Getting the right people on the job is mission critical for all companies. Employees, whether staff or management, can make or break an organization.

Companies frequently call on my business consulting services to help with employee and hiring issues, and I’m never surprised when I hear that request. One thing I’ve learned in my years in business and as a business consultant is that hiring and managing employees is right up there with productivity systems, sales and marketing as driving factors for profits.

There’s really no mystery to choosing the right person for the job, but there are some methods of going about it that, while well understood by some, are inconsistently applied at best. I’ve had people tell me that they hire based on “gut-reactions” to people; others go for the consensus, hiring-by-committee approach. And, while I know that almost any approach, these included, can work some of the time, in business, I encourage clients to seek out approaches that can better “their hand” with new positions and further enhance results over time.

I always tell my clients that a successful hiring process includes

1. Hiring process
2. Policy and procedures
3. Orientation
4. Training and development
5. Management/leadership that will retain the employee.

Strategic Hiring for Success

Strategic Essentials uses a predictive index that gives us a very good idea of how someone will perform in specific work situations. And once we have this analysis, we go several steps further. We look at the personality and expectations of the potential manager and teammates to make sure we’re setting up new hires to be successful – for themselves and for the company.  This information can be used to coach all parties on development needs, playing to the individual’s strengths and how to offset what may be perceived as challenges.

The right hiring, development and management practices can have a tremendous impact on your overall organization. But the best way to explain this would be with real-world examples, so here are a few examples from Strategic Essentials files.

Case Brief: Good Employees Mean Vacation Time

A family-run distribution company came to Strategic Essentials with what they saw as an insurmountable problem. They could not take a vacation or more than one day away from their 70-hour workweeks without jeopardizing their production.

In addition to business consulting, they specifically needed to find someone – that perfect someone – who could be comfortable in a warehouse setting, work with out-dated computer systems (at least at first), learn thousands of products, be ready to shoulder increasing responsibility, and be highly detailed.

This one hire was the lynchpin for further expansion and development. We found this individual by screening through numerous people, many of whom seemed competent. We needed exactly the right person, and we found that person. The difference for the company was profound. The leadership is now taking vacations, and the staff is capable of keeping the company running successfully in their absence.

Case Brief: Too Much Business

A business came to me with what seems at first glance to be an enviable problem: too much business. They had basic needs such as manageable systems and structure. But even more, they had few staff guidelines, no job descriptions, along with poor attitudes and job performance from staff.

Their hiring challenge went past bringing people into the door. It encompassed bringing the RIGHT people in, and then motivating them and giving them performance guidelines. Job satisfaction and productivity amongst their staff was critically low.

Through a mix of consulting and organizational development, this client developed standards, hiring practices, management techniques, and accountability. This focus and combination was what this firm needed to shift their organizational culture and their results!

Case Brief: Disruptive Staff in a Non-Profit Corporation

Non-profit corporations attract employees with a passion for their cause. This is a good thing, but for one non-profit that came to us, that same passion was holding them back and burning out some of their key staff.  One employee was also particularly disruptive.

Our first task with this group was to work with the leadership on management skills and handling disruptive situations in the workplace. Our goal was to improve workplace satisfaction. Because their non-profit guidelines made it almost impossible to let the disruptive staff member go, we worked on effective leadership.

And we worked on understanding what to look for while hiring for new positions to lessen the potential of similar challenges in the future. It takes more than a passion for a cause to be effective for the cause.

Hiring coupled with managing well affects every aspect of a company, from productivity, to workplace satisfaction, to worry-free vacations for top management. It is just one piece – but a very important one – for business success.

“You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” – Paul J. Meyer

Have you heard this business quotation before? It’s one of my favorites because it’s absolutely true. Unless you have a strategy for measuring your goals, you have no way of keeping your business on track and no way of knowing when you’ve achieved success.

Good management of goals begins with setting measurable goals. (You may recall my reference to SMART goals in previous blogs – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible goals.)

If you’ve set measurable goals, then you’ve asked some basic questions, such as: How much? How many? By when?  Now you’re ready to measure.

