What is a good succession plan?

I find it  interesting is that most companies do one of two extremes when it comes to succession planning:

1.  Nothing at all
2. A very cumbersome process with lots of documents and checkpoints for multiple candidates which never amounts to anything.

Let’s find something in the middle…

Get someone ready

Think about succession planning in its core form:  How do you get someone (specific), ready to take your (specific) job?

Every manager should be thinking about this.

The benefits are numerous.  If you do this,  as a leader you score many wins:

• The whole organization gets more capable
• You have a real and meaningful way of motivating your top performers
• Other people see you delegating some power, so they trust you more
• You get to hand off some hard work that you don’t have to do personally!

3  Steps to effective delegating

Succession planning is all about delegating.

As a leader, you need to make sure you have someone on your team that can step up.  Once you do, you need to be prepared to delegate big, hairy, strategic stuff, not just superficial, well contained, safe stuff.

1. Let them practice your work

The first part of someone learning your job, is about the work.  You need to give them opportunities to practice working at your level.

A lot of times we think the way to motivate our top performers is to have them work on the most fun or interesting projects.  That works to a point, but it does not do anything to help get someone ready for your job.

Face it, how much fun work do YOU get to do?

You need to give them opportunities to practice the ugly, mind-numbing, heavily matrixed, controversial, boring, unsupported, failing, no-win kind of work you deal with every day when you wake up.

What is the hardest and most distasteful thing you own?

That’s what you give your top performer.  You give them the benefit of seeing what it is really like in your shoes.

They get to suffer like you do.  But they get to work on big stuff. They get access to your network and stakeholders.  They have the chance to do something creative and heroic to get this done.

What may be drudgery for you, can be really motivating for someone who gets to step up.  OK, you should probably give them a more pleasant task too, while you are at it…

But don’t shy away from giving smart people hard work.

And don’t feel guilty about it.  (I often did, but then realized that this was better for everybody, and that people appreciate it, not resent it, so I got over it)

2. Let them practice your relationships

The next part of getting someone ready for your job is to make sure they are practiced and comfortable with the social requirements at the next level.

If they are stepping up, they need to fit in socially too.

They need to be someone that your peers want to include personally. They can’t stand out like a sore thumb as the junior person in the room,  who has no basis for relating to the big execs.

You need to give your top performer a chance to practice at these relationships.  Give them opportunities to present for you. Arrange one-one meetings with them and your peers.  Send them as your delegate to your boss’s staff meeting when you are out of town.  (Go out of town if this never happens.)

If your succession candidate does not develop personal relationships with your boss and peers they will never be ready to step into your job.  And it won’t matter because they will not be given the chance.

Unless your candidate is viewed by your boss and peers as someone socially worthy of the role, they won’t get it.  So your succession planning will fail. Either you will be stuck, or the company will go outside to fill your role when the time comes.

3. Let them practice your decisions

OK. Here is where the rubber meets the road.  You need to give someone a chance to practice making the decisions that you make.

If you never delegate important decisions you are fooling yourself that you are doing succession planning.

How will somebody ever be ready to take over, if you have owned all the decisions along the way?

Will you delegate important decisions?

Think about the next few months of decisions you need to make.  Investments, priorities, partnerships, road map choices, marketing strategies.  Give your top performer the task of owning the project AND the making decisions.

Let them feel the pressure of owning the outcome fully.  Let them get the experience explaining, defending, and selling their choices. Let them get the experience fixing it if it goes wrong.

Is this scary? Yes.

Might they choose wrong? Yes.  Might they choose better than you? Yes.

The point is, if you never let them own and make key decisions, you are cutting off the single most important training you can give your successor.
See also Let People Fail.  They will never be ready for your job without this.

Thanks

This topic of succession planning came up in a discussion the other day in one of my member Coaching Hour calls.  Thank you to the Azzarello Group members for making the discussions so valuable.

On a flight this week I had a fun conversation with a top sales executive about the profession of selling.

The best sales people have some fundamental things in common:

• They put themselves out there over and over again with no fear
• They hear “NO” a lot, and always keep trying
• Disappointment, hurt pride, and failure have little impact on their continuing to do the first 2
• They always tune their offer to what their customer values most.

