Keeping up with Trouble

Two weeks ago, my wife broke her arm falling on a slick floor. Since then she has had to be operated on to get the bone set, have a cast put on, and is handling all the other difficulties involved with a broken arm on her dominant hand.

Thankfully she is healing and I have been able to accommodate the changes in my schedule without too much trouble.

Most small business owners do not have that luxury of rearranging their schedule. Someone in the family gets sick, or has an accident or other issues - all of these cause the owner to be pulled away from the business. Yet, being away from it can cause other problems to creep up.

You can't avoid the possibility of someone being sick; what you can do is have a plan for your being out. Are there certain duties you do regularly that you could train another person to do (in your absence)? For example, scheduling employees, or ordering food items. Do the employees know what they need to be doing while you are out? Who makes decisions when you are unavailable?

Now is also the time to have your key tracking financial numbers worked out - so if you are distracted or not able to read through all your normal work activities, you can still keep up with the business. Whether table turn for a restaurant, sales/employee hours or whatever ratio is relevant to your business, now is the time to work that out.

Having processes in order will not avoid all the difficulties, but it will mean that when you are out, there is a lessor chance of major problems arising.

Starting the day off right

Every weekday morning, about 7:50am, in office buildings throughout Japan, managers and their teams get together for a brief overview of the day. When I lived in Japan, this meeting was announced by a bell, and ended about 10 minutes later with everyone saying they will work hard together that day.

The meeting gives the team a chance to fill everyone in on who is going where, doing what, and what is important to be handled for the day.

The meeting participants speak one at a time round-robin, starting with the most junior employee and working up to the manager.

I liked this type of a meeting, and recommend it to small businesses. Once you have more than one or two employees, it is amazing how disconnected the owner gets from what his employees are doing each day. Many times I have spoken to exasperated owners remarking they can't understand why their employees are not doing what they are supposed to!

A daily quick recap meeting allows the entire team to know what's going on:

• When the phone rings for Sam and he is gone - everyone knows where he is - and why he is out of the office,
  
• By getting a sense of what his team is doing for the day, the manager understands where to better place staff or arrange schedules,
• Each team member is able to show that his or her work is important,
• There is a sense in which saying what you will get done out loud, motivates you to get it done.

Try adding a short - very short - daily recap meeting and see if it helps overall communication in your company. You may be surprised at what your employees are doing each day!

Hiring the right person

To continue with a theme from my last posting, finding the right employees for your organization will be critical as you grow.

Know who you want and need - but also be knowledgeable about what the market will demand and adjust accordingly.

Here is an example. A technology incubator in a mid sized southern city is looking for a CEO to head the incubator. Their press release says the

"candidate should have 10 or more years of professional management and leadership experience, preferably in the incubation industry, strong fund raising skills and financial management expertise, a successful entrepreneurial experience and demonstrated success in program development and implementation, marketing and administration."

The first thing that should strike you is "wow, this would be a pretty heavy hitter - successful entrepreneur, 10 years management, strong fund raising with demonstrated success". Second, think of how many organizations are looking for this type of person - pretty in demand person. Third, what would it take to get this person to come on board?

Then you get to their next sentence,

"A new CEO will get a mid-five figure salary, benefits, and incentives for fund raising"

Huh? Mid-five figures is what, $50,000? A successful manager, 10 years experience in any sort of technology company - entrepreneurial, take charge person, looking for a new challenge. Your probably making $100k, plus bonuses right now.

Why would you take this job?

Anyone in the incubation industry with 10 years of management experience is going to be making more than that already.

I am sure they are limited in what they can pay, but why ask for all the above if that is all they can offer? They'd be better off saying:

"Ready for a second career working with entrepreneurs? We are looking for a middle aged manager with a technology business background who wants to work with new businesses. We can't pay what you'd made at ABC, co. before they laid you off, but it is a fun environment. Come talk to us!"

At least that might get you someone close to what you are looking for.

If you are a small business, maybe you cannot afford to pay for the talent you need. But you have to give in on something to make it worthwhile to get the right person. You have to be creative: you are not IBM!

Stages of Group Development

As you run begin to develop a team of employees around you it is useful to know some basic information about groups and group formation.

Bruce Tuckman developed a 4-stage model for group development back in 1965, and it has been a major component of the study of group dynamics since.

He labels the stages:

1. Forming: the group comes together and gets to initially know one another and form as a group
2. Storming: a chaotic vying for leadership and trialing of group processes
3. Norming: agreement is reached on how the group will operate
4. Performing: the group practices its craft and becomes effective in meeting the objectives

The first consequence of this is to note that even if you are 'the boss' there will still be a vying for leadership and contention about the group processes. We have all been in situations where the group seems to operate in ways opposite to management expectations!

The second consequence is that how you generate the culture of your organization is going to have a large effect on the way it operates. Culture is the norms, values and methods of interaction between the group. As the employees come together, they will take on the character of the organization.

Once settled in, a culture can be very difficult to change. In fact, short of removing all the employees,I would argue it cannot change - and that businesses that seem to 'run down' or fail after a number of years are suffering from some form of cultural sickness.