Choose Measurements that Can be Managed for ROI

Every business is different, so measurement strategies and types vary. But here are a few standards to get you thinking about measuring your business goals and determining your Return on Investment (ROI):

General Business Measurements

• Dollars per contracts signed
• Number of call-backs per 100 jobs
• Increased your profit  by [insert your goal percentage here]

Sales Measurements

• New accounts as a percentage of total accounts
• Number of new accounts per day
• Percentage of referral business to your total business

Ask yourself: How can you track your success? Or, what does success look like to you?

Remember the quote we started with: You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.

Set up Dynamic, Motivational Measurements of Achievement

Once you establish measurements, then share them and your checkpoints reached – even if the sharing is just with yourself. We humans need to celebrate our achievements!

Create the visual that works for you. It might be a chart that shows your upward progress, a graph that compares, counts, or illustrates checkpoints reached. It might be pins on a map, numbers on a spreadsheet, and it might be the old-fashioned thermometer graphic that you fill in as you reach your checkpoints.

Celebrating the checkpoints reached along the way to ultimate success builds confidence and keeps us motivated. And that, finally, leads to the grand celebration when we’ve reached all the checkpoints along the way and we stand at the goal itself. Success.

Most of my clients have heard of SMART goals, and I suspect you have too. But just as a refresher, let me remind you that SMART goals are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Tangible

Even SMART goals can fail you unless they’re accompanied by smart action strategies, and that’s what I want to talk about today: Smart Action Steps to Achieving Goals.

Put Your Business Goals on Your Calendar

The easiest and one of the most effective action steps you can take is to put your goal on your calendar. In other words: Give yourself a deadline. When should this goal be attained?
Until you move action steps and your goals onto your calendar, you have great ideas but no real means of achieving them.

Make Time to Succeed

Set aside the time to reach your goal. Too often, we ‘add’ goals to our business days, somehow hoping our days will expand to meet them. (Wishful thinking!) As long as goals have no time allotted to them, we have no plan to achieve them.

How to Plan Your Steps and Checkpoints

For most business goals – whether it’s sales, productivity, or other business-related goals – you’ll increase your chance of success exponentially if you have prioritized action steps and checkpoints to keep you on track. So, block out the time for the action steps you need to take to reach your goal.
Creating successful action steps:

• Think through the steps you need to take to reach your goals; make them specific.
• Prioritize your action steps and set target dates.
• Identify checkpoints along the way to your ultimate goal.
• Move your action steps and checkpoints onto your calendar, allowing sufficient time for completion.

Get started today!

Mark McCormick in his book What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School tells of a Harvard study conducted between 1979 and 1989.  Researchers found that the 3 percent of 1979 MBA graduates who had created clear, written goals were earning, in 1989, on average, 10 times more than 97 percent of their graduating class. They also found that the 13 percent of the Class of ’79 MBA graduates who had set goals, even though they were not in writing, were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent of students who had expressed no goals at all.

Goals and the clarity of goals made a lifetime of difference for these Harvard MBA graduates.

Goal-Setting Process

In my consulting practice and workshops, I often include a 9-step goal-setting process. I’ve found that one of the most overlooked steps in the process – the one so many of us dearly want to skip over – is one of the most intuitive.

That skipped step: identifying obstacles and challenges that are likely to appear along the way and thinking through solutions.

These obstacles are usually quite easy to identify. Begin with the top two: you and everyone else.

Consider the obstacles you put in your own path: procrastination? Chaotic time management?  Inability to delegate? Then consider the obstacles others contribute: Interruptions? Lack of support? Lack of training?

Once you’ve identified your obstacles, then set about finding workable solutions. I encourage you to hold to your goals. Resist the urge to reduce your goals; instead, improve your solutions. And remember, well-planned and supported goals – the ones most likely to succeed – include lifestyle and family goals as well as business ones.

Take the time to set goals for your company and your life. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll succeed.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said, “What you’re saying is that company productivity is really all about personal productivity. It’s all about us.”

You can imagine my response: “Excellent,” I said. “Gold Stars.”  All productivity, whether your company is a small firm or a global corporation, derives from the personal. And what does that mean to you, the leader or owner of a company?

It means that your company’s productivity begins (or ends) with your personal leadership and productivity. You get your team to be more productive by setting an example of personal productivity.