Skip the disappointment

The best sales people get over disappointment quickly and jump right back in the game. They don’t let failures along the way discourage or stall them, or damage their confidence.

One of the best stories I heard about this was a sales person telling a non-sales colleague:

The difference between you and me is that if you went up to every woman in this bar and asked them for a date, and they all said, NO, you would not talk to them again. If I went to every woman in this bar and asked them for a date, and they all said NO, I would go back and ask each one of them again. And a third time…

Three Sales lessons for your Success

1. NO is never a dead end

Every good sales person I know, can tell you how many NO’s on average it takes them to get to a YES. If their number is 17, when they hear NO for the 14th time, they don’t get discouraged.  Their reaction is more like, “Great, I’ve got through one more step to YES!”

NO, is not only a critical step in the process, it’s viewed as a positive step forward. This is so important in building your career as well.

You need to get turned down.

You need to get over disappointment quickly, and see this rejection as a step forward in the process. Then you need to put yourself out there again – as many times as it takes.

Don’t Stop Trying

I can offer my personal example.

While my corporate career, and sequence of promotions was highly successful by any external measure, people didn’t see all the failures. They didn’t see all the times I heard, NO, and all the times I went for promotions and was passed over or turned down.

The success came from acting like a sales person, improving my value, and putting myself out there — and to keep asking.

So out of about 25 times at the plate, by putting my fears aside, and selling myself again and again, I got about 20-something NO’s and 3 life changing YES’s

You don’t get to the YES without the NO’s.

I see people make the mistake of going for promotion once or twice, getting turned down, and getting discouraged. Then they stop trying.

They blame the unfairness of the environment. Or they manufacture an imaginary high ground, and cite that they refuse to take part in the political maneuvers they believe are required.

The biggest thing holding these people back is that they got turned down, discouraged and then stopped trying.

If you are not willing to keep trying, you are the one creating the obstacle to your success.

2. Find a Bigger Pond

Good sales people go where the opportunity is. If they are assigned a “bad territory”, they find a way to expand or develop it. If they are assigned a genuinely bad territory, they move on and get a different job.

I see many people make the mistake of not moving on, when their environment can no longer support their advancement. They will stay for years, frustrated that there are no promotions available.

I’m all for advancing within your company, and much of what I write about is to help you do exactly that. But if there are no jobs, and several people above you need to die before a position opens up, you need to take it upon yourself to move on if you want to advance.

Or if you have an incompentant manager, you will get stuck. You need to get yourself into a different spot.

Go outside your comfort zone, go get some NO’s from new people, and keep trying!

3. Increase Your Value

When a customer is not buying, a great sales person will pump up the value of what they are selling.

They do this by getting a better understanding of their prospect’s needs, and putting together an offer which is more useful and valuable, and therefore much harder to refuse.

This is also critical in you career.

If you are not seen as promotable, ask yourself why.

Go the extra mile to really learn about and understand what is most relevant to your executive management. Is it new customers? Is it innovation? Is it cost cutting? Is it developing people?

Learn what counts and tune your job to offer more of it. Build up your value.

No one will instruct you to do this. It’s up to you.

Doing your job as written is more like selling a commodity product. Instead create a new product, higher value product. Differentiate your value by tuning your job to have more business impact.

The only way to reliably advance your career is to be always be adding more value to the business.

But don’t forget to keep selling !

Motivation is Personal

Money is the easiest and least personal way to motivate people (if you have money). If you don’t, you need to get down to the real business of making people actually care about what they are working on.

In any economy, it’s important to focus on the non-financial motivators for three key reasons.

1. Those are always within your control
2. They work better than money – people work for meaning, not money
3. Money doesn’t buy loyalty, it only rents effort

Free motivators that work wonders

1. Remove Uncertainty about the work. The biggest de-motivator you can have is when people don’t know exactly what to work on or why it matters. Make sure you keep people engaged in meaningful work, and always connect the dots of why it matters. Just because you are waiting for answers from above, don’t keep your team waiting. Never pass uncertainty downward.

2. Communicate a lot, on a regular cadence. Clear consistent communication from above is a magical motivator that so many leaders miss. You get huge points for leadership and credibility when you communicate well. People are always more motivated to work for people they know and respect, than invisible, or checked out leaders. Even if you are not checked out, if you fail to communicate regularly, you will appear to be checked out.

