(Oh, and happy Louis Riel Day to all my Manitoba peeps).

Notice how I didn’t use the word “networking” in my title? I wasn’t trying to fool you like some sort of networking insurance salesman. But, and this is important so please allow me to raise my voice, but:

You’re not going to get the job you want by emailing resumes to job postings.

You’re going to have to talk to people. You’re going to have to talk to friends of friends. You’re going to have to get out and meet people. People, people, people, because emails don’t make hiring decisions.

So take a listen to Episode 5 of the Practical Lexicon podcast, and learn how to network to your next job – the job you want. Even if you’re an introvert like me.

I’ve had a funny month. One of my clients has demoted one of their managers, and fired another. A second customer is considering buying out a minor shareholder who’s also a manager. All of them for either not being able to do their jobs as it relates to managing other people or themselves. It all seems to relate back to feedback, influence, and communication.

I’ll give one example. One of my construction clients had an operator who screwed up and caused unnecessary damage. It was bad enough that the operator suspended. His manager didn’t know how, or didn’t feel confident in doing the suspension himself, and asked the general manager to do it for him.

At this point I’ve got a couple of questions, like how come we’re discussing the fairly straight-forward suspension of an operator at the executive level? Or how come somebody is  a manager (leader) and still not confident confronting poor performance? Or how somebody who couldn’t perform basic managerial tasks without guidance and oversight at every step is hired for a job that is essentially just that. Or how long has this being going on?

Ultimately they decided to let that manager go. After they started digging and asking questions they found other issues. They decided that if that general manager has to do his job for him, then why pay the guy?

Which means that the general manager is now (still) the bottleneck for operations. Which isn’t his role. He has to spend time finding the right gal or guy as a replacement, and run operations in the meantime, while juggling his “real” job of building relationships with existing customers and finding new ones in a new operation in a new city.

How well do you think he’s going to do at hiring a good operations manager with all that on his plate? Oh, yea, he’s also short an operator while the original problem child is on suspension.

So what? Well, if you’re in a “manager”, making your “general manager’s” job easier means handling things at the lowest level possible. If you’re not comfortable at giving specific, fact-based feedback and applying the appropriate consequences, then start now. Yes, you’re going to suck at it and be really uncomfortable with it at first, especially if you haven’t done it before, had a good example of how to do it, or had training. Too bad. All those excuses have a solution, but none of them should hold you back from starting now. Everything is practice until it isn’t. So start practicing.

If you’re the “general manager”, then stop hiring for just experience and knowledge. Look for the ability to develop, coach, and mentor team members. Look for the ability to create teams. For the experience admitting mistakes, fostering trust, taking responsibility, and being comfortable with conflict.

Your Homework This Week: Catch somebody doing something right every day for the next seven days. Give them specific, actionable feedback. If you don’t know what this means then do the research and learn how. *

*hint: I’ve written at least two dozen article on the topic of giving feedback for this blog.

Please view this as an exercise in how _not_ to treat your customers. The actions applicable to your company are left as an exercise for the reader, but this at least:

Make sure your organization’s feedback mechanisms are actually working. Yours are? Really? Prove it.*

Update: I have a call with Martin, a customer service rep from Indigo, scheduled for this afternoon. They’ve done at least one thing right: monitoring the social media for signs that things aren’t going well. Good catch. I’ll let you know how it goes. 

Update #2: Just finished my call with Martin, a pleasant CSR who walked through all my issues with me and documented them for his Vice President. After my initial experience I have to say I’m impressed. They were on top of things right away, and even if the website is a little kludgy, they’ve won me back. I’ll try again. Thank-you.

“Dear Unnamed Traditional Bookstore Trying to Claw Back Market Share From Amazon,

Why are you making it so hard to use your website? There’s no reason for it and it just makes you look stupid, as if you don’t want customers, or both.

1) When hitting the feedback button, and I’m ALREADY SIGNED IN, why do I have to fill in my name and e-mail address again? You already know who I am.
<Yes, I realize I’m shouting. there’s no reason for bad interface design. This is bad design at it’s worst: punishing the user for your lack of forethought. Ever heard of a “use case“? They’ve been around for a while.>

2) My original challenge was to add an existing reward card to my account. In this regard the help is less than helpful. Telling me that I can do it, but not telling me how or providing a simple link to the appropriate form is just malicious. Hunting around the “My Account” pages (which also has dead links, by the way) hasn’t endeared me to your company either. Maybe it’s there, but I can’t find it. MAKE THINGS EASY FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS PLEASE!

3) I received an e-mail from you because of my in-store rewards card. The e-mail led me to a website that encouraged me to create an account, which I did. I now have two reward card numbers? Really? Isn’t that just confusing for your customers and a headache for your staff? Isn’t the cost of administering two numbers for one customer driving up your cost and reducing your responsiveness?

4) When I finally hit the submit button I expect my feedback will actually submit. Instead it gets stuck in limbo and never actually reaches your company servers. That’s time and effort I’m never going to get back.

