For the first 4 years of our business, Culture By Choice used a combination of the DISC, Motivators, and Hartman Values Profile assessments to help our clients understand three key aspects of their personality: behavior, motivation, and core values. These three assessments generated separate reports and clients received over 50 pages of printed material. The detail and volume was overwhelming for the vast majority of the people and we wanted to make the information more actionable for them. When we conducted debriefs with individuals from our client companies, we couldn’t cover everything in those reports. There was just too much. So, as a company, we decided on what the most critical pieces of information were and presented that information in our debrief sessions.
After a few years, we started to manually pull that information out of the separate reports and started putting them into a consolidated report that ended up being only 13 pages long. We next worked with our assessment supplier to get the process automated. Over the the past 6 years we have made some further refinements and modifications but the Core Advantage Report has been the most powerful tool in our coaching toolkit! Today, we offer this assessment report to our clients and rather than just debrief them on the reports, we hold a strategy building session so that these individuals leave their conference call with one of our CBC Professionals with real knowledge about what can be done to dramatically improve personal performance in a few key areas. Most often improvements are made in communication, decision-making, goal-setting, or personal organizing. Based on what clients learn about themselves, they quickly figure out what their blockers to success are.
To date we have administered thousands of these assessments and helped our clients make extraordinarily progress in how they manage their most valuable resource, their people. Beyond getting better at their people management skills, they also develop what we refer to as people acumen; the ability to quickly understand the human dynamics of any situation so that they can make the best possible decisions and take the most effective actions possible. For most of us, our personal biases keep us from being as astute in people acumen as we can be. The Core Advantage Report helps to expose those biases so we can work diligently to keep them in check. The Core Advantage Report is a tool we’ve created and we have found nothing like it anywhere. If you would like to see an example of the report, drop me an email and I can give you a run through. Email me at jaynewman@culturebychoice.com.
Every business knows they want to be profitable and so they keep looking at quarterly numbers. Some look at the numbers on a monthly basis. A few will take weekly look. But all that data won’t drive improvement. Those financials and contact numbers are always looking in the rear view mirror. They are pieces of Lag data. If you want to drive improvement, the data you want will focus on the behaviors of your people. Those behaviors will influence those lag data pieces you want to see improvement in. If you always focus on the past, you will never influence the future.
If you want to change the future, you must change behaviors. But what behaviors can be changed that will get you where you want to go? There are 5 key performance areas that can each really drive improvement and each of these has a few subsets. Here are my 5 key performance drivers: Culture, Leadership, Operations, Training, and Service. Each of these has a few key behaviors that can be measured and the data generated in these measures can be considered to be Lead Data because this data drives improvement. Let’s look at each of these Lead Measures and some of their subsets.
Culture is all about how things get done in your organization. The individual components are factors like safety, consideration, communication, how disputes are handled, and connectedness. There are other factors but this gives you an idea. The Culture bottom line is how your people feel about how things get done. Do they feel valued or used? Are they validated or marginalized? Do they feel committed or is this just a job? Any of these factors can be measured and if you find that your people aren’t feeling about your business the way you want them to feel, you can create strategies and tactics to improve things and have periodic checkups to see if things are improving.
Leadership is a matter of establishing a shared set of values and principles and then making sure everyone is fully aware of what those values and principles mean to the organization. When leaders are crystal clear regarding expectations, provide clear guidance as to how everyone can meet those expectations, and then coach people in their attempts to employ the behaviors most likely to achieve the expected outcomes, the leader-follower relationship is highly productive. Do your people know what the values and principles are of your organization? Do they know what you expect of them? Do they know what to do to be successful? Leadership begins with making sure this is well known and understood. Great leaders support their people as they work their way through these expectations under the umbrella of the organization’s values and principles. As with Culture, these aspects of leadership can be measured and you can quickly determine if leadership is all it can be or if improvement is needed.