3. Don’t guess what people care about, ask them! Personally ask each person that works for you. You’ll be amazed at the answers, and how many things you can do without money that will make a material difference to them.

4. Say Thank You. Create a habit in your organization to recognize contributions. Don’t over complicate it with processes, nominations, reviews, and spreadsheets. Just make it clear to your staff that you want to know when anyone in your organization does something remarkable, and then have one of the executives say, “thank you”.

Want to know more?

I’ll talk more about each of these and share some great stories about what really works (and what really pisses people off) in a free webinar: Motivating Without Money, Wednesday, Aug 25. Sign up to be there

Money is the easiest and least personal way to motivate people — that is, if you have money.

Why people care

If you don’t have money, you need to get down to the real business of making people actually care about what they are working on.

Money is not a lasting motivator

The one thing that differentiates money from all the other motivators is that if you give people enough money you can treat them like crap.

I know many companies that take this route.  If you have enough money to spread around, why bother investing personal time and effort in recognizing employees’ contributions?

But if you run out of money…

…People will go somewhere else for the same pay where they won’t get as abused or ingnored.  I’ve seen this happen over and over again when the economy or market turns, and the money for bonuses runs out.  If the pay is equal, people choose not to be tortured.

Money doesn’t buy loyalty, it only rents effort.

Personal Recognition Works Wonders

The organizations with the most loyal employees have a strong habit of personal  recognition.

People don’t work for money, they work for meaning.

Just Say “Thank You”

A big motivator for making people feel like their work has meaning is simply recognizing when someone does a good job and saying thank you – personally.

You don’t need to over complicate this with processes, nominations, reviews, and spreadsheets.  Just always say thanks, when someone does something great.

How do you know when good things happen?

The trouble that organizations face is not that they are stingy with thank you’s, it’s just that they don’t have a way of knowing when good things happen.
This is really easy to fix.

Make Recognition a staff process

Just make it clear to your staff that you want to know when anyone in your organization does something remarkable.

Spend time in each executive staff meeting on recognition.  When someone deserves to be recognized, have an executive outside their organization go say thank you personally.  As the GM make a phone call or send a hand-written note.

In these days a hand written note is a work of art!  It definitely stands out.

The element of surprise

Sadly, people don’t expect to be recognized.  So when you do it, it’s a remarkable experience for them.

Surprise: I know the times in my career when a big executive outside of my business thanked me personally for something I did, it was incredibly motivating.

Notes: When I have sent hand written notes to sales people that exceeded 150% of quota, I got phone calls from them thanking ME for the notes!

It’s contagious: One time someone in my organization did something brilliant to simplify the product line. She got a huge personal thank you from the Manufacturing VP, because it increased our margins. Not only was she on top of the world, but everyone in her group saw it happen and was motivated too.

That one thank you made my whole organization feel like their work was noticed.

Never just give people the money.

If you do have money, don’t waste the opportunity to motivate, and set high expectations for continued great work in the future. This is a prime opportunity to give someone both a financial and personal reward.

Make it a significant conversation with significant appreciation and significant expectations attached.

The financial reward is great, but if you treat it personally, you will also engender genuine motivation and loyalty.

Motivating without  Money

To learn more about how to use non-financial motivators join my upcoming
FREE Webinar: Motivating Without Money.

I’ll share some great stories about what really works (and what really pisses people off)

It’s Wednesday, Aug 25.

You can register here.

.

This week, my visibility and Personal Branding approach was published in Fortune Magazine.

Here’s more…

Invisible doesn’t work

Good work does not stand on its own.  But if you are annoying in the way you pursue visibility, you are also not doing your career any favors.

Visibility is not selfish

Visibility is not just about you.  Your visibility is good for your team and your business. People with visibility get more done.   Get over thinking you are on the high ground by refusing to pander to politics, because you believe good work should speak for itself.  Maybe it should, but it doesn’t.

If you remain uncomfortable with visibility, you remain invisible.  So even though you keep delivering great work consistently, you will be disappointed by the lack of recognition, appreciation and rewards you receive.

Get more done

And you’ll also have a harder time getting resources and support for what you are trying to do.  No one is comfortable giving great projects and big budgets to people they don’t know.

