Category: Leadership & Management

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What’s the mood today?

 

Have you ever had to work with a moody boss or a moody colleague? Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t – I know I’ve had a few occasions where I’ve been snapped at for no good reason – or at least not one that I knew of at the time!

How does that make you feel?

If you are inconsistent in the way you respond to your colleagues or lead your team you are sending mixed messages, and the real meaning of your messages may get lost in the noise generated by your moods.

At the very best it will probably mean that your colleagues will wait until you are in a good mood – just so they can spoil it with the bad news they’ve been saving up!

At the worst, you don’t get to hear about the problem until it is a disaster – when you might have dealt with it early on, when it was just a small problem.

If you have a team member who is sometimes in a bad mood, they can put the rest of the team off their stride.

The mixed messaging, whether from the top down of from peer to peer, destroys trust and creates barriers.

If your mood is changeable – if you are having a bad day – this first step is to tell people. They know already, so it is not a secret, and by opening up you make yourself appear honest and therefore more trustworthy. You’ll also find that telling people (you don’t whine about the reason, just say that you are a bit grumpy today) takes the pressure off you because you don’t have to pretend. That alone will make you feel a bit better!

If it is a team member who is having a bad day, telling them that you have noticed has much the same effect. Don’t get dragged into a long discussion about their woes – for some people the glass is always half-empty and they will drag you down with them – but you can show that you are paying attention. You also show the rest of the team that you are aware and watching. The grumpy one is on notice – being grumpy with your peers is one thing, being grumpy to the boss is something else!

 

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Cross Training to keep your business fit! 

 

For me, cross training in a gym is a distant memory but I am sure some of my readers may still indulge. In a business sense, cross training is a great way to improve the business.

In a well-designed induction program a new team member may experience several different departments over a number of days or weeks. That allows them to start on the job with a wider understanding of how their work impacts upon the rest of the business. It’s a really good way to bring someone into the team and make sure they have a decent understanding of how the business as a whole gets things done.

It’s not often that you see the same principles being applied to established team members, but it can be a great way of making sure that departments work together, rather than forming silos where information is retained within the department and competition with other departments rather than cooperation is the order of the day.

Tesco used to require the senior team (from directors down) to spend some time on the shop floor every year. I wonder if that no longer happens, and some of their problems can be related to the disconnection between the leaders of the business and its customers.

When you acquire a business you should have a plan to integrate the two businesses and a very powerful way to blend the cultures is to have an exchange of staff.

I’ve used cross training with the credit and collections teams, working with the sales team. The credit team can be very dismissive of the sales team – I’m sure you have heard phrases like “Those lazy sales folk, they can’t even get the credit application form completed” but get the credit team into the meetings and they’ll realise (a) how much else is going on to secure the customer and (b) how clumsy the credit application form is. In one case I remember the credit application form was reduced from 8 pages to 2.

Cross training really can keep (your business) fit

 

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Don’t be a day late and a dollar short

 

There is s a great American saying used to describe a failure. It’s often used to describe how an individual performs, as in “He is a day late and a dollar short”.

The English equivalent is “Too little, too late”

The business lesson is directly connected to expectations.

If your customer expects a delivery on Wednesday and you don’t deliver until Thursday, in your customers’ eyes you are a day late, even if you always planned to deliver on Thursday.

In the same way, if your customer thinks that you will do more than you think you are going to do you will come up a dollar short!

I am sure you don’t set out to be a day late and a dollar short – who would?

You can avoid that by making sure you have a solid grasp of your customer expectations at the start of the relationship. If it is a complex service or project, map out the steps of the project and assign responsibilities. Often, with complex projects, you as the supplier cannot make progress until the customer has completed a task, but if that dependency is not clearly stated guess who will get the blame!

If it is a customer complaint, time is of the essence. If you can get back to your customer quickly – even if it is just to say “we’re working on it” – that can alleviate some of the perception.

The other side of the coin is how you can turn your customers into raving fans.

Under promise and over deliver is a frequently heard truism, but the over-delivery has to be managed. There’s no point over delivering if what you are adding are things the customer does not want / need or value.

The crucial steps are to understand (and manage) your customers’ expectations, work out what is really important to them and then over-deliver in that area.

 

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Do you delegate well?

