My client answered “6, I think I’m pretty lucky!”

Steve is looking for real-estate agents in the midst of one of the most difficult real-estate periods in our history. Why would he ask whether or not an agent believes he’s lucky? I wrote about this earlier in Zappos Employees Live the Brand. Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, asks a question to cover each of their ten Zappos Core Values to ensure candidates fit their culture. “How lucky are you?” is based on Zappos Core Value #4: Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded. Tony created this question from a study he’d read about. This question “how lucky are you?” was given to a group of people. Upon answering, the participants were given a newspaper to read. They were unaware the newspaper was fictitious and hidden in the paper were several headlines that offered the reader $100 simply by mentioning the offer to the survey person. The result from the newspaper headlines is dramatic. Of the participants who indicated they were not lucky, not one noticed the headline offer. Tony believes that luck is being open to opportunity. If you don’t feel you are lucky you will not see opportunity even if it is readily available to you.

The point of my question to Steve was to point out the possibility of his including a similar question when interviewing real-estate agents. In the present economic times wouldn’t it make sense to have people working for you that feel they are luckier than others?

Getting the right people in your organization requires identifying how your culture is different. It means establishing a set of core values and purpose so that not only can you recognize how your business is different but also whether or not the people you want to join you fit in with the culture you wish to build and maintain.

You want better people? You want A players? You need to break the mold on how you’ve been doing your hiring and recruiting practices to attract the people who fit the culture you want. This isn’t easy; however going the extra effort to develop specific systems that discover better fits offers your business to elevate its game to a higher level of performance.

We’ve all seen loyalty cards. In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath offer the story of a car wash offering their customers two slightly different loyalty cards. In one case, every time the customer buys a car wash the loyalty card is a stamped and when filled up with eight stamps they get a free car wash. Another set of customers need to collect ten stamps to get a free car wash. In this case they were given a head start. When they receive their card, two stamps are already included.

The goal is the same, the psychology however is different. In one case your 20 percent of the way there, in the other you’re starting from scratch.

The results? A few months later, the group that started from scratch [the eight stamp group] only 19% had earned their free car wash. Those that had been given the head start [2 free stamps on a 10 stamp card] 34% had earned a free car wash. That’s a 44% difference. The latter group had also earned their free car wash faster than the eight stamp group.

It’s more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting point of a shorter one.

Have you ever worked on a United Way Campaign? In my blog What Your Business Can Learn From The United Way I mention Aubrey Daniels “What to do instead” section on Stretch Goals where he advises to Make Progress Visible. Chip and Dan Heath point out that the conventional wisdom in development circles is you don’t publicly announce a fund-raising campaign for a charity until you’ve already got 50 percent of the money in the bag. As they point out who wants to give the first $100 to a $1 Million campaign?

Daniels offers three suggestions on “What to do instead” for Stretch Goals. I’ve included my thoughts on why giving people a head start works so well with these ideas.

1. Set Many Mini Goals
   

   Aubrey Daniels feels the best mistake in setting a goal is to set it too low. Setting a goal too low increases the likelihood of success. Rewarding goal attainment you increase motivation and achieve subsequent goals. While small incremental goals appear to take longer to produce significant results, the opposite is true. This is because positive reinforcement accelerates performance and small goals provide more opportunities for acceleration. [Note giving the loyalty customers a head start on 10 car washes not only got a 44% increase in reaching a free car wash it also got them to their goal faster!]
   

2. MAKE PROGRESS VISIBLE
   

   Display data on a graph so that employees/customers can see progress daily when possible. [loyalty customers could see their progress and in the case of those given a head start they could see visible progress even when they'd just gotten started.]
   

3. PLAN POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT FOR IMPROVEMENT
   

   Specific measureable goals combined with frequent feedback and positive reinforcement for improvement from a powerful combination for improvement in the organization. [Daniels provided these specific numbers] Stajkovic and Luthans [1997] found that goals combined with feedback resulted in 10% improvement. Social recognition produced a 17% improvement and monetary incentives improved task performance by 23%. Combining feedback with social and monetary reinforcement resulted in a 45% improvement. [It's not coincidental that this number nearly matches the difference (44%) in the eight versus ten loyalty card example.] Daniels indicates that improvement of two to three times baseline levels is not uncommon when graphic feedback and effective positive reinforcers have been used.
   