Visibility = progress for your business and your career.

1. Visibility for Real Results

Annoying: Go for publicity without results to back it up.

I am never advocating visibility INSTEAD of results.  It’s always about great work and results FIRST.

You never want to be seen as managing your career more than you are doing work. (We all know and wish bad things for those people.) You don’t ever want to be viewed political with no substance.

Valuable: Be seen as doing and delivering high impact work.

The being seen part is as important as the high impact work.  As long as you base the visibility on actual work that delivers value, there is nothing hollow or shallow about it.

2. Visibility with Executives

Annoying: Stalking Executives

Don’t talk to an executive when he has to go to the bathroom. I have seen people keep executives outside the door to the bathroom, and refuse to let them in.  How much are they really going to listen to you at that point?

Don’t corner them at parties to pitch your agenda or complain about your issues.  They are at a party. Don’t drag them down, they get enough of that when they are not at a party.

Don’t Blame them for things, with no proposals for improvement – Don’t bleed all over an executive about how everything is screwed up in their business, and think your analysis will make you look smart. If you have a complaint, have a proposal. Otherwise you are just annoying.

Valuable: Have a good reason to connect with an executive.

Pay attention to what they care about.  Give them positive feedback or valuable inputs to solve issues or expose opportunities.  Share a personal point of interest.  Don’t start with an ask.

Have them know you as a person, not just a climber.  Update them briefly when your work matters to THEM.  And be careful that your work actually matters to them before you go on about it.

3. Visibility at Important Meetings

Annoying: Don’t go to meetings just to be seen.

The important people at the meeting notice if you have no function or reason for being there, and subtract points from you career.  It backfires.

Valuable: Do high value work. Tune your job to deliver more value over time. Be the reason for an important meeting to happen around your work. Find ways to make that work visible in other ways.

4. Visibility based on truth.

Annoying: Never take credit for work you didn’t do.

You may get a blip of visibility, but it will backfire because it is not real.  You get no real benefit from promoting yourself on any false foundation. Ultimately people will see right through it.

Valuable: Make other people famous.

Give credit to other people for good work that they did. The great thing about this is that you still get the visibility for doing the communicating.  When you give the credit where it is due, based on the truth of who did the high value work, you get recognized for cultivating stars.

Managing Energy

One thing no one ever tells you about executive positions…

…is that a big part of success is simply surviving them!

As a leader it is vitally important that you maximize the energy you bring to your work.

When your energy is low, you are just not very good at your job.

So you need to be clear that part of your job is to make, and keep yourself OK, despite the stress of the job, and the many things lining up to kill you each week.

I picked this topic because I am writing this before leaving on vacation, (and you’ll be reading this while I am on vacation.) I am managing my energy this week, scuba diving in the Bahamas.

Brain Science and Happiness

I have come across some really interesting pieces of information about brain science, as it affects attitude and positive energy.   I wanted to collect them in one place, because together they tell an interesting story.

The punchline of the story:  You need to do stuff on purpose to be happy.

1. How long can you stay angry?

From Jill Bolte Taylor’s book:  My Stroke of Insight, she talks about the fact that there is a physiological response to anger.  She writes: Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over.  If however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.

Basically, if you get angry, you’ve got 90 seconds of real anger that is a physiological experience.  If you stay angry after 90 seconds, it’s entirely up to you.

After 90 seconds you are using up energy specifically to stay angry.

2. The Default Mode of the Brain is Negative

A friend of mine is studying the brain science of meditation, and told me two fascinating things, that made a lot of sense to me.

The brain’s default mode is negative. So all those stories, sequences, decision loops, doubts, and obsessions that your brain puts you through — all the negative processing, is actually the default mode of the brain.  Yuk!

The fear response. The other shoe to drop on this negative-default topic, is with regard to the amygdala. The amygdala is the oldest part of our brain that has not evolved since we were cave men waking up at 2am because a tiger came into the cave. Actually it’s not evolved since way before then, which is why it’s often referred to as the lizard brain.

The amygdala is responsible for the fight or flight, survival response — the raw, paralyzing, fear response, that puts you at your most threatened and defensive.

When that response is triggered, blood actually rushes to your limbs (to get stronger for the impending fight or flight), which means it rushes out of your brain! So in the moment of threat, you are actually less mentally capable.

