Learning

I was so lucky through-out my career to have great mentors and lots of smart people who cared about me.

I often say, (because it is true!) that the single thing that had the biggest impact on my success outside my own effort was mentors.

There was not a close second. Mentors helped me make the big leaps in my career and I am very grateful to each one of them.

Teaching

Now, much of what I do in my business is to pass on learning, insights and ideas to others.

I wanted to use this one blog post to make you aware of a resource I offer to share the benefits of what I have learned throughout my career with others – Membership to Azzarello Group.

My goal for the membership program is to coach and mentor as many people as possible through monthly Webinars, live Coaching Hours, and other resources.

I’ve been doing this for almost 2 years, and over 1000 people have participated.

My request of you

If you know anyone who wants to invest time and energy in building their success on purpose – please pass this on, and recommend that they join.

If you have high performers in your organization, and you want to provide a unique, personal development program for them, sign them up.

What you get

Members get access to me.  Each month I choose a topic on creating success in your career and business.  I deliver a Webinar, and provide live Q&A, as well as worksheets and templates for members to put their learning into action.

Some of the topics have been on Personal Brand, Ruthless Priorities, Building Credibility & Relevance, Networking Online & Offline, Making More Time, Business Strategy, and Managing your Boss.  A few times a year, I interview a special guest star who is an industry leader, key topic expert or author.

Next month our Webinar will be a member requested topic of
How to Upgrade your Team, based on a recent blog article Average isn’t Enough, which got a lot of discussion.

A Personal Resource

I have been told that membership to Azzarello Group provides a very useful monthly reminder, a reason to focus, and the inspiration to make your career and business goals actually happen.   It helps you:

• Step back, and rise above the day to day activity
• Clarify those few things that will make the biggest difference for YOU
• Take action with practical and specific ideas you can do right now

Take control of your success!

Learn more about membership
Join Now (3 Months free if you join by Nov 7)
Contact Me to sign up your team as a group

Thank you!

I really do appreciate your continued interest, support, feedback and referrals.

I will be back on the blog next week with more ideas and insights for your success!

Thanks for your indulgence and help this week in helping me share the Membership program.

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INTERVIEW WITH
BOB KAPLAN ON STRATEGY

HERE ARE 10 IDEAS BOB SHARED WITH US IN
THIS MONTH’S MEMBER WEBINAR

How do you manage when your budget keeps getting cut, but the expectations don’t?

You need to support 30 percent more products or customers and your budget is flat or down.

The level of quality demanded is higher.
The business is more complex.  But you have less money…

It’s important to remember:

• This is not a unique situation.
• Every leader in every company is in this same boat at one time or another.
• This is what your job actually IS

Any smart person can do more good stuff with more money!

That is not what your job is. Your job is to do great stuff no matter what the budget.

If you walk around saying “I can’t do as much as I did last year because my budget is smaller” you are putting a bulls-eye on your chest.  The most effective leaders don’t worry about how much money they don’t have and how much harder the job is, they just get to work making the right, few things happen.

“Do Less with Less”

The goal is not to do “More with Less”.  More with less just doesn’t work.

Just piling more work on with less resources and telling everyone to deal with it, is not a formula for success.

At one point in my career I had to cut my annual budget from $140M to $60M.  The details are not necessary.  That is a cut!  My mantra became “we are going to do LESS with LESS”!

I learned that when you are faced with less budget you need to do less stuff, but you need to make sure what you do now, is  better stuff than what you used to do!

Do less, but achieve more

That’s where the leadership comes in. Here is when you personally need to step up to drive change.

It’s about challenging yourself and your team to do things in new and different ways to achieve better results with the same or fewer resources. This is what I refer to as “Better with Less“.

Your job as a leader is to find a way forward when expectations don’t match  resources.

It is to find different ways of working that accomplish more.  It is to:

• Make your team less busy on things that don’t matter
• Make trade-offs on purpose
• Decide things with less study
• Emphasize a few key things over everything
• Make cuts without being asked

Focus on key outcomes, then make cuts to make room

So many managers get into the mode of trying to take on everything without enough budget, and don’t think of making cuts on their own unless they are forced to do so from above.

You need to step up and take the ownership and initiative to make cuts to make room for the most important stuff, whether or not you are asked to do so.

Avoid across the board cuts.

Another sign of whether you are doing your job as a leader is that some things get less money and some things get more money.

This shows you have chosen things to emphasize to drive the business, and that they will succeed because they are well funded.  If everything gets cut equally, you are not doing your job.

For more ideas see Better with Less.

How do you deal with people that are average performers?

The nice, loyal employees, who are not capable of stepping up to do what the job requires in the future?

You can’t really fire them for poor performance, because they are not problem employees, but you also know they are not what you really need in your business. 

They can’t help you enough to get where you need to go.

This is a very common situation, and as a leader you have two choices.

1. Average leadership behavior would be to let it ride, and wait until you can hire an additional new person, who is a top performer into a NEW role, and leave the average performer there.

2. Stand-out leadership behavior would be to change your organization, and build it UP.

Draw the ideal blank-sheet org chart

1. Start with the Desired Outcome for the Business

Get really clear about what business outcomes the company needs, and what the role is that your team needs to play in driving them.

Really understand and articulate the specific work, strategic problem solving, and outcomes that your team, and the specific individuals on your team, need to deliver to drive those business outcomes, not just now but in the future.

2. Draw your ideal org chart

Create a picture of the team that can do what you really need done.

