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Meetings

7/27/2010

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You Can’t Live With Them, You Can’t Live Without Them.
Conway Daily Sun July 28, 2010
By Michael Kline, The Entreprenologist

Most of us who have ever worked in a larger company can attest to most meetings being a waste of time.  Endless research proves that to be correct. Let’s do some math – three salaried managers, who earn $60,000 per year, cost a total of $180 to sit in the conference room for just two hours. If they only do this once a week, that meeting costs the company about $9,000.00.  Who decided to spend $9,000 on that weekly meeting?  Is there even an approval process for this budget item?  Of course not!  How many of these meetings are “purchased” every week with little to know thought on the return on investment?  Think of the cost of a whole team sitting there all day to learn or accomplish very little.  Meanwhile, the same company is counting paper clips and cutting services to customers to save money!

The good news is, tremendous progress has been made on a relatively new business model, the “Results Only Work Environment”,  in which employees own the personal responsibility and accountability for the results of their job. They work the hours they want, the way they want, and all meetings are voluntary. This concept isn’t just for hippies and philosophers; it’s actually working in the real world, in large, profitable corporations. The book that explains the genesis and real life experience of the concept is “Why Works Sucks and how to Fix it” by  Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Of course for this to be effective, meetings would have to offer value to employees. Employees would need to be motivated to want to get that value to increase their productivity. The company culture would have to be such that people who cared and would be rewarded for results, not just activity. That would mean abandoning everything that waste time and productivity in the company. Owners and managers would have to make wholesale changes to the old way of doing and thinking about everything that happens in the company. That would mean utter chaos for most companies, and panic in the minds of most managers. Read the book, and then argue with me.

So yes, the Entreprenologist is a big fan of eliminating as many meetings as possible. Unless, you are like many small businesses and don’t have near enough meetings in the first place.  Everything in moderation, I say.  I like a little dark chocolate, a little wine, and a few good meetings.

Most small organizations agree they should have regular meetings, but don’t bother because they make  the argument that they  all see each other constantly. This is costing as much as having too many meetings, because you're missing focus and alignment on your specific strategy for achieving your stated goals. Of course if you have no stated goals, or haven’t created a clear strategy to achieve them, or lack the talented staff to contribute, then yes, meetings would be a waste of time.

Before you take my advice and commit to weekly staff meetings, you need to have a purpose to your meetings, a strict agenda and some rules.  First, what’s the point of meetings?  In the past, they turned into complaining sessions – that’s not productive.  Sometimes they are just for talking about sticking points in operations or sales process. That’s nice, but that’s the daily meeting agenda, not the weekly.  Confused?  I’ll give you the schedule, but the implementation is most effective when guided by a professional outside coach (or Entreprenologist). Meet first with your key people to establish your annual goals and your strategic plan. Assign accountability for every item on the plan. Meet weekly with the agenda being a report from each team member on their areas of responsibility to the plan. Everyone is accountable to everyone else, every week. No more getting off track and not making lasting changes or progress! You determine what data you should measure daily that most drives your primary goal. You meet every day for five to fifteen minutes to discuss your measured data and any sticking points that should be addressed. The cycle gets adjusted once a quarter with a strategic plan update – no changing the plan in the middle of a quarter – give your strategies a chance to succeed or fail before you change directions again. This helps manage the A.D.D. of the typical owner, the need for consistency of the typical manager, and the need for focus for the rest of the team. In summary, the plan is written annually, updated quarterly, monitored weekly and pulsed daily. That’s probably all the meetings you need, unless you want to meet with me to personalize a plan for you.
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How to Motivate Anyone

7/26/2010

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How to Motivate Anyone
Conway Daily Sun, July 14, 2010
By Michael Kline

I have heard smart people argue it is impossible to motivate people; that the best we can do is to create an environment for people to become motivated.  Okay, smarty-pants, let’s not argue semantics, lest we miss the point entirely. Let’s talk about the challenges of reaching the desired results and set aside the technical language for a moment.

Sometimes, one of the easiest ways to get closer to understanding what something is, is to know what it is not.  For instance, a satisfied need is not a motivator.  Imagine you were locked in a small, hot box with no air holes. You would be significantly motivated to get air. If you were locked in a cage, you would not be sitting there thinking how thankful you are to have air, you would be solely focused on your desire to get out of the cage. Air is now taken for granted and freedom is your new motivation. If you feel trapped working in a boring job, or living in a tiny house, or stuck in an unhealthy relationship, your primary motivator is to solve the problem at hand.  Do you still need air?  Of course, but air being an “already satisfied need” you do not consider it a motivator.

For the unemployed, some argue that any job is better than no job. This is true, but what happens six months later when you hate the job and can’t live on the wages? Now the motivation is to get a better job.  It’s a tough choice to hold out for the better job if you don’t know when you’ll find it.

Money does not always motivate someone who has their financial needs met (as defined by them). Other priorities, such as a sense of freedom, or self expression, or control may be more important.  So, that’s lesson number one – a satisfied need is not a motivator.