The new piece of brain science emerging from this, that my friend told me about, is that long periods of extended, severe stress can make the amygdala response part of your default brain response.

If this has happened, and your brain has recruited the amygdala to participate in it’s default, negative mode, then even the  slightest nudge or input (think, dropped phone call vs. tiger in the cave) would trigger an extreme anger/stress/threat response. How painful would that be? You can see how stress can build upon itself to the extreme, if you don’t get a break from it.

3. How to get a break? Trade one stress for another!

The third thing I have come across was actually some research from a colleague of mine, Vonda Mills, who is a noted psychologist, and management consultant, which showed that working professional people with children actually had lower overall stress than working professional people without children.

The reason was that the people who had children were forced to “turn off” the work stress because their children required their full attention during parts of the day.  The people who did not have an alternative stress to switch over to, those who alternated between stress and “rest”,  actually ended up more stressed than the people who got to alternate between different sources of stress.

There is more science to say that a stressed brain, gets more useful rest given something else to work on vs. being idle. Remember, idle/default mode is negative.

(This made me think of something I often say — that happy people make bad art.  Perhaps many of the great artists created their works because they intuitively knew they needed to give their  brain something to focus on instead of the stress that was causing their despair.)

4. Stress and laziness

I was traveling through an airport a few weeks ago, and caught a news story about how distracted we all our by the amount of information we have to contend with on all our electronic devices, social networks, and many browser windows (and televisions in airports).

The point that leapt out at me, (which I typed into my blackberry on the spot), was about a study of highly distracted, stressed people… “[in mice] under stress, the areas of their brains associated with habit formation grew, while those linked to decision making and goal achievement shriveled.”  I found the source info here.

Wow, so stress adds real estate to the part of our brain that wants to be a couch potato and shrinks the part of our brain that is required to make new things happen.  Yikes!

OK, so now what?

What this all means to me is – the broken record part from me –

Do stuff on purpose. Actively do things to keep your brain out of the default negative mode.

Acknowledge that happiness is not the easy, default state. It requires effort.  Focus on things that make you happy or bring you fulfillment, and do them on purpose.  On purpose = actually schedule time in your life to do the things that fuel your energy.

Be careful of anger. Remember that you have an excuse for only 90 seconds – a physical process that makes you angry, after that it’s up to you.  And the more you choose to stay angry, the more you stay in extreme stress, the more you encourage the already negative default mode of your brain to recruit the amygdala and make it far worse.

When you need a break, try keeping your brain busy with something instead of “zoning out”. Since even switching one stress for another stress has proven to be more restful than resting your brain, next time you need to de-stress, try something that is mentally challenging but fun for you, and see if you feel better than letting your brain fester in a negative “rest” state.

Happiness on Purpose

Finally, from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, describing something from one of her teachers:

…People universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough.  But that’s not how happiness works.  Happiness is the consequence of personal effort, [...] and once you have sustained a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it…

10 IDEAS FROM THE WEBINAR:
DEFENDING YOUR TIME

Download the Podcast
Download the Complete Webinar

Time Challenges

1. Everyone is too busy. The most successful people were not the ones who were less busy along the way.  They figured out how to get the most important, valuable stuff done even though they were overwhelmed with work too.

2.  This is HARD. Remember, your job as a leader is not just to do good work when things line up to support you in getting the job done.  It’s to find a way to get the right stuff done when everything lines up to kill you — THAT’s what the job of a leader is.

Change your Job

3. Your job description is just a starting point. As a leader, you are expected to re-invent your job to be the job that needs to be done, not just the job that is given to you.  We  talked about how to tune and connect your work to key business priorities to ensure your work really matters.

4. You can’t do everything that is asked of you and succeed. We talked about how you need to “catch” all the work and satisfy your boss, without actually “doing” all the work.   Learn  to analyze, and prioritize your workload so you make some room to get the most important stuff done.

5.  Do more smart stuff. We talked about working at the right level and the importance of strategic thinking, planning, communicating, processes, and more high value ways of working.  You must give yourself time to think about your workload, not just work on it.

6. Do less stupid stuff. What work do you get caught up in that is at the wrong level?  We talked about how to identify repetitive tasks, chaos, and reactive activities, and eliminate them from your work.

