Fire the Slugs! And Other Great, No-Nonsense Ways to Retain Your Best People

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StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability ArticleThere isn’t an organization anywhere that doesn’t have a problem with some type of personnel turnover problems. Depending on the study you look at, the impact of turnover ranges from three months of salary for a low level employee who leaves to as high as 400 percent of the annual salary of an upper-level person who leaves.

It’s doesn’t have to be all bad. There’s good turnover and bad turnover.

Firing a non-performer is good turnover. When a top performer leaves to go elsewhere and leaves your organization with a huge void, that’s bad turnover. It can affect the performance of the whole organization.

If you are going to maximize your organization’s performance you have to make a conscious, binding top-down management decision and commitment to develop a no nonsense approach to retention. The following are several must-do actions items for retaining the high-value human assets you’ve worked so hard to acquire:

  1. Start at the top! Assess your supervisory and management team! Seventy percent of the people say that the worst thing about their job is the boss. Find out what’s wrong and fix it! Identify the prima donnas and micromanaging control freaks, the whiners, complainers, and blamers. Get them basic supervisory training and improve their performance continuously. If you are the boss, take ownership!
  2. Clean Up the House! Identify the non-performers. Identify the poor managers and supervisors. If they do not respond to training and show significant improvement, remove them from an influential role and replace them with someone that does what is truly desired and required for the role and position they are in.
  3. Manage Visibly! Get out of the ivory tower. Begin each day by walking around. Stroll around the floor several times a day. Meet the customers, talk with employees, visit with the supervisors, greet the vendors, help the delivery trucks load and unload. Get out of your office. Let people know you are there and that you care. The point here is that you set lead by example. If they like you they are less likely to leave you. Visibility drives retention.
  4. Care About Your People! If you don’t really care about your people, your business is doomed. Caring is the reason why people stay. Get to know your people. Learn what each person likes and enjoys. Listen to them and learn about their interests, families, and hobbies. Protect your people from harm and from others in your organization. People are loyal to those who care about them and care for them.
  5. Keep your door open 80% of the time. Let your people know you are accessible to them. Avoid telling people to make an appointment or come back later. Make sure the time you do spend with your people is quality time.
  6. Focus on Employee Assistance Actively. Sit down with the other managers in your organization and identify the problems that are faced by people in your workforce. Develop innovative ideas and deploy specific new plans to provide employees with more flexibility in their work, support for their common needs, and help for dealing with personal issues that impact their life.
  7. Treat Everyone with Respect Always! Every leader and manager and supervisor must set the standard that respectful behavior and sincere open appreciation are expected with no exceptions! Investigate and take immediate action for all non-respectful behavior incidents. Have the managers and supervisors bring food to be shared on a regular basis! Break bread with your people regularly instead of forcing people to eat baloney.
  8. Ask Your People What They Want! Sit down with your people and ask them what they want out of their work. Identify what they want to grow, to develop greater control, autonomy and responsibility for the work they do for you. Help them achieve these goals specifically and incrementally. Meaningful engagement in their own future drives commitment and loyalty.
  9. Tell Your People What You Want of Them! Be specific and be clear but make sure you explain what you expect of them. Give them the tools, support and the time they need to get the work done. If they do not meet your expectations, bring them in and talk with them and find out what it will take to get them on track.
  10. Fire the Slugs. Hold your people accountable for their performance. If they don’t solve the problem, then terminate them with respect and dignity. Your good performers will love you.

About the Author

Jeff Kortes is known as the ‘No Nonsense Guy.’ He is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resource consulting firm specializing in executive search and leadership training. He has trained hundreds of first-line supervisors, managers, and executives during his career. His approach to training is no-nonsense, and practical.

Jeff is also a member of the National Speakers Association and a regular speaker on the topics of retention, recruiting and leadership. For more information, visit www.SlugProofYourTeam.com.

A Technology Case Study: Implementing What the Customer Wants

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleIn order for any change to occur – whether it’s a decision to purchase a product, or an implementation to add new technology – whatever touches the ultimate solution must buy-in to the change.

Often our focus is on getting the end-result we think we want. We forget that without buy-in from the necessary people and policies that maintain the status quo, we face the high cost of the resistance emanating from pushing change into a system that believes that it’s fine, thanks.

I’d like to share a story about how I helped my own tech guys shift their project work and our revenue as a result of having decision facilitation skills. At the end of the day, unless there is a decision – one person at a time – to adopt to, know how to, and be willing to change, there will be resistance and possibly failure.

First Signs of Trouble
In 1983, in London, I started up a body shop/recruitment company to support the ‘new’ language and ’4GL’ support technology called Focus. As the first company that supported this language (26 competitors grew up in the field) we grew quickly. Seemingly overnight we had 43 tech folks going out to client sites as programmers, systems analysts/designers, project managers/leaders.

Within the first months, I began hearing murmurs of annoyance from the folks: “Stupid users.” “We have to spend twice as long redoing what they told us to do!” “Why don’t they get it right when we first talk to them?”