When I was first promoted to managing a team, I had been the “technical” expert, a real hands-on, sleeves rolled up type.

We had so much going on that I had to learn to delegate and let go of things. The team were not as good at some of the things I could do, but at least they could do them, so I could do other things.

Over time, as they gained experience, their skills increased and some of them were actually better than I was.

That’s when I learned to delegate responsibilities, not just tasks.

If all you ever do is delegate a task, no matter how complex, you will only free up so much of your own time. Much more importantly, the people you are leading won’t feel empowered – you’ve made it clear that it is just the task you are handing over, not the responsibility.

There’s a downside to this. If you delegate a responsibility, you also have to delegate the authority.

I was once in the invidious position of holding a senior role, with responsibility for the P&L of a business unit, but I was not empowered to change the focus or control the spend of the single biggest item in the P&L. That’s an extreme, but it really was the classic “poisoned chalice.” I had the responsibility, but not the authority.

I have found that delegating responsibility – by which I mean focusing on the outcome, not the means employed to achieve the outcome – allows me to harness the abilities and talents of those around me.

A phrase I have often used when delegating something new is to ask

“What do you need to make this happen?”

That, coupled with a review process, allows me to delegate responsibilities and the necessary authority, but I haven’t abdicated. The ultimate responsibility stays with me.

 

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Don’t be an Ostrich

Don’t be an ostrich

One of my clients had some really powerful, and very useful management information in the form of a report from their custom built computer system. The report gave great detail on the thousands of daily & weekly transactions, allowing the client to see profit & loss by individual item, or analysed by groups or by territories.

They had an issue with another report from the system. This second report listed all the supplies that they had paid for, but had not yet arrived – Goods in Transit – and this report was getting bigger and the value of GIT was getting larger & larger. The value of GIT in the monthly accounts did not tie back to this report.

When we investigated, it turned out that both reports were wrong, and indeed were being used in a way for which they were never intended. The business had overstated its profits by almost £1m over a period of some 3 years.

The accounting team had found a small problem 3 years ago when the stock records didn’t match up to the profit & loss report that management relied upon so heavily. They looked at the GIT report, realised that some of the information on the report was wrong, and adjusted the value of GIT to make everything balance. In short, they fudged the numbers. It was a pretty small adjustment for the size of business.

3 years later, when I was involved, that little adjustment had been added to and had grown, so that it was now just under £1m.

The accounting team played Ostrich – head in the sand, hoping the problem would go away instead of dealing with it when it was tiny.

The trouble is when you play Ostrich your rear is somewhat exposed, and your problem will come back to bite you.

Deal with the problems when they are still little problems

 

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Cooperate and win

On a bus journey, a delivery van had blocked the road and the bus driver pulled up behind the van and made use of the horn. When he didn’t get a satisfactory result, he left the cab to remonstrate with the delivery driver – and was promptly followed by 3 or 4 bus passengers eager for either the distraction or a piece of the action!

The van driver moved his vehicle and the bus journey continued.

How much time and energy did the bus driver, the van driver and the 4 passengers expend in shouting at each other?

Have you got a van driver in your business – someone who gets in the way and delays everyone else?

Wouldn’t life be easier if they didn’t do that?

Do they know they are doing it? Why are they doing it? Have you explained the consequences, and tried to help them, or are you taking a detour and avoiding the problem?

Cooperation is always better than conflict

 

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Measure the right things

There’s an old cliche in management speak “What’s measured is managed” but like most cliche’s there a grain (or more) of truth within.

I’ve seen businesses at every extreme, from those that measure and try to control absolutely the finest details, to those that barely measure anything.

One client ran a substantial manufacturing business with a weekly management report consisting of two lines on a graph, sales and cost of sales. If the lines started to converge, he needed to take action, if the gap was widening and the lines trending up the business was doing well.

Another business that I worked in had a monthly management report pack of over 50 pages. Nobody (other than the finance team who slaved to put it all together) read all the pages.

In the first case, the methodology was simplistic, but focused on the overall success of the business, and it worked. In the second case, the various departmental managers wanted their own key metrics so they could brag about how well they were doing. No one was focused on driving the overall business success, just their own little piece of the pie.

