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!

Rally!

Labor Day represents the end of Summer for most of us. Even though the local schools have been going since mid-August, and Fall seems a way off, Labor Day weekend ends Summer.

But in ending Summer, it also kicks off the next few months until the holidays start up again with Thanksgiving. Now is a great time to rally the team, get them re focused on business priorities and even enthused about what is coming.

Take a bit of time over the next few weeks to reconnect with each employee or report one-on-one. Does she know what is the most important thing that has to be done? Does he know what goals you have set for the next quarter?

Likewise, take a bit of time and be sure you know what your goals are for the next quarter - and what is the most important thing you need to get done.

Put away the beach clothes and let's get back to work!

New CBD Informational video

We've created a new video describing the Center for Business Development and what we offer. '

If you have a chance to view it, please give some feedback. The intent is to help in a small way to give prospective tenants to see what we can offer without necessitating them coming into the building.

Managing and Leading

In the August 17th Business Week, the back page article by Henry Mintzberg argues we are 'overled and undermanaged'. [As an aside, the article in the magazine was called "We're Overled and Undermanaged" but online the same article is called "The Best Leadership is Good Management" hmmm!]

He writes that it became fashionable a few years ago to say that Leaders "do the right thing" while managers "do things right" - and that crucially we've been told that Leaders need to be detached from what is going on day-to-day in managing. This detachment resulted in much of our financial crisis, i.e., the heads of banks and investments did not know what was going on, being so caught up in 'leading', and the problems rolled into a giant mess.

It is true that you as the head of a group or business have to have some detachment from the immediate issues at hand. Being too caught up in day to day is sometimes characterized as 'fire fighting' where you are solving immediate problems all day and no time devoted to larger issues.

This detachment (or lack thereof) is not a characteristic of Leadership, rather the defining characteristic of Leadership is to be able to detach from the particular when necessary to understand what is happening over the entire organization. Leading is not standing in front of a PowerPoint with the 5 goals for the year (strategy) or even setting the tactics of a marketing campaign. If anything, leading is creating an environment wherein the organization and its members - employees - can be successful. And a necessary condition of success is good management.

This reminds me that for many years, the most influential movie on managers about leading was the WWII movie, 12 O'clock High, released in 1949. Gregory Peck's character was not detached from the management of his bomber squadron, just the opposite: he flew with them. You might take the opportunity to watch it if you've never seen it!

Finally, I might comment that the back page of Business Week is where Jack Welch's article is placed (on vacation the week of this piece). Jack is often considered one of the best leaders of this generation who oversaw huge and drastic firings of employees, especially at the outset of his being head of GE. How might we view his leadership (or management) in light of the above?

'Flush' with ideas

Last month there was an interesting article about Toto, the Japanese bathroom and kitchen ceramics company in the Economist. Toto is trying to get their fancy lavatories into houses in America - with heated seats, music and 'hiding odor' features!

At the end of the article, it is remarked on Toto's 800 engineers working on new toilets, but that even still "they will have a hard time getting around the biggest obstacle to the use of its fancier lavatories in the West: the lack of electrical sockets in bathrooms."

Toto's President, Kunio Harimoto says that it took Japan 20 years to get this change added to homes, but that they are ready to wait until it develops in America.

What struck me about the article was how often the business ideas (or plans) I am presented depend on 'getting electrical sockets in bathrooms' - that is, some large structural change that a single new startup will be hard pressed to enable.

A startup by its nature has a limited life; it either catches a segment or customer base quickly or it starves. Structural changes take time. If your business idea depends on a major change happening, you will need even more capital and more time - which increases risk. The entrepreneur who started Segway already had made millions before Segway, and it still has not happened yet.

Coping with Millennials

gen y,millennial,young workers,entrepreneurs

By now you are probably familiar with the term "Millennials" or "Gen Y" - these are young people from about 8-30 years old. If you are not, here are some links:

• Millennials: Wikipedia
• Amazon.com Books on topic "Gen Y"

As I read about this upcoming generation, I am reminded of a comment made by a boss I once had. He said that the new employee Sam, "wanted to start at the top and work his way up".

Part of me is rather unsympathetic to this new generation and thier expectations. But as a business owner, we have to come to grips with them. I could of course hire only people over the age of 30 (inverting the old 60's adage to 'never trust anyone over 30'), and I could sell my products only to older people.

For those who don't want to pursue the above course w e should ask ourselves: what do I need/want from that group of people and how can I get it?

From the employee side, I need to hire the best people I can find. And many of the younger generation have valuable skills that can be useful. First, remember that even within the generation there are outliers - there are young people who won't quit at the first chance to go tubing in Chile. Second, don't forget Joel Spolsky's adage to hire "smart people who get things done". Even if the person in front of you has very different expectations, if you two can negotiate a win-win situation, it could be very productive.

Yet, these different expectations of the younger generation should cause you to ask questions like "is it more important that their body is here from 8-5, or that the work gets done" or "why should my best employees stay working here". I believe that in trying to answer these types of questions, you will be able to better handle all the employees and customers you can gain.

From the customer side, it is much more difficult. Depending on your product or service, you may have a hard time reaching them. If you sell expensive watches, what will be the effect of young people no longer using watches (they use their cell phone to tell the time!) My brother, who is a creative designer, wears interesting watches that are more jewelry or statement than they are watches, since his computer, phone, ipod all tell him the actual time.

You might want to hire 'one of them' to help you market to 'them'. But what happens when she says you need to change the way you are selling your products or marketing or even the products you stock - then what?

Return from Summer Conference

I was at our Summer CareerTech conference this week in Oklahoma City. This brings all the CareerTech system professional staff together for three days of sessions, meetings and networking. Our plenary speaker made an interesting point about education: "The primary aim of education is not to enable students to do well in school but to do well in life outside of school". By this he was remarking on our education systems unfortunate tendency to be more interested in obedience and order than in learning and development.

In considering this comment about education, what came to my mind is we often have processes or procedures or even 'ways of doing things' in our businesses that are more due to internal aspects than have to do with customers - that is - our reason for being.

As always, Seth Godin has a good statement on this, "The only reason to answer the phone when a customer calls is to make the customer happy." We often set procedures such as 'you must answer all customer calls', then not provide any resources or ability for the person answering to actually solve the problem. We lose sight of the reason we have a business is the customer.

You might remember, and it seems to have gone out of our collective consciousness, that there used to be a place in the department store called "Complaints Department" - a window where customers brought their unsatisfactory purchases. One also used to see this as part of a joke in comic strips.

Anyway, the point being is that the Complaints window never actually was able to solve the problem - so it was more a place to vent than anything else.

If we have policies in our organizations that inhibit our being able to sell products and make money, then we are just like schools turning out students good at school but not at life.

In both cases, the results don't justify the outlay. Take the opportunity here at the end of summer to review your procedures - are there places you are teaching your employees to be good students and not good salespeople?