What is the cost of customers that return the most merchandise. The power of metrics is illustrated in this article about how Zappos customers that return the most are also the most profitable. What if they had only looked at the customers that returned the most merchandise without digging deeper? Hmmm.
Who are your best customers? How do you define your best customers?
When many of us think of leadership we get the stereo-typical “Follow-me!” physical courage type of leadership. It might be a nice image. In working with business owners and leaders, however, moral courage is the kind of courage I see most often. The way I see it displayed is in those quiet but crucial conversations with one or two other people.
Many of us stall when it come to facing that uncomfortable but necessary confrontation with another person. Climbing over the top of a trench to face the machine guns seems preferable to sitting down with an employee to discuss their recent non-performance, or the way they treat other employees. People are messy and unpredictable, and when the issue is important to us we often get emotional. Emotional people aren’t always at their best.
Here are some warning signs that we may need to learn how to have more effective confrontations :
Ignoring those squishy “soft skills” confrontations has a bad effect on our business. How do we get good at one-on-one conversations that are so important in building influence, confronting issues, and moving the business forward? One resource I’d recommend is VitalSmarts’ book called “Crucial Conversations“. It will give you the basic tools and practices you need to begin having the courage to have those conversations.
What examples have you seen of courageous leaders when skillfully confronting poor behaviour? Let us know in the comments.
Some things that humans are bad at: predicting the future, reading minds, and seeing ourselves as others see us. Which explains why stupid people are often confident out of proportion to their skill, knowledge, or experience . . .
. . . and sometimes being confidence is more important than being smart. Which explains why so many stupid people survive long enough to reproduce. Good news: confidence is easy to fake.
Avoiding failure is not the same as striving for success. Think about it.
The biggest response to a blog posting I’ve gotten so far was to my article on how I ignored the troublesome kids in my Scout troop and focused on the strong ones. Commentators accused me of abandoning them, and taking the easy way out. I can see that point, but in the end it helped out the entire troop.
Focusing on strengths, whether it’s personally, corporately, strategically (ten years and beyond), tactically (day-to-day), or the strengths of the people who report to us and look to us for leadership is much more productive and effective than trying to fix so-called weaknesses.
Here’s another example of how focusing on strengths, and learning from those in our organization who do things really, really well can benefit everybody. Including those on the bottom of the performance evaluation. Oh, and keep it simple. Over-thinking is not a strength.
“If you lock a soldier in a room with a cannon ball he’ll either lose it, break it, or eat it.” – Command Sergeant Major Lenton
Some people love to complicate things. Being one of these people, I can say in our defense that we’re just trying to make it “better”. Usually we’re doing just the opposite, unfortunately. We know about the KISS* principle, but nobody defined simplicity for us yet. Here’s a definition I heard this week that I really like:
Simplicity is the inability to f**k it up.
Many good example of needless complication is found in presentations. When we’re nervous or emotional we’re not always at our best, and public speaking is a great way to scare normally competent and composed people into a puddle of lumpy pudding. So here’s a simple rule to follow when creating a slide presentation. If you absolutely need to use a slide presentation. Consider first not using PowerPoint if you can.
10 – No more than 10 slides. Get to the point. If you don’t know what your point is, or what you’re expecting from your audience , then go back to your presentation and distill it. Are you asking them to make a decision, be educated, be inspired, act? Get focus, get results.
20 – No more than 20 minutes a presentation. This is a variation of the 10 rule. Get really clear on what you want from your audience, then strip away everything that doesn’t do with that focus. Being prepared and focused is a huge message, and the message to your audience is this: I respect you and your time enough to actually think and prepare enough to get to the point. I spent the time and thought on this topic so you don’t have to.
30 – Minimum 30 point font. This isn’t an eye test. Do your audience a favour and leave everything you think you need to read out loud in your notes. 6 words per line, and 6 lines per slide is plenty. Alternately, take the age of the oldest member of your audience and divide by two. That’s your font size. Don’t put everything you’re going to say on the slides because you don’t know the material well enough.