A current client tells me he is very proud of the fact that his revenue per head and his gross margins are best in class. That has not helped with his most recent year, where a few big projects were delayed and the business lost a lot of money.

He’s not measuring all the right things – are you?

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Are you getting the best results from your business?

 

Part of creating a successful business is to focus attention and effort on the areas that are going to bring the most reward.

There is a fundamental economic principal sometimes referred to as the law of diminishing returns where the first additional resources applied to a production process give far greater output results than those applied later.

One way to imagine this is to think of a seized wheel where the first few drops of oil enable the wheel to move. Adding more oil will improve the lubrication and the process, but those first few drops make a massive difference.

In business, it’s really easy to keep adding more oil to the process that is running. You’ve done it before and you know that it had a good or even a great effect. You don’t have to think too hard about it!

Fixing the thing that isn’t working, or starting a new project or process may well require you to put in greater initial effort but the return may well be much larger.

Applying this thinking to a sales & marketing context, perhaps you are well established in a market, with a particular type of customer. You understand their needs, you have a presentation and a product or service that has been successful in the past and you know how to win more business. There will come a point where doing more of the same will not have the same effect, and it will take more sales & marketing effort and expense to win new customers.

The alternative strategy might be to identify a new market, where you are not established and you don’t have the same level of knowledge. The initial resource required – especially from leadership – will be greater – but the returns may be even greater still. If you now have two markets where you are established, instead of one, you have a more robust and less risky business.

You can apply this thinking to many different aspects of the business. You don’t have to keep doing more of the same if the results don’t warrant it. Are you getting the best results for your efforts?

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Cross Training to keep your business fit!

For me, cross training in a gym is a distant memory but I am sure some of my readers may still indulge. In a business sense, cross training is a great way to improve the business.

In a well-designed induction program a new team member may experience several different departments over a number of days or weeks. That allows them to start on the job with a wider understanding of how their work impacts upon the rest of the business.   It’s a really good way to bring someone into the team and make sure they have a decent understanding of how the business as a whole gets things done.

It’s not often that you see the same principles being applied to established team members, but it can be a great way of making sure that departments work together, rather than forming silos where information is retained within the department and competition with other departments rather than cooperation is the order of the day.

Tesco used to require the senior team (from directors down) to spend some time on the shop floor every year. I wonder if that no longer happens, and some of their problems can be related to the disconnection between the leaders of the business and its customers.

When you acquire a business you should have a plan to integrate the two businesses and a very powerful way to blend the cultures is to have an exchange of staff.

I’ve used cross training with the credit and collections teams, working with the sales team.  The credit team can be very dismissive of the sales team – I’m sure you have heard phrases like “Those lazy sales folk, they can’t even get the credit application form completed” but get the credit team into the meetings and they’ll realise (a) how much else is going on to secure the customer and (b) how clumsy the credit application form is.  In one case I remember the credit application form was reduced from 8 pages to 2.

Cross training really can keep (your business) fit

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Who looks after your customers?

 

Some time ago I was collecting my wife from the station one evening.

It was cold and windy, and when I entered the station lobby it was no warmer than being outside as one of the doors was open.

I stood there for a few minutes, trying to see if her train had arrived, and then realized I was early and would have to wait – so I closed the door.

As soon as I did so, one of the security guards leaped up and propped it open again, telling me “We have to leave it open, there are no handles on the outside – if the door is closed no-one can get in”

Many of you will know that Reading station and the surrounding track have just undergone a £400m investment program – the whole station is practically new, as are the doors in question!

You can understand, I suppose, that the detail of a mechanism to allow passengers to enter when the doors are closed was overlooked in the initial plans, or even during the final construction. What is difficult to understand is that the station and these doors have been operational for several months without remedial work.

Passengers have not been seriously inconvenienced as the doors are always open, but on the evening I was there three ticket office staff and two security guards were suffering the cold weather coming through the open doors.

If the front-line staff are inconvenienced in this way, how are they likely to give their best service? Why hasn’t this been fixed? I am sure a handle could be fitted reasonably quickly!

Are the management not listening to their staff, or is there no communication system? Are the staff unwilling or unable to raise this issue?

In your business, if you want to give the best service, you need to get the best from your front-line staff – which means you need to take the best possible care of them. Are you doing that?