do better at minimizing these will have a more energized team.
you struggle with appreciating the differences in your team, you might be more of a leader than a manager. Managing is about differences; leading is about sameness. Great managers discover what is different about people and capitalize on it. Great leaders discover what is universal, build a common vision for a better future around it, and then rally people behind it. (Marcus Buckingham, this time in his book The One Thing You Need to Know … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, explains this difference between managing and leading.)
produce managers will typically read four to five books together every year.
Maria Rodale’s Organic Manifesto.
initial weeks on the job represent a unique chance to create connection and deeply ingrain a company’s DNA into new people. Yet few companies make proper use of this opportunity. Instead, the first days on the job often feel more like waterboarding than onboarding: no desk, no computer, no phone, the new boss is traveling, and the first assignment is shadowing an unenthusiastic colleague for two weeks.
Onboarding needs to be a celebration, not paperwork. It should create emotional connections between the new recruit and a maximum number of team members.
But they found that new recruits who went through the boot camp could hit the ground running at near 100% field-ready alignment, whereas before the orientation process was introduced, they had normally needed a frustrating six-month ramp-up period. Everyone became huge fans of the process as Sapient scaled up to 2,500 people.
People are exceptionally positive, receptive, and willing to learn in this phase, and they experience deep attachment to whatever you expose them to. So be careful about the kind of induction program you put in front of your “hatchlings.”
2% to 3% of your payroll is a good benchmark. Who should you spend it on? Senior leaders, middle managers, frontline employees? They all need training, but focus first on your middle management. In most growth companies, they have the hardest jobs and are critical to employee engagement and retention, yet get the least preparation for
It shows the videos every six to eight weeks in operations or other meetings. “It is a learning event incorporated into a meeting that has already been planned,” says Croft, the training director.
“The general idea is to expose these emerging leaders, if you will, to different thoughts about how we grow ourselves and how we grow a business, and how we grow a unit within the business,” explains Croft.
“What is the one takeaway that you are going to commit yourself to working on?”
If it is monthly, an hour is appropriate; if it’s weekly, then budget 20 to 30 minutes.
Recognize good performance, analyze underperformance, and discuss activities needed to get back on track. Ask questions to put the focus on the process, rather than lamenting results.
Regularly question each employee’s task list in your coaching conversations (e.g., do the “love and loathe” exercise) and search for opportunities to refocus activities on areas that the person is naturally drawn to but that at the same time represent a challenge.
Modern careers now resemble the process of rock-climbing, where the top does not have to be the goal. Getting across the rock face or reaching another specific spot can be much more exciting and rewarding.
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. It’s especially important that top managers lead by example, making sure their behaviors and decisions align with the Values. When Values fully permeate the company, the leadership team can avoid being sucked into many of the day-to-day operational issues. The rule becomes, “If you think you need to ask me permission for something, just consult the Core Values!” This gives management the confidence
...more
Out of this single idea should emerge a “stump speech” that the CEO shares repeatedly, reminding everyone of the big picture and “why we do what we do.”
To collect great stories about Appletree’s Core Values, Ratliff and his team initiated a Core Values Hall of Fame event, held every quarter. Employees were encouraged to look for colleagues whose actions embodied a Core Value and to submit a written story about this. “It was more rewarding for the person who wrote the story than for the person who was recognized when we told the story,” Ratliff says.
Collect values stories