Here’s another example of a presentation that would have benefited from a bit of focus. It’s great that the presenter put so much thought into it. It’s too bad that he or she didn’t take the next step and figure out what the point was. As the General said: “When we understand this slide, we’ll have won the war [in Afghanistan]“.
*Keep It Simple Stupid, or Keep it Simple Scouter
Your “to do” list is not a place to park your ideas, for motivation, or a task graveyard. It is only for clearly defined physical actions that you’re going to take in the near future. Now, go forth and prune your list. Be honest with yourself. Are you really going to do it, or do you just *want* to do it?
Sometimes we step in dog poop. Trying to make lemonade out of that would cause us stress (and we’d probably get sick). The better approach? Let go of judgment about the good and bad of the situation which causes us stress, and just dealing with it as part of the puzzle of life is what gets us through the crap that life sometimes lays in our path.
Touch can transmit as much emotion and information as facial expressions and body language, and motivate and inspire us if used the right way. Just don’t linger, because that’s creepy. Groping is right out.
At the beginning of my business career I learned about the “Skunk Works“, also known as the Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Projects. The way I was told it was a heroic little band of engineers that stuck it to the man and snuck off to a secret location to do what the big company with its bureaucracy and hide-bound leadership of the larger company could not. Projects (like developing a U.S. jet-fighter during WWII) were started on a handshake.
A careful reading of the history tells a more mundane story. The Advanced Development Projects was deliberately established as a prototyping facility, where the KISS principle was the principle. Speed was essential, cost was not. The secrecy was because of what they were working on, not because they were pulling a fast one. It makes for an inspiring story, but it’s just not true.
Unfortunately in the last fifty years the term “skunkworks” has come to be an excuse for siphoning people and resources from sanctioned projects to get around controls, avoid oversight, or to reduce the risk of the official project by having a backup to go to when it fails.
Here’s the problem. By stealing resources from a project because we think it might fail, we are increasing the liklihood that it will fail. The talent, time, and materials taken from one project and given to another secret, unofficial skunkworks may contribute to the failure of the first. By allowing a skunkworks to exist we are failing in our duty as a leader in two ways:
If the first instance, where the main project succeeds, we incurred the additional cost of supporting a skunkworks without benefit. In fact we’ve probably increased the time and cost, and decreased its quality because we didn’t have all the resources available to us working on it, and we’ve wasted all the time & effort used in the skunkworks because it didn’t get used. Where the skunkworks succeeds and the main project fails, we’ve incurred the cost of supporting the chosen alternative for no benefit.
As managers and leaders we’re supposed to provide the greatest benefit to the company the employs us for the least cost. Running two projects that do the same thing betrays that responsibility.
Again, allowing an alternative, secret project to exists increases project risk, cost, schedule, and the likelihood that the main project will fail. When we make a decision we should strangle all other ideas in their cribs. Before they grow and interfere with our decision and plans.
Even if we don’t agree with the choice we must still put our heart and effort behind the choice that’s been made. Bosses need to know, and we need to show, that we support the choice they made. We need to do everything in our power, in both word and deed, to give it the best chance of being successful. No whining, no complaining, and no “If I was in charge things would be different” sabotage and gossip.
Here’s a side-effect of supporting our bosses decisions, even if in our heart of hearts we don’t agree with them or they turn out to be wrong. The next time a tough or controversial choice needs to be made, and your boss has seen that you’re a team player, you’ll have more influence. She’s more likely to listen to you if she knows that when the decision is made you’ll work like hell to make it successful. No matter if you agreed with the decision in the first place or not. This means you have a better chance of getting things done your way the next time.
Who knows. Maybe even your boss might be right once in a while and we’ll learn something. Which is better than the alternative of getting the blame for sabotaging the project.
Next time: when a decision turns out wrong -why you shouldn’t have a “Plan B”.
What do you think is an essential skill for good managers? E-mail me bernie@practicalmanagers.com and share!