Next time you’re ready to set some goals for your people, give them a head start. Make them feel like they’ve already made progress. In Clarity Dissolves Resistance we discussed the value of clarity, and we looked at the importance of developing your Personal Mission Clarity to providing you with the energy to succeed. Next blog we’ll look at the importance of clarity for your business vision.

The expert on this is Aubrey Daniels and his book Oops, 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money lists Performance Reviews as #3 on his list. Performance reviews go against rule number three and four of Aubrey’s Making Performance Work errors to avoid [See Positive and Negative Reinforcement – Oops].

If there’s two things that have been consistent in my coaching training with Gazelles [Rockefeller Habits] and E-Myth is that performance reviews are not good tools for improving morale or getting better performance.

Aubrey Daniels quote sums up the lessons we teach in Gazelles coaching, “The best job you will ever have is one in which you know how well you have done at the end of every working day.”

If you still believe in Performance Reviews ask yourself this question. What are you trying to accomplish?

Here are some keys to creating an organization where people do their best every day based on the value of positive reinforcement:

• Knowledge of how you are doing is essential to any kind of improvement
  
• The best feedback cycle is immediate
  
• Every job can be measured and
  
• Performers will help you measure them when they learn that measure is sued to help them perform better and not used as a basis for criticism and punishment.
  
• The goal of this type of appraisal should be to have all employees performing in the top group.
  
• Rewards for managers should be contingent on the number of performers reaching the top level, not some aggregate measure of the unit performance.
  
• When manager success is determined by the employee success it changes the behavior of the manger from evaluator to coach. That creates more involvement in the day to day performance of employees by the manager.
  

All these points are from Aubrey Daniels book Oops. He points out that managers and supervisors should be teachers and coaches who job it is to transfer their knowledge and experience to others in an efficient and positive manner. It’s not to sit in judgment.

Daniels challenged the idea of stretch goals in Oops. Principles that are fundamentally correct find support in other sources. The book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard confirms Daniels is on target. We’ll explore how in my next blog.

Please provide your feedback and experience, good or bad, with performance reviews. I’m interested to discover whether or not you agree or disagree with these Daniels and his beliefs.

The expert on this is Aubrey Daniels and his book Oops, 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money lists Performance Reviews as #3 on his list. Performance reviews go against rule number three and four of Aubrey’s Making Performance Work errors to avoid [See Positive and Negative Reinforcement – Oops].

If there’s two things that have been consistent in my coaching training with Gazelles [Rockefeller Habits] and E-Myth is that performance reviews are not good tools for improving morale or getting better performance.

Aubrey Daniels quote sums up the lessons we teach in Gazelles coaching, “The best job you will ever have is one in which you know how well you have done at the end of every working day.”

If you still believe in Performance Reviews ask yourself this question. What are you trying to accomplish?

Here are some keys to creating an organization where people do their best every day based on the value of positive reinforcement:

• Knowledge of how you are doing is essential to any kind of improvement
  
• The best feedback cycle is immediate
  
• Every job can be measured and
  
• Performers will help you measure them when they learn that measure is sued to help them perform better and not used as a basis for criticism and punishment.
  
• The goal of this type of appraisal should be to have all employees performing in the top group.
  
• Rewards for managers should be contingent on the number of performers reaching the top level, not some aggregate measure of the unit performance.
  
• When manager success is determined by the employee success it changes the behavior of the manger from evaluator to coach. That creates more involvement in the day to day performance of employees by the manager.
  

All these points are from Aubrey Daniels book Oops. He points out that managers and supervisors should be teachers and coaches who job it is to transfer their knowledge and experience to others in an efficient and positive manner. It’s not to sit in judgment.

Daniels challenged the idea of stretch goals in Oops. Principles that are fundamentally correct find support in other sources. The book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard confirms Daniels is on target. We’ll explore how in my next blog.