Next, consider who it is you wish to motivate. It’s not a bad thing to “be used” by someone, especially if you consider it your task to be of service to your employees in the first place – your job is to help them see their work as a means for them to reach their personal goals. Now, you have their attention! The trick is to find out what they really want. Ideally, this means what they want from life in general; in the short term, we can also talk about what they want on a day to day basis.

Public recognition works wonders on some folks. However, recognition is not motivating to a shy, task-oriented person who just wants to do their work and be paid well for it. Before you go out and buy your little plastic statue/award to present at the annual meeting, make sure you’re not insulting and embarrassing the person you wish to appreciate. Your best salespeople may not like being rewarded with a 7 day Caribbean cruise. If that sounds insane, get over it – not everyone wants a cruise. I do, but I’ve done all the normal cruises and now I know exactly want I want, so just give me a check that fits your budget and I’ll take it from there!

What is it people want?  If you can figure that out, you’re a genius, and you still only have half the answer! The other half of the answer comes when you can figure out how bad they want it.  Most people can’t even say what they really want in life. At the risk of offending everyone to some degree, I say we already have everything we really ever wanted. If you wanted something you didn’t get, you just didn’t want it bad enough. This is the point where you argue with me saying “I couldn’t have what I wanted because (insert your explanation here)”. I’m sorry, but if you really wanted it bad enough, you would have overcome your excuse and gotten what you wanted. It’s just that we didn’t want it more than we wanted other things we chose instead.

You shouldn’t have to give away the store to motivate someone. And, if you did, would it help? As a faithful follower, (you are, aren’t you?) you probably know we are in the processing of selecting apprentices to take over our stores. Interestingly, we have not had any unemployed people apply for the positions. We have received a great response, but only from employed people. This study is in its early stages, but I wonder if people who are unemployed don’t think they could get the apprenticeship. I could be way off-base, but at least for some, is the lack of self-confidence the same influence in their life that led to their unemployment in the first place? I wish I could interview the people who decided not to come for an interview! Perhaps they don’t read the paper other than the classifieds. I would read every page of the paper looking for possible opportunities on the horizon. Is this a motivator? A free business education, not available at any school for any price, while getting paid to work a pleasant job, and getting the business (for free) at the end of five years of service, with nothing to lose. Yes, it is. We have more than enough applicants, but all currently employed, hard working, creative people, who are willing to work as many hours as it takes, do whatever job description it takes, at whatever pay they need to take. It appears it is not a motivator to the unemployed, or those who are not willing to do what it takes. Perhaps when you’re unemployed, you just need a job – any job, not some pie-in-the-sky dream building opportunity. The lesson learned (again) is it’s difficult to figure out what motivates others. I’m sure we will have many lessons to share from our big experiment.

So, in conclusion, when considering what it is that will help move us forward, or to motivate others to move forward, we need to remember three areas of concern. Find an unsatisfied need, consider the personality and self esteem of the one to be motivated, and find out what they really want and how bad do they want it. This runs parallel to the three steps to success in anything – decide what you want, find out what it will take to get it, and then do that.

 
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Your Ticket to Freedom

7/26/2010

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Systems, Structure and Predictability are Key
Conway Daily Sun, June 30, 2010
By Michael Kline


Owning your own business is your ticket to freedom. Yeah right! Funny, how the goals change over the years of owning a business. For many, in the beginning, the goal was simply to create a job, working for yourself. Usually, a more ideal goal when opening a business is to create personal and financial freedom you are not likely to achieve working for someone else.  Whatever your goal was in the beginning, I bet it’s changed a few times over the years. In good times, it might become a little grander – to expand and become five times our current size! In times of stress, the goal may adjust downward, just a tad, maybe to get through the week without killing anyone! As someone who has just announced a pretty dramatic exit strategy, I’d like to talk about reassessing our ticket to freedom concept.

Our goal was always to work on our business, rather than in our business. With our background in franchising, this was obvious to me, but it’s a difficult lesson to learn for the person starting a business in which they are the person who delivers the goods or services. If you are the artist, the chef, the landscaper, the lawyer, the carpenter, etc. then you are your business, especially in the beginning.  You often don’t really own a business, as much as you own a job.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need to understand the difference.  You can’t sell a job, like you can a business. A job doesn’t build equity and you can’t hire someone else to do it without firing yourself. A business on the other hand, is a separate entity that can live without you. A business, that has systems and processes that are teachable, repeatable and sellable, has value beyond providing you with a job. You can expand such a business, hire someone else to run it, sell it or just have more fun running it yourself.

The entrepreneur’s job is to create a business that is marketable. Your product isn’t the goods and services your business sells. Those goods and services create your cash flow, but your real product is the business itself.  It only has one customer – the person who buys it when you’re ready to exit as the owner. Now, with that mindset, how do you go about building your business as the ultimate “product” to sell? You would make it what we call turn-key.