Leadership Matters in Productivity

Productivity starts at the top, in your office. Think of who has the most invested in your company or department. I’d wager that that person is you. If you own the business, it’s your money on the line. If you’re the managing executive of a department, it’s your career and reputation on the line. Your investment in productivity is huge.

Now, consider the essential nature of productivity. If I’m on your sales force, I can bring in all the work in the world, but if it can’t be done within budget and without cost overruns or rework or, at worst,  orders cannot even be filled, then we do not get the net result we’re looking for.

In fact, we do our business more harm than good when we over-sell and under-deliver; i.e., when productivity cannot meet needs. This is no small order, either, and is especially challenging now that many workforces have been reduced and everyone has to be more productive without having a nervous breakdown.

Productivity can mean the difference between survival or not and/or profitability or not.  Right down to whether the business owner can pull a paycheck or not.

So, when my client said, “It’s all about us,” you can see, he was right. Productivity begins with you, the leader, personally, and it is also fundamental to your net profit.

– Success begins with a blueprint.
Valerie

Many businesspeople I consult with hear the word productivity and immediately fall into a deep sleep. There’s just nothing exciting about the word.

But I have to tell you that the difference productivity can make in your life and business is very, very exciting. Improve your productivity and you improve your chances of spending quality time away from business, leaving you more time with the ones you love.

How to Improve Productivity

Productivity is fundamental to meeting any business goal. And in challenging economic times, being strong on the fundamentals can be a make or break for a business. But how do you improve and increase your productivity?

This is one of the essential business concepts I tackle during some of my first meetings with clients. We go through many steps and use several different tools to reveal the truth underlying the hours spent at the office. When we do, we almost always discover that too many of the hours we spend at work are virtually “lost hours”, which in turn contribute to long days – and weekends – at work instead of play.

I want to share with you one of the first steps toward discovering these lost hours and the holes in your own productivity:

Know – and understand – what your time is worth. Your productivity will always be tied to how you spend your time, so seriously evaluate how you spend each minute and hour at work.

• What are your high-payoff activities, and how much time do you spend on them?
• How much time are you spending on low-payoff activities?
• How much time is lost to no-payoff activities?

Once you’ve taken this step, you should see some opportunities for increasing your productivity. And when you increase your productivity and begin to see the ripples of effects this can have on your work and home life, I guarantee that the word productivity is going to begin to sound a lot more exciting.

Business leaders often state that one of the greatest needs in the workplace is people who can communicate.

Once goal setting and planning are accomplished, goals and plans must be communicated to others whose cooperation is needed. Effective communication unifies employees and their work to the overall purpose and direction of
the organization. Through communication, you raise your organization’s levels of energy, enthusiasm, and productivity!

Mastering the art of communication is a complex process demanding time and ongoing effort. But choosing to continually improve your communication skills increases your productivity dramatically and the productivity of those around you.

As you communicate, you reap these valuable results:

• Satisfying relationships with others;
• Well-coordinated, goal-directed work activity;
• New ideas;
• Agreement on shared priorities;
• Avoidance of costly mistakes; and
• Increased profits and marketplace competitiveness as employees take action on important messages.

EMPATHY IN COMMUNICATION

Communication is the exchange of ideas between two people for the purpose of eliciting some kind of action. Most often, we think of communication as expressing our ideas to someone else. That is one part of it, but not all.

William James, known as the founder of modern psychology, said that the greatest human need is to be understood andappreciated. To meet that need, effective communicators must understand others before trying to influence them.

Successful communication is a two-way process. You must present your ideas in a form others can understand, and you must, in turn, listen to others to understand how your message is received.

Such mutual understanding is necessary if the purpose of any communication is to be achieved.

Understanding others depends upon empathy. Empathy is the ability to look at a situation from the viewpoint of another and understand that person’s feelings and beliefs. Empathy is closely associated with most of the skills usually labeled as human relations skills, or the ability to get along with people. Empathy recognizes the inherent right of each person to hold personal views.

Understanding another’s feelings and beliefs does not mean that you are forced to agree with or accept that point of view. Such understanding is the basis of sensitivity to the needs of others, flexibility in dealing with those needs, and fairness and objectivity in helping others fulfill their needs.