How to say NO and maintain credibility

7.  What if it’s your boss’s fault? How do you deal with a boss who just keeps piling the work on, and expects everything to get done right now?  We discussed some ideas to get your boss to back off, and see that it’s right for the business.

8. Negotiating your workload: We talked about how to negotiate your workload with your boss and other stakeholders so they understand the value of what you ARE doing, vs. being upset about what you are NOT doing.

9. Stakeholder Communications. You need support of your boss, your team, and your peers and partners.  How to build a communication plan to make sure that there are no surprises, and avoid attacks and judgment about what you are not doing so you build credibility, instead of being known as someone who says, NO.

Deal with Fire Drills

10.  Get ahead of the chaos. Proactively deal with pressures that throw you off course.  We talked about how to budget the right amount of time and to shield and protect resources.   You need to deal with the inevitable urgent demands and fire drills without risking the most significant work.

Download the Webinar now.

(FREE Downloads for members of Azzarello Group)

• Download Podcast Only
• Download Podcast, Presentation and Worksheets

Why not Become a Member?

Become a member now

Or you can:

• Purchase this single podcast
• Purchase this one podcast with the presentation and worksheets

.
See Also:

• Make More Time

.

Getting your whole team in the same room these days is rare.

So how do you create a sense of team?

And how do you motivate people you can’t spend time with in person?

Thank you for your ideas

This article includes some thoughts from my first blog post ever! But also, this is a topic that many of you have contributed great ideas to over the past couple of years, so I wanted to collect them all in one place.  Please keep your ideas coming!

1. Virtual Team Building (literally)

I always did team building exercises when I had my team in a room together. But somehow with a remote, virtual team, I never considered that it was possible.

This was a brilliant idea that a member offered on one of our coaching calls.

How to do remote team building

First, prepare.  Distribute a template ahead of time that each person fills out.  It should include a photo of them, and questions which help people get to know each other.

Some examples:

• What is on your iPod?
• What was your best/worst job ever?
• What are your hobbies?
• What is your favorite book, movie, sport, animal?
  
• What is something from your childhood that has stayed with you and you use in your work?

.
Then when you have your virtual meeting over a conference call, show each person’s template and photo, and have them talk about it.  It is an amazing way to help your team get to know each other as people, and build a much more productive working relationship.

Photos! Photos alone go a long way to build trust and camaraderie.  If your team is comfortable with photos, create a social media, facebook sort of page for your team to share non-work things with each other.

This is something you can easily assign to someone on your team who is inclined to set it up and keep it alive.  Refer to recent posts in your meetings.

(note: if someone refuses to submit a photo, let it go, don’t force the issue.)

2. Improve the Quality of Communications

Another issue with virtual teams is often that they are spread around the world, in different countries with different native languages.

Conference call communication is difficult enough, but if it’s not in your native language it’s excruciating.

Suzanne Pherigo created a brilliant process to deal with this.  (You may know Suzanne from Azzarello Group Webinar fame, as my Co-Host).  Suzanne runs an international R&D organization.

Add written reinforcemnent to conference calls

On all of their multi-country conference calls they use an additional IM window where people in each country type out the key points being made, translate any jargon, highlight questions and decisions, and clarify areas in the discussion that were moving fast, or unclear.

They also use blog updates which capture the key ideas and decisions from the conference call in writing, to re-inforce the key outcomes and have a record for later review and understanding.

Adding written communications to conference calls, improves understanding, relationships and productivity dramatically.  Brilliant, Suzanne!

(I would think these were good practices even if there were not language issues.)

3. Timing

Being sensitive to time zones can go a long way to make people feel like they count.

Use their time zone: Whenever I recommend a meeting time, I always note it in the time zone of the other person.

From their perspective, if they are not in the headquarters time zone they need to translate every single meeting. Just doing that one step for them makes a big difference.

Use GMT: Another idea that came from a member was to always note times in GMT so everyone has to translate equally.

Share the suffering: Also, if you need to get the US, Europe, and Asia on the phone at the same time, alternate the suffering.  Have the meeting on rotating schedule so that one time zone is always comfortable.