Operations is about the systems, processes and procedures that make a business run. A company is trying to accomplish something. Does everyone know what that is? Amazingly, there are many employees, in far too many businesses, that do not connect what they do, in their job, to what the company is trying to accomplish. We’ve heard employees say, I’m just a bookkeeper, or I’m just a mechanic, or I just run this machine, and never stop to think that they are part of something so much bigger and so much more important. Helping people connect to the bigger picture increases engagement, improves understanding, and can motivate many employees to do a better job. The person making 500 of the same part every day may not realize that a critical error in that part could create a systems failure for a critical machine. A salesperson might sell more of a product than a factory can produce. An engineer might take so long perfecting a product that the opportunity is lost. Operations is about the coordination of all parts of the system to make sure everything works together. We can measure this and figure out what systems, processes and/or procedures need to be adjusted to make it all work better.
Training is so often overlooked or given short shrift but training can make or break a company. So, many people are expected to do things they’ve never been trained to do. Making the assumption that because someone has experience and/or education means they should be able to do what you want them to do, is not good business practice. For the best results, every job needs to be examined for the knowledge, skills and behaviors needed to succeed in the job and then every employee needs to be assessed for that knowledge and those skills and behaviors needed. Wherever there’s a gap, training is needed. Furthermore, every company has unique systems and processes that can only be acquired through training. And how else can people learn the values and principles of the company. Plus, just like Culture, Leadership, and Operations, Training can be measured and decisions can be made about what training is still needed.
The fifth of the 5 key performance areas is Service. Customer Service is critical to the success of every business. Making sure your customers are satisfied with your products and services is essential if you are going to retain them. But do your people understand how important service is? Do they know how to provide the customer service you expect? Assuming everyone knows how to provide good customer service is another big mistake. Making sure you have a system that tracks your customer service is also important. We’ve found that what gets measured gets done and what is not measured is too often ignored. Once again, these Lead Measures help us know whether we’re getting better, staying the same, or getting worse. With these specific lead data points, our decisions are better informed and more likely to generate the results we want.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple assessment that could tell you how your business is doing in these 5 areas? There is! It’s called the Performance Gap Indicator or PGI. If you’d like to learn more about it, let me know. I’d be happy to explain how it works and give you more information.
It’s been a while since I’ve written an article for this blog. I took a brief break from writing to gather my thoughts and reframe my message. Covid19 has caused many people to rethink a few things but as I observe our Country coming back to action, I am saddened to see how little attention, so many of our fellow citizens, have actually paid to the warnings of medical professionals. As I watch the world around me, I see an all out goat rodeo of craziness. Over 100,000 people have died. Yes, that’s only .03% of the US population, but each one of those people was a human being. Over the years that we were involved in Vietnam, more than 55,000 US soldiers were killed and we hold that war to be a tragedy for our Country. Those who have died of Covid19, deserve more respect than just returning to business as usual. For their lives to not have been lost in vain, we must have learned something from their experience.
And then, as if Covid was not enough, we now have monumental racial tensions in our Country, once again! These serious racial problems arise periodically. There is a connection between the Covid19 situation and the racial problems we face. Both are fueled by our biases. How we approach any crisis, if we are not mindful in our approach, will be greatly affected by our biases! What is a bias? Consider this definition from Wikipedia. Bias is disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair.Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief. In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. How anyone of us responded to Covid19 was most likely influenced by our biases. That bias might have been a lack of trust in science or government or that bias might have been an irrational fear of a disease that was new to us all. Or we may have been influenced by one or more of dozens of other biases. If we do not check our biases as we make decisions, we run the risk of making decisions that are not always in our own best interest. Now, if we look at the current racial strife, we can apply the same definition of bias. Once again, if we let our biases go unchecked, we run a serious risk of making decisions that are not only in opposition to our own best interests but we run the risk of behaving with outright prejudice!
I have learned. I have changed. There is a Conservation-Change Paradox: We undergo changes in order to conserve that which we value most! I change my diet and how I engage with others to conserve my health. I change jobs to conserve my pursuit of wealth. I learn (change my knowledge and understanding) to conserve my mental function. What do you value most that would cause you to change something? Do you value your health and the health of your loved ones enough to change how you interact with your world? In order to change we must challenge our own biases. In order to grow and learn, we must change. Our biases prevent growth, learning, and development. We must challenge every one of our biases. In order to do that, you must first admit you are biased. Next you must identify those biases. And finally, you must commit to making the changes required. I challenge every reader to take a few minutes and sit down and write down the biases you know you have. Then, ask others what they see as biases that you have. Once you really know, how can you not do what will help you grow?