Please provide your feedback and experience, good or bad, with performance reviews. I’m interested to discover whether or not you agree or disagree with these Daniels and his beliefs.

If you’re one of these people that intuitively knew where you are going from the minute you were born, I’m envious. I bless you and I say go for it! I’m jealous that you’ve got it figured out, and I don’t always, or at least I had to take the time to determine what my personal mission was and is.

Until about age forty I struggled with what my life was about. Where was I headed? Where did I want to end up? What did I really want my life to be about? I’d worked on a personal mission statement but never came to a conclusion. Some material I’d read by Wayne Dwyer inched me forward, yet it wasn’t until I went through the 5 day intensive training to become an E-Myth coach that I had to come fully to grips with writing something down and crystallizing my personal mission statement.

I’ve personally found it to be the most powerful work I’ve done with respect to my life and other than the work I did with Robert Bloom on my Inside Advantage, it definitely had the most powerful influence on my life.

Why is a personal mission important? For the reasons discussed in my last blog, Clarity Dissolves Resistance – Switch is provides clarity. More importantly if provides energy. As the authors of Switch note, in order to change you need to direct both the rider and the elephant. If we are going to make change in our lives, if we are going to achieve anything that we want that is worthwhile, we need inspiration. A personal mission statement provides inspiration, and most importantly it provides us with fuel. We live our lives at such a frantic pace that we rarely take the time to reflect on what is most important, what we value most, and rarely keep those priorities in front of us in times that are precious and of crisis. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz point out in their book, The Power of Full Engagement, most of us spend more time reacting to immediate crises and responding to the expectations of others than we do making considered choices guided by a clear sense of what matters most. So the most compelling reason to discover your passion, your mission statement, is energy. Whatever our path in life, it requires energy to compete, to endure and to persevere. Energy is the fuel that provides us with the natural substance to do anything we enjoy or dislike and get reward from it. Fueled with the proper energy we can accomplish anything. Without the required fuel we will inevitably fail and come up short in our expectations. Your mission statement provides you with either a high or low level of energy depending on the passion and commitment you have for it.

As we moved from the industrial age to the information age the currency of performance has switched from time to energy. Once again Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement point to this, “Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.

One only needs to watch someone with this level of commitment to realize the enormous power and fuel that knowing your personal mission can provide. Gandhi, Mother Theresa, our country’s forefathers all risked their lives to live their mission and the result has been a significant impact to the people they were committed to.

A personal mission statement is the first and primary step to acknowledging and accepting ourselves. It says this is who I am, and I’m okay being that person. It is not an effort to invent who we are but rather a serious introspection on who we are, what we are capable of being, and with an extension of this realization, who we can become. It is meeting and then exceeding our potential by simply recognizing the talents, skills and abilities that we have been born with and is innate to our being. A personal mission statement represents the highest form of clarity, and ultimately leads to living a life of purpose.

As Verne Harnish [Mastering the Rockefeller Habits] states, “A company with too many priorities has no priorities.”

I’m reading the book Switch, How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, and the title for this blog comes from the closing line of chapter 3 Script the Critical Moves. I happen to get an extra copy of the book and if you’re the first to make a comment on this blog on the website, I’ll send you a copy of the book absolutely free.

The book reveals how seemingly impossible and extremely difficult issues have been resolved with small changes that follow a distinct pattern which reveals the critical nature of clarity. From malnutrition in Viet Nam, reviving Brazil’s railroad system, reversing abusive parent behavior, to reviving the local economy in Miner County, South Dakota, big problems are not solved by big solutions. Instead they were solved with simple, small solutions.

Switch delivers a three part framework to change behavior and solve problems:

1. Direct the rider. Human behavior is like a rider on an elephant. The rider is logic, the elephant emotion. Many times what appears to be resistance, either in ourselves or the people we are leading, is often a lack of clarity. Provide crystal clear decision making.
2. Motivate the Elephant. You must engage yourself and your people emotionally with the decision. What looks like laziness if more often exhaustion. Trying to get something done by force is exhausting. Getting emotional engagement is absolutely required to change behavior.
   