4. Individuals must exert their presence

As a leader, another thing you can do is let individuals who are remote know that part of their job is to make sure they are not invisible.  The more they step up to make their presence felt the more included they will feel and the more motivated they will be.

It just works so much better for the remote individual to own this.

5. Have Better Virtual Meetings

Finally, re-published from my original post…  How to have better meetings when no one is in the room.

When people are in a meeting I expect them to be “present” – listening, participating,
contributing, and NOT doing email. If people are not going to be present why have a meeting?

Here’s how I do it.

Insist on starting On Time.  Everyone is to call in 5 minutes prior and be ready to go on time.  If need be, start the meeting start at 5 minutes after the hour – sharp! No excuses. Being late degrades accountability for presence, and is a huge time waster.  Don’t tolerate it.

Start with a weather report (or another personal topic) from each person on the call.  This gives every person’s presence a chance to be felt even though you can’t see them around the table.  And it gives you an opportunity to treat people like humans, which always helps.

Insist that no one mutes their phone. I don’t care if I hear children or dogs.  This also makes it harder to type, or watch TV without getting found out.  Mute degrades presence.  And it’s another big time waster.  After a discussion has gone down the road a bit, someone will chime in and say, “sorry, I didn’t realize my phone was on mute and I need to go back to …”

Be there. Make it clear that if this is an important meeting you are supposed to have it on your schedule, be on a landline, and not be driving somewhere between more important things.  You need to set the example for this yourself too – or don’t have the meeting.

Have a clear desired outcome and the promise of a shorter meeting.  “We will finish this meeting at 9:45 so that you can hang up and do 15 minutes of something else before your next meeting.”

Reinforce the fact that you value each other’s time. “The reason we have a shorter meeting, keep our phones un-muted, and don’t do email is because we respect each other’s time and therefore commit to being present, even though we are not in the same room.”

Thanks, everyone!

Creative Thinking vs. Job Skills

OK, so I am stealing a story I read about 15 years ago in an airline magazine.

If anyone out there recognizes it and can help me attribute this please let me know!

Solve this problem…

Here is the story.  This was a science class and there was a homework problem which was the following:

If you needed to find out the height of a tall building using only a barometer, how would you do it?

The “correct” answer involved measuring the air pressure at the top of the building and on the ground, and using the difference in air pressure to calculate the height of the building.  Kids that used that approach and got the math right were marked correct and given full credit.

But there were two other answers that stood out to me, that the teacher marked wrong, with no credit.

I would have marked these correct and given these two students a job!

The first “wrong” answer:

One student said he would take the barometer to the top of the building, drop it off, count how many seconds it takes to hit the ground, and calculate the height based on the time of the fall.

This is probably at least as accurate an answer as using the air pressure based approach.

The second “wrong” answer – even better!

This student said, I would find the general manager of the building and say to him. “If you tell me how tall this building is, I will give you this barometer.”  – Fantastic!

Not only did this solution meet the requirements of solving the problem, it was likely to give a far more accurate answer than the correct answer based on air pressure!

What a shame these two students were marked wrong. These are precisely the kind of creative thinking skills that help people solve important problems when the by-the-book way does not work.

Be careful what you ask for

I have made many hiring mistakes by looking for job skillls — by keeping my interview only to the spec of what needed to be done by the person in the next 6-12 months.

People would come in with very impressive experience and just the right skills to do the job that needed to be done right now.  These hires are so tempting because you can see how they will immediately take some pain away.

But, what about when the job changes?

But more often than not, when the world changes around them, they get stuck.  They don’t adapt easily.  They need to find another job that matches their skills vs. being able to step up to do the new job that needs to be done.

Hire Fast Learners

The most valuable hires are the ones that can do the job today, but also can learn and adapt.

You are far more likely to hire a star if you ask questions that get at how the person thinks, and hire creative thinkers that are fast learners.

In your interview process you need to try and assess how much potential the person has to learn, and judge how fast they will grow.  People with the most room for growth and the most acceleration (smarts and ambition) are your best hires.

This approach is valuable from hiring summer interns, to top executives.  I have used it at every level, once I learned that sticking to the job spec doesn’t work very well.

See also Leading a High Performing Team.