Undoubtedly, you have heard it said, “Put yourself in the other person’s place.”

“As you learn more about your team members, your communication reaches far beyond the level of basic information exchange.”
– Paul J. Meyer

However, for a deeper level of empathy, do more than imagine yourself in the other person’s place; imagine what it is like to be the other person – with that person’s individual personality, desires, fears, and dreams – in that situation. Knowing what you would do is not enough; empathy is imagining how the other person feels.

Empathy is basic to at least four principles of effective communication:

Organize your ideas.

Even the most disorganized people have some order in their thought processes. Present your ideas in an organized way, and others comprehend them better.

First, be sure your ideas and your thinking are crystal clear to you. Write them down. Organize them in light of what you know about others.

When you are absolutely certain you have organized your own ideas, you can be more confident they will be understood and accepted.

Tap into People’s Interests.

People are constantly bombarded by sights, sounds, and ideas competing for attention. A pattern of habits and attitudes affects their acceptance of ideas that seem to promise satisfaction of their needs.

Empathy allows you to present your message in a form that fits into the existing pattern. When you understand other people’s interests and phrase your ideas in those terms, you communicate effectively.

Paint a Picture

Some words suggest logic. They appeal to reason and fact. Other words appeal to emotions, to desires, and to needs. Words of both logic and emotion can contribute to painting pictures of ideas.

Recognize the needs of others and express your ideas in words that form a mental picture that promises to supply those needs. Word pictures engage both the mind and emotion of the listener to produce a lasting impression.

Vary Your Communication Style

To motivate or to influence someone else, use the communication style most comfortable and familiar to that person. Adjust your style to enable the listener to understand and accept your message without the need to “translate” it into a more acceptable style.

When working with a team, be aware of the communication styles that are different from yours and capitalize upon the strengths of those differences.

CLARIFYING WITH EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS

Promote two-way communication by asking effective questions. Ask questions to bring answers that give you a genuine understanding of the viewpoint of others.

When you demonstrate empathy through asking questions and genuinely listening, others feel valued and respected. You also gain valuable information you can use later to make informed decisions.

When your primary aim in a conversation is to draw out information, begin by asking easy questions. Questions that are easy to answer relax the other person and dissolve tension. When you demonstrate your willingness to listen and remain nonjudgmental, you obtain more information and build a positive relationship for future communication.

The type of question that produces active involvement of the listener is the open-ended question. An open-ended question cannot be answered by a simple yes or no. Open-ended questions begin with phrases like these:

• “How do you feel about . . .?”
• “What do you think . . .?”
• “Why . . .?”
• “What happened?”

Open-ended questions go beyond extracting basic information to . . .

• Identify problems
• Uncover underlying feelings, attitudes, and needs, and
• Encourage the sharing of valuable suggestions and solutions

Become expert at asking open-ended questions that encourage people to tap into their own creative resources. Be patient as you improve your questioning skills in routine conversations.

As you learn more about your team members, your communication reaches far beyond the level of basic information exchange. An amazing amount of information can be gained from asking open-ended questions that inspire people to select relevant information, form personal opinions, develop new methods and ideas, and reveal underlying emotions.

LISTENING FOR THE TOTAL MESSAGE

When you ask a question, listen attentively to the answer. Listen for the total message. Listen to the words themselves, to the manner of delivery, and to what is not said.

Ten percent of communication comes through words, 30 percent by sounds, and 60 percent by body language.

Observe and evaluate body language, emotion, attitudes, and any other apparent external or internal factor. Because it is one of the master human relations skills, effective listening is worth the time it takes to refine and polish.

Listening multiplies the value of the information you receive. You gain a reputation for courtesy and concern – traits that enhance your leadership and effectiveness.

Improve Productivity with Communication

Business leaders often state that one of the greatest needs in the workplace is people who can communicate.

Once goal setting and planning are accomplished, goals and plans must be communicated to others whose cooperation is needed. Effective communication unifies employees and their work to the overall purpose and direction of
the organization. Through communication, you raise your organization’s levels of energy, enthusiasm, and productivity!

Mastering the art of communication is a complex process demanding time and ongoing effort. But choosing to continually improve your communication skills increases your productivity dramatically and the productivity of those around you.

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