Think of creating a franchise prototype. Develop your business to run predictably, successfully and profitably without you. If it can run without you, then you can choose when, how and if you’ll work in the business. You must have two hats – one is that of an employee, you wear whenever you are working in the business, and another hat as an investor you put on when you are working on your business. If you’re the master artist/chef/carpenter/lawyer/dentist/barber, and you like to work your craft art, great! Now build your business for other people to run so that you can concentrate only on your craft, wearing your employee hat. You will need to have time to wear your investor hat to work on your business though, to establish the systems and processes that can be teachable, repeatable and marketable, if you ever want your freedom.

 If your ultimate goal is freedom, (say to start something new or focus on your passions) then

Making this happen is easiest with involvement from your entire team. Depending on your business, sometimes that literally means every employee, but sometimes it’s a group of key people. Anyone who’s worked in a large organization knows management by committee is slow, fragment, and more complex than management by an individual. That’s not what I’m suggesting. We want to create a structure, or framework, for creating systems!  Go ahead, make your fun – this isn’t like asking for paperwork to analyze how to reduce paperwork. It may sound like a government program at first, since I am suggesting we create systems for creating systems, but this works

As the owner or CEO of your business, you are the ultimate decision maker. But with your strategic team, you will gain from their insight and experience. You’ll be exposed to a diversity of viewpoints and a wider variety of alternatives than you could ever come up with yourself.

 They can help you with:

  • Long-term plans and budgets
  • Tracking of overall business indicators
  • Business policies
  • Major projects
  • Marketing decisions
  • Customer service strategies
  • Just about any issue you want!
The point here is to get your freedom. I’m not saying you want to be free of your business, but to be free to choose how to work in or on your business, perhaps to grow it and have more of it!  But freedom is the goal, nonetheless.

To do that, you need to develop it to operate and be successful without you. The good news is, there is a proven, step by step process, by which any business owner can create a predictable business in any industry. Coincidentally, for more information on this process, there are local seminars available on how all this works, or you can contact your local Entreprenologist for help!
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Do Your Employees Work in Fear?

7/26/2010

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Conway Daily Sun, June 16, 2010
By Michael Kline


Fear is created by uncertainty. When employees see sales dropping, or others being laid off, or hours being cut, they can’t help but get a little anxious over their own futures.  Anything that causes you stress or anxiety if usually perceived by others as something they should be stressed over as well.  If they don’t know what the future holds or what the plan is to take control over your collective futures, fear sets in.  Fear is not good for productivity.  Fear saps the energy from the team just when you really need them to engage and give their best.  So what’s a manager to do?

Well, let’s start with the simplest look at this. If uncertainty is causing the problem, the almost-too-obvious answer then, is to remove the uncertainty! Easier said than done, but if you can provide a clear, unmistakable mission, you can turn fear into engagement. Here’s what some experts say. Olivier Blanchard, Economics Professor at MIT and Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund, advises leaders to “First and foremost, reduce uncertainty… Above all, adopt clear policies and act decisively”.  So how do we remove uncertainty?  Strategy and communication are the two big issues.  Do you have a strategy? If not, we need to start with the basics, review your goals, adjust them if necessary, and come up with a strategy you can achieve given all the current circumstances and resources.  This is often a difficult exercise in focusing on what we can do with what we do have, instead of worrying about what we can’t do because of what we don’t have.  The process of creating this strategy and executing it are topics for another day. Today we’re talking about how this relates to coping with fear.

Once we have a strategy, communicating it with your staff will help you get a clearer understanding of your own plan, and will build confidence mong your team.  You need their confidence if you want them to help you execute the plan instead of working on their resumes.

John Baldoni, “How to talk to you employees about the recession” teaches that if you have a strategy, lay it out clear and simple. If you don’t have one, say so and ask for help. Give people the chance to share feelings, express concerns and, most of all, their ideas. Remember, people need to know they make a valuable contribution – they want to help.

Are your people more in fear about their work situation than the people were on that flight that crash landed on the Hudson River? That would be pretty extreme.  The hero/leader pilot on that flight gave the leadership that people in fear crave.  There was no chaos like you would see in a movie about a plane crash.  When in fear, people tend to be silent, awaiting honesty, the frank truth about the situation, and clear direction as to what to do about it. As the leader in business, this is your job.

Even if you don’t know what to do, you can diffuse a lot of fear simply by communicating the situation.

The belief at the root of fear is that people have no control over their own fate – that they are at the mercy of some change they don’t understand or don’t like. When we do not have any influence over the things that concern us, they can cause anxiety and fear. Fear saps our energy and creativity. When our work seems futile, we disengage and productivity suffers just when we need productivity at its best.  Some items of concern we have influence over and some we do not. When we identify, talk about and accept those items that are of concern, but not in our circle of influence, we can separate the circle of influence from our circle of concern, and focus on the things over which we do have influence. Being able to take decisive action on items over which we have influence, is hugely empowering and liberating. Fear subsides and confidence and productivity increase proportionate to our sense of control over our situation. Suddenly things are not so bleak.

In times of change, stay positive, proactive, focused on your circle of influence and above all, communicate with those who depend on you. They want to help and if you didn’t need their help, you wouldn’t have hired them in the first place.  
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