Some approaches…

1. Puzzles: Actually give someone a puzzle to solve.  Some people will get annoyed and refuse to engage,  some will give up very quickly, and others will visibly start thinking and working it out.  They will tell you how they are thinking about approaching the problem.  They will ask you more questions about it.
Hire the person who is doing something with the problem.

2. Stories: Ask for stories about how the world was different when they first got into a job compared to how it is now.  What did they think needed to be done?  What new ideas did they come up with?  What changes did they drive?  If they just did the job as-is for a few years, and did not grow the responsibility or usefulness of their role, they are not a top hire.

3. Actual Problems: Tell them a situation that you are facing that needs a solution.  Ask them to talk through how they would approach it.  The ones that say, I don’t know yet, I’d need to get into the job first, are not your top people.  The ones that ask a bunch more questions and say, of course I’d need to listen and learn more, but from what I know right now this is what I think… and start offering insights, have stronger creative thinking skills.

Your ideas?

If you have used some great questions, puzzles, problems or other approaches to learn more about your candidates creative thinking, and learning skills, and are willing to share them with us, please leave a comment.

.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not
an act but a habit.” –Aristotle

.
Consistent Behaviors

I am always talking about how Brand is about consistent behaviors.

In fact, I just was interviewed by a Forbes Magazine editor for 90 minutes on this topic.  Turns out, I was scooped by Aristotle!

As Aristotle will tell you, what I am saying about branding is not a new idea.

The Big Idea

But the big idea here for me is that we build or degrade our Personal Brand every single day — in every single conversation, meeting, email, presentation, and interaction we have with others.

You are broadcasting your Personal Brand

The behaviors people experience most consistently from you, ARE your Personal Brand.

(By the way this is true for corporate brands too.  Your company’s brand is granted to your company based on your customers’ cumulative experience with all the products, services, processes, communications, and employees that interact with customers.)

You have a personal brand today whether you know it or not.

The question is –  is it what you want it to be?  And are you doing anything consistently, on purpose, to give people any particular impression of you?

Choice #1 – Build  your Personal Brand on Purpose

If you want to build your Personal Brand here are the steps.

• Learn what you are known for.  Get some feedback from people who know you and work with you.
• Decide what you want to be known for.  Understand if there is a gap.
• Define some specific behaviors that support your Brand.
• Do them on Purpose every chance you get.
• Get help with this.

.
For example if you wanted a Brand of being…

• Efficient: Don’t write long emails, ever.  Do present (every time) how your solutions save time and resources along with getting the desired outcome.
  .
• Well Connected in your industry: Don’t take on projects alone, engage your network.  Do expose the virtual team you’ve created and always include externally sourced content in your communications.
  .
• Cutting Through Chaos and solving complicated problems: Don’t ever participate in group email debates, offer obtuse suggestions, or let issues fester.  Do offer concrete ideas and close off loose ends – every day.

Choice #2 – Leave it to chance

Why now?

If you have made it this far in your career without bothering to build your Personal Brand, why should you worry about it now?

One hazard of leaving your Personal Brand to chance is that you remain somewhat of a blank.

Even if you are generally known as “good”, when opportunities come up, if you are not known for anything in particular so you don’t stand out very much.  You don’t stand out as much as someone who is known for something specific.

Many people are striving for more recognition,  relevance,  and respect.   Building your Personal Brand is a key factor in positioning yourself to attract the respect and the rewards you deserve.

Stand out more.  Be more Credible.

You become a much more credible and powerful presence in your company if everyone around you says similar, specific things about their impression of you.  Your Brand becomes significant and believable.

Your intentions do not equal others’ perceptions

It doesn’t matter what you think or feel, or intend to do.  Those things only matter to you.  No one else can see them.

Others can only experience what you DO.

Another hazard of leaving your Personal Brand to chance are that you can be giving negative impressions that you don’t intend.

For example, I remember once when I did a 360 review, I got low scores on being a good listener.  I was totally shocked, because I always considered myself to be a great listener.

What I learned when I dug in was that the few people I listened to, indeed thought I was a good listener, but the vast majority of my organization never observed me listening.

Build your Brand with visible behaviors

So to build my Brand as a Listener, I created more opportunities to listen.

By investing some thought and energy in building your Personal Brand on purpose you will increase your credibility and your value.

Build your Brand with My Career Workshop on DVD.