As a test to see what was going on that was creating so much failure and cost (time/money), I called in my head tech guy to design a requirement I’d been complaining about.

Julian’s first question was: “What do you want?” I didn’t know how to respond because 1. I wasn’t a techie and didn’t know how to explain to him in his language; 2. I didn’t have the right description, as it was mostly a picture in my mind; and 3. no one in 1983 had the vocabulary or capability we have now. So I responded “I don’t know.” Julian smirked. “This is what I hear from clients. But I know what you want. I’ll take care of it and show you some screens next week.” We were already in the middle of the problem.

What he created was from his own vantage point, using his own beliefs and limiting assumptions (remember again that it was in 1983, and my ideas were well beyond the capability of the technology). “This is all wrong,” I said.

Julian’s eyes glazed over. In the UK you don’t tell the MD that she’s a Stupid User. I continued: “Imagine where we’d be now if you had started our conversation with ‘ What would you have if you had all of your wishes and dreams, and a computer could do everything that your brain would like to do?’ With that, I could have I would have ‘designed’ screens and offered colors and made up functionality. That would have been a far better start.

New Skills for Internal Consultants
I realized that all of our tech guys needed decision facilitation skills to enable them to

  • recognize how to bring together the appropriate elements to be included in a way that would serve both the strategic AND tactical elements,
  • elicit the right data at the right time so the clients could get their projects completed efficiently,
  • eliminate resistance.

I taught the 43 tech guys my ‘Buying Facilitation® model (a decision facilitation model that is a change management model, independent of buying or selling). The results were instant, and dramatic.

  • The systems designers were able to elicit the right data and develop the exact right design the first time with no redos.
  • The systems analysts not only understood the tech issues, but were able to understand and address all of the personal/human issues and manage the change and potential resistance issues upfront, before they became a problem.
  • The programmers got the proper information to code the first iteration, with a minimum of changes.
  • The client didn’t need the work to be redone.
  • The clients got to hear/see/feel their vision of success and agree to it before anyone moved ahead with technology.
  • The projects were completed well before time – sometimes 25% sooner – and since we were being paid on a project basis, we made more money and the team was freed up for the next project.
  • The clients trusted us so much that they handed over much of their own programmer’s work to us and were able to take on additional creative projects that they hadn’t planned.
  • With 26 competitors, we captured 11% of the market (even with prices well over 40% higher than everyone…. my nickname was Sharon Drew Blood), and my clients signed sole supplier contracts.
  • Everyone was happy, and I kept all of my employees for 4 years.

In fact, my competition tried to steal my employees; no one budged, regardless of the money that was thrown at them. I made sure they had plenty of personal time off, I took them for darts/beer at the local pub once a month, and I made sure they were happy. Plus I kept them doing what they loved, rather than having to deal with any ‘issues.’

I hired a ‘Make Nice Guy’ (who I also trained) to go make sure everything chugged happily along: if any sort of problem – client concern, project glitch, personality issue, tech malfunction – occured, it was his regardless of time of day. Or he could take the day off.

As a result, I had nothing to do but grow my company. And I was able to exit after under 4 years, with 3 branches in two countries (offices in London, Stuttgart, Hamburg), $5,000,000 revenue (remember this was a start up in 1983, in a huge depression) and a 43% net profit.

Your tech folks and internal consultants need decision facilitation skills in addition to technology skills. Because at the base of it all are humans who resist change, get confused, hang on to turf, and don’t always communicate properly. Let me know if I can help you design a program for your tech folks or internal consultants:[email protected]

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and the new book Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Human Performance Warning Flag 1 – Peer Checking Everything

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StrategyDriven Human Performance Management Warning Flag ArticlePerforming operational tasks is no different than administrative work or project activities – elevate all tasks to a level of equal importance and they all become unimportant. As previously defined in StrategyDriven Human Performance Management Best Practice 2 – Peer Checking, activities that should be peer checked are those irreversible actions presenting a severe adverse consequence if an error is made. If all activities are peer checked, including those that are either reversible and/or have little consequence if a performance error occurs, then all activities are elevated to an equal level of importance; unnecessarily diminishing productivity and inviting complacency in the performance of truly important tasks.

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Leadership Inspirations – Well Done

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“Well done is so much better than well said.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)

Founding Father of the United States of America

Recruitment Strategy

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Many companies do not understand how to approach developing a recruitment strategy. The Human Resource Department is pulled in many directions and formal recruitment strategy development can be pushed back until it’s too late. Then the decision is made to ‘do the same thing we did last year.’ This is a very costly way of recruiting because recruitment is a very fluid dynamic.

In addition to cost, why is developing an effective recruiting strategy important?

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About the Author

Bill Humbert is an expert Recruitment Consultant with 30 years’ experience in the field. In his consulting business www.RecruiterGuy.com he focuses on one company at a time and charges a flat monthly fee for recruitment process improvement, recruitment marketing improvement, interview training, and recruitment. RecruiterGuy’s Guide to Finding a Job is his book that helps job seekers learn how to better understand the sales process known as a job search – and to be more effective than their competition. To read Bill Humbert’s complete biography, click here.