Start with a blank sheet of paper. 

Don’t consider the current roles or who you already have on the team at all.  Just think about what the BUSINESS really needs, what outcomes you are on the hook for, and what the ideal team would be to make sure you can do it.

3. Create and clearly define the specific NEW roles

When you define the new roles, focus on outcomes, objectives and deliverables, not just “responsibilities”. 

List the long term objectives and short term work for each role on your ideal team.  Articulate the level of skills for decision making, strategic thinking, communicating, leadership, influence, and support which are required of someone in the role.

4. You have just created a clear and actionable picture of your goalIt is your job to make that picture come true.  It is likely that your current team does not fit into that structure.  It is your job to change your team over time so it does.

Two things will likely become clear at this point:

1. Some of your current people will people obviously map into the new roles.  Put them there.

2. You will end up with both some empty boxes AND some extra people.

The hard part

The real leadership comes in when you need to fill the empty boxes, and deal with the extra people.

This is a straightforward, and business focused way to move average or unmotivated performers off your team when you can’t fire them for being poor performers.  You make it clear what the business needs, what the new roles are, and what the requirements are for those roles.

It’s not personal

Their role does not exist any more.  The roles that do exist are new and different.  They are welcome to interview.   If they don’t make the cut, either give them a new role a level down in your organization, move them to another organization, or lay them off.

Your job is not to take care of people who are not up to the job you need to get done.  Your job is to build a team that can drive the right business outcomes.

This seems harsh. Is this really necessary?

Sure you can look around you, and see lots of average performance and other leaders not acting on this and not doing what it takes to build the right team. 

There can be a wide-spread tolerance for mediocrity in your company. 

Maybe you won’t lose your job if you just tolerate average performance and muscle through most of the hard stuff personally.

But just be clear maintaining the status quo is not stand-out, high value behavior as a leader.

This is not the kind of leadership experience that will set you up to advance. This is opting out as a leader.

This does not make you a bad person

If you have to eliminate jobs to build a stronger team, that also doesn’t prevent you from helping people you let go, get into their next job.  It wasn’t a performance issue, you needed different roles and this person was no longer a fit.  You are still in a position to help and provide referrals.

I have found that when people are struggling in the wrong roles and not doing well enough, taking them out of the role, gives them a new opportunity to move to a role where they can thrive and excel.  After getting over the initial shock and disappointment, they are often happier.

I acknowledge that right now is not a great time to be putting people out of work, but you can’t let that keep you from building the right team.

The other way to look at it is that you may be putting your whole team and your own job at risk, by not stepping up to do what the business needs.

The tougher the business challenges, the stronger the team you need.

As you consider the things you measure in your business, it is
helpful to step back and ask,
“Why am I measuring this?”

Is it:

1.  To get better & more efficient?

2.  To get people off your back?

What are you trying to do?

Of course you need to do some of both, but it’s really helpful to be clear about which one you are doing at any point in time.

For example, I have made the mistake of simply taking all of the internal success measures for my function,  putting them on charts, and giving them to my peers and management.  This, as it turns out, is a bad idea!

Be Relevant

No one really cares about what you do.  See also  Be More Relevant.  And no one ever really wants to see the guts of what you measure to do it better over time.

By all means, measure away when it comes to improving your operational effectiveness and efficiency, just don’t torture everyone else with the details.   Even if it’s really impressive, and you’ve done remarkable things, they won’t really understand it anyway.

It’s about communicating

Understanding why those measures matter is part of your expertise.  Keep those charts inside your function with the people who know what it all means.

When it comes to reporting measures outside your function, find a way to measure and report on things that are important to your stakeholders.  Remember, when you are talking outside your function…

It is not about improving operations, it is about communicating.

How to impress people

Outside of your organization, your goal is that people be favorably impressed with your results.  That allows you to defend your honor and your budget.

So you need to come up with a new set of measures, or at least a new set of reports for your stakeholders.  These reports will portray your results in a way that relate to things the already care about, in terms they already understand.

Their Measures, Their Vocabulary

If you are in marketing don’t deliver graphs about impressions, reach, or cost per lead.  Find out what the hot buttons are and report on those.

Business relevant measure: 50% more sales people report we have moved to the top competitive position when they walk into an account.

The fact that you delivered this through PR and SEO only matters to you.

If you are in IT don’t show charts about network availability, or data center upgrades.

Business relevant measure: Talk about the fact that you were able to decrease days sales outstanding (DSO) by providing online payment capability.

The fact that you did this by creating new applications and infrastructure improvements is secondary.

Measures people care about

Here is the way to establish your set of measures that the business will care about

Interview your business stakeholders about what they believe drives the business and what the most important business initiatives are.

Listen for 2 things.  1. What the list is, AND 2. the words they use to describe the things on the list.  This is your secret weapon.

(This is really magic…  Do this, it works.)

Now when you create the dashboard or scorecard to communicate your results outside your function, use only THEIR words to create the labels for the measures.

That way when they see what you are measuring, they see a list of highly relevant things they already understand and care about.

If you report your team’s performance and success based on those things, you win.

Get it on one page

You can still have your whole binder full of backup details, that you use to actually run your operation, but when it comes to communicating the value of what your operation delivers to the business, make sure you fit it on one page.

That way, you give a concise, positive impression that you are delivering on the things the business cares most about, and because it is on one page, they will be willing to take it in, and you’ll get the recognition you deserve.