Posted: December 19, 2023 | Categories: Leadership, Management, Team Building, Uncategorized

We have 13 days left in the year.  Unless you have the rest of the year off, you will still have some work days.  Here’s my suggestion:  Think about the coming year and your strategy to obtain and keep good people.  Turnover is far more costly than we probably think.

In my coaching of owners and managers, I have found that weekly communication with a boss and his or her direct reports makes a huge difference.  It seems that the team members who are most valued know where they stand with the boss, and vice versa.  Conversely, I have noticed that employees that hit their boss broadside with a 2-week notice are usually not in regular productive communication with their immediate supervisor.  There are two specific situations I am thinking of where the individuals tended to do things their own way, and when the boss finally discovered it the gap was too large to bridge.  It these folks had been communicating weekly with their supervisor along the way, there is a good chance the boss could have effectively “re-directed” the employees and get back in alignment with them.

So if you want to increase the probability of keeping good people, follow these steps;

1. Select the right person for the job.
2. Set clear, measureable goals under key categories of their position.
3. Have weekly meetings or conference calls with the person focusing on the following questions:
   1. What did you commit to?
   2. What specific action did you take?
   3. What happened?
   4. What did you learn?
   5. What is your next step?

I encourage you to stay in their with your people.  Think of good team members like they were your teeth.  Remember what they said in the old toothpaste commercial:  Teeth:  Ignore them and they will go away!

Posted: November 17, 2023 | Categories: Sales, Self-Improvement, Uncategorized

“Success comes in cans”

-Fortune Cookie

Many people know the story of Sir Roger Bannister.  The legendary runner from the UK achieved something that physiologists said could never happen:  In 1954, he broke the 4-minute mile.  He believed he could do it, and he did.  Since that event, the 4-minute mile has been broken hundreds of times.  Bannister led the way.

This is a great story we all love to hear.  It reminds us that many of the barriers to success are in our thinking.  Bannister thought big!

My question is, “Where can we think bigger?”  About 20 years ago I was working for a company that did an excellent job of tracking sales goals.  Among the chatter throughout the sales team, the most common topic was the record revenue goal for one month:  $320K.  Many of us would come fairly close, but we always fell short.  Like breaking the 4-minute mile, the $320K record was a barrier in our minds.

Then one day a new kid came to town.  Hi name was Dan and for some reason he wasn’t aware of the 320K mark.  He fervently dug in to his work and within three months he broke the 320K barrier by nearly 40K.  It wasn’t a fluke.  For the next several months he kept breaking the threshold.  In less than a year he left to start his own company.  We all loved Dan and were sorry to see him go.  We missed him but we knew he left us with a gift of wisdom we could never forget:  We challenged ourselves to think bigger and put our goals in a “can”!