The world is getting back to work. Covid19 is not gone but life cannot be sustained without productive societies. So how we return to work is critical. If we make mistakes, the virus will win. And a Covid19 victory is not just about the illness! It is also about our economic, social, emotional, and psychological wellbeing. How are businesses supposed to consider all of that?
The biggest mistake that many leaders will make is creating a one size fits all approach to restarting business. Doing so assumes that everyone has experienced this pandemic the same way and that everyone is coming out of this with the same needs, wants, hopes, and fears. Our years of work, at Culture By Choice, has taught us that looking at our people as a monolithic aggregate of workers is a catastrophe in the making. The diversity of behavioral styles and motivational preferences that exist in every workplace requires us to have a multifaceted approach to getting back to work. Any approach that does not recognize the various points of view and worker preferences can result in so much uneasiness in the workplace that getting back to work can be stifled at best and nearly impossible at its worst. So, what’s a leader to do? Here’s what we recommend.
To begin with, make sure you really know your people. Make sure you know what their most predominant behavior styles are. What their motivational preferences are. What their core values are principles are. Designing a new workplace without this information will be based on assumptions about people that are often too narrow and quite often just wrong. Our 10 years of action research has taught us that when workers feel too uncomfortable and unconnected to their workplace, they are far less productive and often leave. Creating the best culture for your business is not just a good idea, it’s the best idea. Now is the perfect time to do that.
How do you create your best culture? That’s the most important question to answer before you restart your economic engine. In brief, I can tell you that it understands that people are at the core of that culture. So, the culture must be designed around your people. In addition, your values and principles must be reflected by that culture. To get started, talk to your people. Find out what they need, expect, hope for, and what fears they will bring back to work with them. Before Covid19, we were doing this with our clients. Now we see this as more important than ever. If you want to know more about what the best questions to ask are or other ways to get critical information on your people, send me a message and we can explore the possibilities.
This post is a huge departure from every blog post I’ve ever made. I’m enlisting your help in getting this one done. I am going to ask a few questions and I’m looking for your advice to the world. Please answer one, two, three, all! Whatever you’d like to do. Here are the questions.
What advice do you have for entrepreneurs in today’s world? How do you think small businesses can best survive this economic downturn? What is the responsibility of large businesses to the success of other businesses? What should government do to support businesses? What should government not do to support businesses? What advice would you give our elected officials?
Please answer any questions you’d like to answer in the comments section. I will assemble them into another post for all to see.
With the fast pace of business, we don’t often take the time to reflect on the totality of what our businesses are doing. Through this economic slowdown, our clients have had the opportunity to reflect on everything they are doing. This has allowed them to ask several questions and deeply examine the possibilities. Here are some of the questions they are asking?
What assumptions have we made about the people we’ve put in every position? Are they truly suited to the tasks required for this position? Are the processes and procedures used in each position the most effective and efficient way to get the job done? Do I have the right number of people to get the work done? Do my people have the training, tools, space, time, attitudes needed to get the job done? Are there things we haven’t even thought of yet that would help us be more productive? Does everyone who comes into work really need to come into work to get their job done? Have we clearly stated our expectations for every position and have we clearly delineated what everyone is supposed to be doing? What assumptions have we made that are really making things more difficult? Does everyone know our why as a business and does everyone have their own why for being part of our business? That’s a lot of questions! But we all need to ask them and seek clear and accurate answers.
During this slowdown, many of us have the opportunity to dig into these questions and clearly state our answers. The answers are crucial to our success as businesses and they need to be answered on a regular basis. Answering these questions once is not sufficient, especially if your business is dynamic. As most businesses today are evolving endeavors, they will need to hit the pause button at scheduled times to make sure the answers to these questions are still relevant. Just because on May 1, 2020 our answers fit doesn’t mean they will still fit on August 1, 2020. The pace of business can be blistering, and I’m sure everyone hopes it will be like that again soon. When things are happening at the speed of light, it’s hard to see your way through the dust. We need to schedule our pauses to make sure we don’t unwittingly get off track.