3. Shape the Path. People problems are often disguised as situation problems. An example of this is provided in the book where despite popcorn being stale, moviegoers ate more when given a larger container. Shape the Path and you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening to the Rider and the Elephant.
   

The book is loaded with examples of how using this simplistic approach resulted in monumental change. If you want to discover how to implement change I encourage you to pick up this book or audio.

At Positioning Systems we teach our clients to achieve clarity on their personal mission, their company mission, One Page Strategic Plan, and then determine their priorities for the year and each quarter. The leader and executive team need to be in agreement on priorities in order to get their team members to follow. Clarity dissolves resistance. When everyone is on the same page, agreeing on priorities heart and mind follow. One hour of planning saves ten hours of doing. Clarity multiplies this leverage.

We’ll explore the first stage of this clarity journey: personal mission, and why it’s so important in my next blog.

My client’s goal was to find a successor for his business. I detailed his efforts in my last blog. [Delay Gratification – Strategic Discipline] When his initial efforts failed to find someone in the immediate area, he decided to take a new track. He would find a professional, who may not be prepared or experienced enough to become his successor, yet would help with the increasing workload the company was experiencing to help continue its growth.

If you believe in synchronicity or perhaps in Napoleon Hills quote, “The moment you commit and quit holding back, all sorts of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, will rise up to help you. The simple act of commitment is a powerful magnet for help,” then perhaps you will not find the outcome of my client’s 1^st quarter priorities surprising.

The search for a successor failed in 2009, yet the moment he renewed his interest in finding a professional and released himself from the successor, his first efforts to search for an attorney yielded not only many qualified candidates but one who had just moved to his area and was exactly the profile he had hoped to find previously in a successor.

Anxiety and caution was soon replaced with excitement and anticipation. My client met this person while they both were attending an industry conference, and the subsequent CIDS [Topgrading] interviews confirmed the candidate was real. Offered the position would they accept? Would they leave the position they were already in, with plenty of job security and financial reward, to pursue their career choice where despite its “dream” opportunity, entrepreneurial risks loomed.

Last week Monday, the candidate said yes, despite her present employer offering her more financial reward and responsibility to stay.

Of course there are hurdles now to traverse that will determine whether or not this move will be successful for both parties. As a friend of mine once told me, the decision isn’t generally good or bad, it’s what you do after you make the decision that determines whether it was right or wrong.

Based on the track record of my client, he and his teams commitments to reach goals and the preparation they put in to finding this person, I’m betting on their success together.

The point: once you commit to your business priorities, persistence and determination ultimately produce your desired outcome. The problem isn’t that we can’t reach our goals. The failure is in determining what we want and then maintaining the Strategic Discipline to eventually achieve it. Would you agree? Please leave a comment.

Next blog we’ll discuss the importance of clarity.

www.positioningsystems.com

www.abdynamics.com

Chet Holmes in The Ultimate Sales Machine notes that the key to success is, “pigheaded discipline and determination.” Positioning Systems defines this as “Strategic Discipline.”

Brian Tracy suggests that, “The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term is the indispensable prerequisite for success.”

One of my clients recently demonstrated the value of having a clear vision for his future, then staying true and being persistent to this vision despite delays and setbacks.

Third quarter of last year this client began searching for a candidate to succeed him in his business. It became one of the company’s top three priorities for the third quarter. He’d built a successful private practice, and recently expanded to new, larger facilities. Business was growing, so much so that he felt he could sustain another full time professional. Systems were allowing his staff to contribute more, and with an additional professional they would grow even faster. The recent application of quarterly priorities/themes had focused his staff on achieving 90 day goals and they were responding very well.

Third quarter goals included finding a lateral. The plan included identifying possible candidates from the pool of professionals already in the market, someone either at a larger firm or possibly had their own firm who might be interested in merging. The latter option was least desirable. They quickly identified 4 strong candidates, sent letters and then proceeded to follow up. It quickly became apparent that each candidate was not interested in moving from their present position. In fact all of them appeared to already be on a path to secure business partnership or succession where they presently were.