I came to the website looking for an e-reader, ut if you can’t run a simple retail website why should I trust you with my money? Retail e-commerce is not that easy, but it’s not like you’re inventing the wheel here, is it? It’s been done before.

I was sceptical that I wanted an e-reader to begin with. Some of my clients and peers told me I should really try it out. I like books. I like the feel, the weight, the fact that I can write in the margins and turn down the pages. That I can go back years later and re-read my favourites, lend them to friends, or even pass them down to my children.

You think I’m kidding? My wife has a cabinet with glass doors dedicated to her grandmother’s leather bound books. That grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from McGill University at the turn of the last century with a degree in literature. We don’t have a family room downstairs. We have a library with room for a TV and a sofa.

I’ll stick to my real-life books for now**, and you’ve lost a revenue stream.

In summary:

1) Stop wasting my time (like identifying myself more than once, looking for simple functionality that doesn’t exist, submitting feedback that doesn’t get to you)

2) Stop doing things more than once (like issuing more than one loyalty number to a customer)

3) If you want feedback, please make sure the mechanism for submitting that feedback works so you can identify and fix issues.

Kindest Regards
Bernie May

* This post started with me actually filling in the feedback form on the Indigo / Chapters / Coles “Plum Rewards” website. When I hit the submit button it didn’t actually go anywhere. That’s when my calm became damaged.

** Just in case you think me a Luddite, I begin my professional life as a programmer. Most of my hesitation about getting an e-reader centre around Digital Rights Management, which have real-world impacts.

You can also find some previous resources at:

Karl’s guest blog on Give Feedback
Rules of Thumb for Improv in Life and Business: Embrace Failure, Reject Fear 

5. Getting Things Done – answering the first question every executive or executive wanna-be needs to answer: how do *I* control my own time? How do I manage myself so that I can credibly manage others, and get the most important things done?

4. The Effective Executive – the classic book by Peter Drucker, answering the second and third questions every executive can answer: what is my contribution to the results of the company, and how do I develop my people?

3. Manager Tools / Career Tools – the ultimate career and management podcasts. In business for over five years and going strong. Actionable, entertaining, smart.

2. RESULTS.com Business Growth Tips – 30 seconds to business enlightenment.  The weekly business tip going out to over 50,000 subscribers world-wide.

1. This blog – Find something from this list, no matter how big or small, to implement every week.

5. The Definition of Business Focus

“If we did not do this already, would we go into it now? If not, what do we do now?”

One of the shortest blog posts ever, and quoted from Drucker.

4. Before Leading Others, Lead Yourself

I am more and more convinced that the biggest  obstacle to leadership is the self-imposed lack of regular blocks of uninterrupted time to think. This article came out of what happened when one of my clients went to France for a week on a family vacation, without his Blackberry. Since then he’s doubled the size of his business.

3. How to Give Corrective Feedback

2. How to Give Positive Feedback

One of those simple things that outstanding managers do well – giving continuous, mostly positive feedback. Can you become an okay manager and still avoid giving feedback? Maybe. Can you become an outstanding manager? Absolutely not.

Here’s the four “F’s” of feedback, in an easy to remember mnemonic so that you have no excuses:  fast, friendly, frequent, focused. Make it factual and actionable. That is all. Now go practice.

1. Deep Survival: Business Lessons From the Wild

I’d like to say that this is the most popular article because of my deep insight and wildly lucid writing style. I’d like to say that, but I can’t. More likely it’s because the work “survival” is a popular search term. Which just goes to show that sometimes you have to get lucky to make the hard work pay off, but if you don’t do the work you can’t get lucky.

I just wanted to take the opportunity to say thank-you to everybody who reads and comments on my humble attempt at a blog. It’s been a great year, and I lots more planned for the next. See you in the New Year – and stay tuned for some “Top Ten” lists!

Thanks,
Bernie

Which is why I couldn’t figure out why how entrepreneurs were just as successful with their approach. It seemed to me that they couldn’t make up their mind, didn’t know were they were going, and changed course at random. Their approach was puzzling to me until I realized they just go through life in rapid-prototype mode.

They start with were they are, figure out what they have, and try to put it together in strange and interesting ways to see what happens. If something useful comes out of it, so much the better. If not, they’ll quickly drop it and go onto the next thing. They’re the creative types.

So if you’re a planner working with a creative type, remember that they don’t think in terms of process, but in terms of what if. For you this means you have to figure out what you (collectively) are trying to accomplish in the long term, which will give you a context for figuring out where the hell that latest idea came from and what it means to you. It also means that you need to check in with the current environment often, to make sure the plans haven’t changed. Sometimes this means waiting a day or two to see if the latest idea stuck, but also be ready to move quickly on it.

For you creative types working with us planners, please remember you’re working on a team now. If you could do it all yourself you wouldn’t need to hire other people. Let them know where you’re going, and try to cross the finish line with all of your people together. There’s no point finishing the race if the rest of the company is still in the parking lot tying on their running shoes. And remember: all those good ideas mean nothing if you can’t make them reality.