Our clients who are taking the time to answer these questions, and perhaps several other questions as well, are finding answers that range from surprising to supporting. Sometimes they figure out that the person they had doing a job really wasn’t suited for the job. In one case, the person didn’t want to do the job, but was so loyal to the company they never complained once and did the job even though they were miserable doing it and had to put in more hours doing it than a more suited person would. Hitting the pause button allowed this company to figure this out about an employee who was on the verge of quitting. By rethinking the entire situation, a better position was found for a great employee and a more appropriate person was found for the position. Now both people are happier and work is being done more efficiently and effectively. The lesson learned is don’t wait for a business slowdown to examine what you are doing. Schedule time to ask these critical questions so that you can maximize your productivity through better processes, procedures, and talent alignment. Covid19 has created a pause. Let’s not wait until the next crisis to cause the next pause. By hitting the pause button on our own terms, we can make sure we stay on track towards the company culture we really want! We can all have a Culture By Choice!
In all our experiences we have the choice of how we think about them. We can look for the good. We can look for the bad. And we can look for the beautiful. The old Clint Eastwood movie, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, expressed another viewpoint. I prefer thinking about the beautiful rather than the ugly. The old saying is “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and I view this as a choice. I can choose to find beauty or ugliness. I choose beauty. I can also choose to be good or bad but I cannot choose whether good things or bad things will happen. I had no choice as to whether the Corona virus would come to America. But I do have a choice regarding how I will respond to this bad situation. I can be a force for good and beauty and I can reject bad behavior and ugliness.
So, what is so beautiful? What do I see in my world that I view as beautiful? There’s so much beauty out there, it’s hard to identify it all. My family is beautiful. My community is beautiful. Today, as I write this, it is chilly and rainy but as I look out my window I see a beautiful lake and trees with beautiful young leaves just bursting with new life and fresh green energy! I hear birds singing and the rain playing a soft rhythm on my deck and I’m lifted by the beauty of this morning. Just 3 days ago, I was in Sarasota, Florida with the sun shining and a sky so blue it was as if an artist has brushed the heavens with the most magnificent blue paint; beauty for all to enjoy. And 2 days ago, on our drive from Florida back to Michigan, the mountains of Tennessee; all I can say is gorgeous.
Beauty is all around us. It is for us to see. If we rush through life without seeing it, that’s our own mistake. We can fill our lives with busyness or we can fill our lives with beauty. The choice is ours and only we can make the choice. By finding the beauty, we do not eliminate the ugly and the bad, but we do shift our focus and where our focus lies, there is our direction. Our direction determines our destination. My desire is for my destination to be a beautiful place, a peaceful place, a place of goodness and love. The only way for me to get there is to keep my eyes on that target. Some will say they cannot do that. The needs of there world won’t let them. My question is why? Does getting things done keep us from seeing the beautiful and make us see only ugliness, badness, what’s wrong, and pain? I don’t think so! I think it’s a choice. We can choose goodness and beauty! So, why not do that!
These days I find myself longing for what was. When I do this, I am often sad, bordering on depression. I think of what I don’t have rather than of what I do have. As soon as I recognize that I am in that place, I have to do something about it. To stay there is not good for me, or anyone else. I realize, however, that many people are in the same boat. I’m not in this alone. I can get myself into a better place, but I know some people have difficulty getting to a better place. So here’s what I do. I hope my practice is helpful to you.
Being in a place that is harmful to my state of mind can only happen if I let my mind go there. But, sometimes my mind is a stubborn thing and fights against control. It’s during these most difficult moments that I need to employ my best tools for staying positive. Darkness needs light in order to be dispelled. So during these very dark times I fill my environment with light. The strongest light I can find is hope. So I look for hope wherever I can find it. I can always find hope in planning for my future. When I long for what was, (Which I can never recapture anyway) I’m sad that I’ll never get it back. When I plan for what I will do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year; I plant the seeds of hope.
What kind of plans do I make? I plan trips. I plan meals. I plan gatherings. I plan projects I want to complete. I plan articles I want to write. I plan for anything that will bring me joy in the future. Then I share my plans with people I care about and who care about me. In those conversations about my plans an excitement comes into play. Together we start to anticipate the fun and satisfaction we will have. The future starts to look brighter. The road ahead has hope, while the road behind is only a memory. To get my mind out of sad places, which seem to be all around me, I look to the future. Our future is still full of hopes and dreams. I choose hopes and dreams! You can too!