As the quarter ended my client’s team succeeded in achieving every one of their priorities with the exception of finding a lateral. It was disappointing, especially since business continued to increase. Despite the frustration, my client offered this on the success of identifying priorities/themes for his business, “Establishing quarterly priorities and themes has had a dramatic impact on our business. Even in our relatively small business of 5 employees we’ve seen growth that can be measured. The first quarter of 2009 was our 5^th best revenue wise in our history with $17K in profit versus a loss the previous quarter of last year. Our second quarter was our 2^nd best revenue producer ever and produced $33K in profit versus another loss from the previous year. Finally our third quarter was our best in our history and produced $66K in profit a 100% increase from the previous year’s 3^rd quarter. Our employees are excited, aware and most importantly accountable to their metrics which we review in our daily huddles. We certainly intend to continue establishing quarterly priorities and rewarding our employees with celebrations and recognitions through quarterly themes.”

Disappointment in meeting goals can often cause companies to lose faith, abandon or weaken commitment, and change priorities. The success of the previous quarters helped to diminish to disappointment in their number one priority. Fourth quarter, the lateral position was set aside and once again the business continued to do well with the team exceeding all their 4^th quarter priorities. First quarter the quest for a successor took a new path. The surprising results next blog.

www.positioningsystems.com

www.abdynamics.com

They concluded that in the future they should look within to hire for management. Much as Shannan Marty, CEO of Tracer Research Group discovered [Read Chapter 1 of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits]; it was a mistake to hire from larger companies when her company started to grow dramatically. As she indicates in the book, “Eventually a culture clash developed from the regimented hierarchical communication structures they were used to at their mega-corporations.”

The same type of thinking strangled my client’s manager. The disappointing experience with this manager made them realize they had another core value that was vitally important to their success. Agility. Their people and business respond quickly to customer needs. The new manager had not been able or possibly unwilling to understand and respond this way.

Had they recognized the importance of this in the hiring process they may not have proceeded to offer this person the position. Sometimes mistakes are only apparent after the outcome. The path before us looks bright, the reasons supporting our decisions are clear, yet there’s some underlying issue that is not conspicuous at the time of the decision. It’s unfortunate to hire someone and release them. When your business is growing many times all the relevant factors are not obvious.

Repeating mistakes is the dearth of business. My client is already planning to develop a path for management development, and feels they have a candidate within the business that can ascend to management and occupy this position. The plan is to identify the path to determine how many steps this candidate still needs to complete in order to have management eligibility. Taking this action is intended to prevent another hiring mistake from occurring in the future.

Do you believe in synchronicity? Next blog I provide how one client’s desire took longer than expected to realize. Yet with persistence brought unexpected results.

www.positioningsystems.com

www.abdynamics.com

How many times has this happened to you? You wrestle with a decision to let someone go. You make the decision and immediately discover skeletons in the closet. Had you known it would have made the decision simple.

The present economic conditions offer the opportunity for businesses to realize that performance is not a given. After years of having to search for capable employees the role has been reversed. The pool of candidates is much better. You still have to do your homework and have an excellent recruiting and hiring system. As Gazelles coaches we recommend Topgrading to our clients.

It is more important than ever in these challenging economic times to make sure you have the right people on the bus. Remember these rules from Good to Great, Discipline #2 “When you know you need to make a people change, act.”

Here are some key points and following those two key questions:

KEY POINTS

• The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone you’ve made a hiring mistake – the best people don’t need to be managed.
  

• The time and energy we spend siphons us from developing and working with all the right people.
  

• It’s unfair to the right people –compensate for others inadequacies. Drives them away.
  

• Equally unfair to people that need to get off the bus –stealing a portion of their life
  

• Reason we wait –hassle to replace or we find the issue stressful and distasteful. It is more about us then them.
  

How do you know when you know?
Two Key Questions

• If it were a hiring decision (rather than a “should this person get off the bus?” decision), would you hire the person again?
  

• If the person came to tell you that he or she is leaving to pursue an exciting new opportunity, would you feel terribly disappointed or secretly relieved?
  

How do these rules and questions sound to you? Has anyone used these rules for keeping or releasing an employee? Do you have policies for absenteeism, and do you follow them? What’s the point where you decide to let someone go? Please provide your comments and feedback.