By being aware of the process of group formation, you can try to influence the way the group comes together. And of course, since you will likely be the person hiring new employees, it is important to consider how they are going to fit into the group, and how the group will react to those changes. Don't be surprised if the addition of a new employee causes the entire organization to reach in unexpected ways.

Incubator Syndrome

I was reading a blog entry on incubators, and the author advised prospective clients to watch out for incubator syndrome: "in which the entrepreneur allows their initiative and judgment to be replaced by those of the consultants in the center." I had never heard this term used, but a quick Google search showed others have referred to the same.

If you are starting a business, and the incubator manager says he has started multiple businesses, and met with many companies, and here is what you need to do, you might well decide to follow me, rather than your vision.

And that would be bad.

But is it a 'syndrome'? I am no more easily able to manipulate your initiative than any other person you might depend on for advice.

It is true that I have to be careful to acknowledge that what advice I provide is just that - advice. My confidence of how you need to sell or market your product, while based in experience, is not the 'truth'.

What is more important than worrying about whether you will fall susceptible to the incubator manager's beguiling, is whether you really are making good decisions based on the advice you receive, and what your action will be. If you refuse to listen to advice and want to go it your own way, then why come into the incubator in the first place? Get clear in your mind what you want to do to be successful and then pursue that.

Most incubator managers are there to help you, not manipulate you into their vision of your company.

Of course, when I heard the use of the word 'syndrome' - i was reminded of the SNL skit "The Pepsi Syndrome"! I assure you, incubators are not like the nuclear power plants of the skit.

Fighting Adversity with Indifference

Chris Guillebeau in his latest post discusses what happens when he misses a goal he's set for himself:

1. Acknowledge disappointment: don't hide it away.
2. Revert to backups if possible: accept a secondary or partial goal.
3. Compare to other goals at the end of the year (and reevaluate for next year): if you did not achieve the goal, maybe others got in the way, or were more important.

Let's apply his response to our situation. As entrepreneurs, we are confronted with (the possibility) of failure every day. A sale could fall through, a product has a tough bug or problem with it, an employee - or yourself - can fail to get something done that needed to be done.

1. Acknowledge disappointment: let others know it happened - the telling gets it outside of ourselves
2. Revert to backups if possible: accept a secondary or partial goal - you did have an alternate or backup to whatever the goal was, didn't you?
3. Compare to other goals at the end of the year (and reevaluate for next year): if many things went right, and a couple went wrong, take it as a win and move on. Or decide on whether the goal is a valid one or not.

Try to follow the maxim: "Fight Adversity with Indifference". Act as though the setback has been expected, and that you have a response to it. It is not that you don't care about the missed goal - but that you are focused on the consequence, not the event itself.

An advantage of following the maxim also is that when you are setting the goal, you set the expectation as to what you will do if it is not handled. "We are going to sell product X to Company Z in 3 months" - well, what are you going to do if that does not happen?

Too often an entrepreneur says "well, we were supposed to get the sale last month, but didn't so now we don't know how to recover from it".

Instead, set goals in a matrix of what the different outcomes may be, and the resulting responses to them. It will keep you ready for when things do go wrong, and responsive when an alternative presents itself.

Evaluating your Staff

It is time for our bi-yearly performance reviews here at the tech center. Most people dread the entire process of performance reviews, and some entrepreneurs have been motivated to start their own business after receiving a review that seemed to ignore all they did the last year!

Once you start your own business and have your own staff, it is easy to decide that your company is not going to do the same tired performance review. But all to0 soon, it seems as though the HR blanket falls over the company and you are filling in forms that say "Performs duties as necessary" with a five point bubble scale.

It is understandable to want to avoid the above, and you are so busy doing other things - how are you going to review your employees? Nevertheless, this does not absolve your responsibility to evaluate the employees you have working for you!

One way I like to get my hands around an issue is to create a framework across two parameters and use that to categorize. You could consider your employees according to there Usefulness/Critical skills for the organization, and whether they are likeable/good to have around. (You may have other more important criteria).

Setting these two parameters into a quadrant layout gives us the following:This gives us four categories of employees. Then work out what you want to do for each category:

• An employee you want to keep, but is not doing a critical or very important role, you need to get them into something more useful (whether by training, promoting).
• The difficult employee performing a critical task needs to be handled carefully until you have the chance to brings someone else into that role or at the very least, be a backup. Then you can try to change whatever it is that makes them difficult.
• The want to keep/critical employee may not need any more than just taking care of them and being sure that what they need to do their job is gotten them.
• The difficult/non-critical employee needs to be moved out; you don't have the time to deal with that type of employee.

Generally, you want to move employees up and to the right, that is, someone you want to keep and someone doing something important. Those in the 'want to keep' and 'less critical' roles can serve as your 'bench' for future moves into important spots. Those in the difficult and critical you might have to keep because of skills or particular need, but you are always looking for someone who can better do the work.

Again, each of these are merely types, not particular people. By using a typology though, you can look over your 5, 10 or even 20 employees and quickly sort them into categories, then come up with reasonable responses for each.

If you have an employee you can't categorize, put him or her on your list to watch a bit more closely.

The reason I like this typology is that most employees already think of the other employees as 'nice or not' and 'good worker or not' - so it gives you a rough method to start thinking proactively about your employees and where they are going in their careers at your company. Which is something you as the owner should have at hand anyway!