Have you ever wondered what people are thinking? I may be wrong but I think a lot of people aren’t thinking! I think a lot of people must just have the sound of buzzing bees going on all day long. When I see how a lot of people respond to what’s happening in our world, I’m convinced that there must bee a lot of buzzing going on.
Have you ever wondered if you are the only sane person around? What does that say about you, or me for that matter. Sanity might be related to sanitizing. I may be wrong, but my sanity, today, probably depends on sanitization.
Have you ever been scared to go to the grocery store? Have you ever wondered why some people just don’t understand why we all need to wear a mask? Do some people think a mask is about protecting them? Don’t they get it? I may be wrong, but I think a lot of people are stupid! They don’t understand that wearing a mask tells everyone else that “I care about you! Just in case I am contagious, I will wear this mask to make sure I don’t infect you!”
Have you ever been so proud of people you know that you could just explode and immediately tear up? Have you ever seen people do things that are just so amazing, it’s hard to believe? I may be wrong but just when I start to think mankind is beyond hope, some people totally rebuild my faith in humanity. The commitment some people have made to feed the hungry, heal the sick, provide equipment needed to save lives, donate their money, time, knowledge, etc to help!
Have you ever wondered what you can do? Have you ever wondered why you haven’t done more? Have you ever wondered how to do anything worthwhile? I may be wrong, but sometimes we just have to stop wondering and just get busy. And in our busyness we can find a better purpose. I am so thankful for the opportunity to be what I’m capable of being! I may be wrong but I really think I’ve been blessed, even in this time of such trials and tribulations.
It doesn’t matter if you are a Bobby Kennedy fan or not. This quote is right on target. We can all make a difference by making things better. But, how do you do this? How do you make things better? The best way for me to explain my experience with making things better is to give some examples of what not to do!
Potbelly vs the local deli!
Example 1: During a financial crisis, if you are going to provide help to small businesses, don’t let big businesses take the money earmarked for the small businesses. We all get the fact that almost every company is hurting, but a “real” small business rarely has the resources to compete with companies that are publicly traded! And banks, shame on you. Once again, you made life miserable for small businesses. We get it! You don’t like us because our deposits are in the 3 and 4 figure range, not the 6 and 7 figure range. It takes a bunch of us to make your bottom line look bigger, where one or two of the big guys can do the same thing. But, we employ a whole lot of people and we make our communities better!
Example 2: When masses of people get laid off or furloughed due to no fault of their own (it’s the virus which kicked the crap out of the economy, Stupid!), don’t make getting unemployment compensation so darned hard to sign up for and qualify for! Dear state of Michigan: why the heck do laid off state workers automatically get signed up when small business workers have to spend weeks trying to get the forms filled, frequently get told the amount they qualify for is far less than they really qualify for, so they file a formal protest and then are asked for documentation out the wazoo! Come on folks! You are messing with people’s lives here. We get the whole problem! We understand! But that doesn’t make things any better! As a society, we have to do better.
PPE for most jobs will now be needed! And it might look different than it did in 2019!
When we decide to open society back up, don’t start with things that focus only on the less necessary aspects of our lives. I need a haircut, my lawn needs mowing, and I’d really like to get out on my boat! But how necessary are those things. People need to work, to create products and services that the world wants and needs. And, when people go back to work, let’s not let carriers of the virus get into situations where they can infect dozens of people and start the pandemic all over again. Let’s make sure that those who restart our economy are either immune or virus free. No work without a test and if you don’t have immunity, your place of work should be checking your temperature and pulse ox at least once a day! And for goodness sake, don’t let workers go back to work without appropriate personal protection gear for the jobs they are doing and the environment they are doing their work in!
Life will never be the same, nor should it be! We weren’t doing it right to begin with so we shouldn’t go back to the same wrong ways in the future. If somebody is sick, they should not be goaded into coming to work anyway and infect the entire workforce. We have to make the health of our people our top priority. Without people, nothing gets done and even more important, without people there’s no reason to do any of it anyway!
Cheryl Lohner
drjbnewman
Newman’s Legacy Leadership Blog 