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“One thing we learned while building Google is that it’s easier to find what you’re looking for if it comes looking for you.
The key to finding them, as Nash, Browne, and others have discovered, is by creating a recruitment strategy that reflects your Core Values and Purpose and then using your marketing skills to reach the right potential pool of talent.
Assess Systems’ wide range of pre-employment tests and OMG’s Sales Assessments
For an excellent overview, read Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s book Who: The A Method for Hiring; to learn the details of the process, read Bradford D. Smart’s book Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance.
It’s important to hire the best A Player you can find for each position in your company.
Hire fewer people, but pay them more. 4. Give recognition, and show appreciation. 3. Set clear expectations, and give employees a clear line of sight. 2. Don’t demotivate; “dehassle.” 1. Help people play to their strengths.
If another wants more time off, let it happen. “Fairness” does not mean “sameness.” You need to be creative and flexible in order to keep your top talent happy, from a compensation-package perspective.
Studies have shown that for people to be happy and productive at work, they need to experience positive interactions (appreciation, praise) vs. negative (reprimands, criticism) with their manager in a ratio of at least 3:1. (Watch out: For a marriage to work, you actually need a 5:1 ratio!!)
To get ideas on how to create a culture of recognition and appreciation, see Chip Conley’s excellent book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, Chapter 5
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.
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.
Firing such clients can gain the manager huge respect internally.
noting all of the activities that drain their energy and keep these techies away from their primary strength: programming. She then eliminates those activities no one should have to do (they creep into every job) and then uses the remaining list to create a Job Scorecard for a new position — to be filled by a new chess piece that loves to do what others hate. Result: happier, more productive, and loyal programmers.
(gallupstrengthscenter.com).
In order to keep your company competitive and your people loyal, you must grow them through education and coaching.
The involvement of senior management in the onboarding process is critical.
And how much should you spend on training? It obviously depends, but 2% to 3% of your payroll is a good benchmark.
Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership,
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.
We also recommend Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni’s book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want. It is a great resource with many practical tips and hands-on guidelines on how to structure your one-on-one conversations. Add Brian Souza’s book The Weekly Coaching Conversation to help get your managers into the mindset required for great coaching.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
So rethink the name of the department that takes care of them. Call it Talent Development, Human Relations, People Support, or whatever fits your culture — anything but Human Resources.
Sustainable top-line revenue growth and increasing gross margin dollars
Similar values and boundaries play a parallel role in parenting. The key is having a handful of rules, repeating yourself a lot, and hoping that your family’s values sink in by the time your children strike out on their own.
If it is less than 5 years old, its Values are still being formed. The Values you listed when you started it may take a few years to take shape fully.
Once you have this starting list, do not carve it in stone, as one of our early clients did. (That client’s CEO literally had small engraved stones sitting on everyone’s desks a week after the exercise.) Let the Values bake for a year, testing their validity at the next several quarterly planning sessions. Ask the leadership team, “Are there plenty of examples where we lived these Values?”
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.”
It’s equally important for a company to understand what it is inherently incapable of doing, or its core weaknesses.
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.”
“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,’
In addition, organize your employee handbook into sections around each Core Value.
In either case, establish a rhythm that keeps the Core Values top-of-mind by repeating them.
Having managers who are engaged, every day, in reinforcing the company’s Values and Purpose through their decision-making is the most important routine of the eight.
Every time you praise or reprimand someone, tie it back to a Core Value or Purpose.
We’ve found that managers and CEOs can repeat Core Values endlessly without it seeming ridiculous, as long as the Core Values they’re using are relevant and meaningful to their employees and they make connections to real situations.
Strategy is what a senior team should be spending the bulk of its time on, anyway — not fighting fires on a day-to-day basis, which is best left to the middle managers.
In the end, that’s what branding is all about: owning a small piece of the mind-space within a company’s targeted market, whether that’s in a local neighborhood, an industry segment, or the world.
The key is owning words that matter — the ones people think about and use to search for your products and services.
KEY RESOURCES: Robert H. Bloom and Dave Conti’s book The Inside Advantage: The Strategy That Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business, and Rick Kash and David Calhoun’s book How Companies Win: Profiting From Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In
Bloom and Conti’s book will help you discern a concrete definition of your core customer.
Professional service firms might offer “short pay” guarantees, giving the client an option to pay whatever he thinks reasonable if there are issues.
Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
Frei and Morriss’ overarching point is that great brands don’t try to please everyone. They focus on being the absolute best at meeting the needs/wants of a small but fanatical group of customers, and then dare to be the absolute worst at everything else.
Michael E. Porter’s classic 1996 Harvard Business Review article titled “What Is Strategy?”
Underpinning the One-PHRASE Strategy is a set of specific actions that represent HOW you execute your business differently from the competition.
“a true differentiator can only be defined as something your competitor won’t do or can’t do without great effort or expense. Often these can take years to develop since if it can be done cheaply, easily and quickly it provides little or no competitive advantage.”
The key is to choose HOW you go about delivering your products and services in your industry in ways that are nearly impossible for your competition to copy.
Read Porter’s article, along with Uncommon Service, and establish a set of activities — “how” you run the business — that is different from the norms of the industry, helps you drive profitability, and blocks the competition.
Verne’s Fortune article titled “The X-Factor”: http://tiny.cc/the-X-Factor
