High performance teams don't just happen. It takes a magic combination of accountability, leadership and great coaching.
“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. Guided, taught, led — yes. But not tightly managed.”
THE FOUR Cs
You start by hiring for character. Then add clarity, communication, and consistency.
Character is something each and every person brings to the table. You can train team members to perform new tasks, but you can't change their character.
You've undoubtedly experienced this before. You can bring on the top person in any given field but they won't help your team succeed if they don't share your firm's values. In fact, it's highly likely the lack of fit with your company's culture will cause problems. Potentially big ones. And then you're left with the messy process of letting them go.
Are you batting 1,000 in your hiring process? We're guessing not.
Does your interview process help ensure that new hires are in alignment with your company's values? I.e., can your hiring manager tell if a specific candidate has the character you're looking for? If not, it's time to reassess.
How effective are your recruiting, interviewing and onboarding processes?
We can help you design and implement new methods, including interview training, to help you build a winning team right from the start.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Accountability begins with clarity.
Every single person starts their first day of a new job wanting to be a success.
No one, repeat no one, starts a new job saying, "I really want to fail at this."
Let's back up. The simple definition of accountable is "required to be responsible for something." Hard to be responsible for something if you don't know what that something is, right?
Yet all too often companies don't adequately clarify what each team member is expected to be accountable for. In crystal clear, precise terms that are easily identifiable, and where success is measurable.
Most companies, at best, provide a nebulous paragraph or two that reads more like a job posting. That doesn't cut it. Not if you're building a great enterprise.
We'll help you craft high-quality, meaningful and measurable job descriptions, customized for your organization. For each and every person on your team.
Here's our mantra about management. Your job as a manager is to make sure your team members have everything they need to succeed — the tools, training, resources and clarity. Then get out of their way.
What you provide after that is quality coaching and feedback, given in a timely and meaningful manner. Combine this with effective performance management and employee development and you have the formula for building a winning team.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Is your company absolutely as successful and as profitable as it can be? Can you truly say you have a high performance, winning team?
There's a popular adage in business school — you get what you measure. It's usually discussed in the context of operations management, but it's even more important in performance management across the board.
We'll help you assess the effectiveness and impact of your current performance management system.
Ask yourself, what are you really measuring? How are you measuring it? Are your measurement tools effective? How are you communicating with your employees about their performance? Is your appraisal process contributing to your team's success, or dragging you down?
source: the table group
The cost of job misery is astonishing...and you can bet it's having a financial impact on your firm.
If you're honest you'll admit it...you and your management team probably hate writing and giving employee reviews, almost as much or more than your employees hate receiving them. Not to mention most existing systems are reactionary, which doesn't help.
All too often performance management is the last thing companies think about — or want to think about — whether you're focused on growth and success or you're in fire-fighting mode. Yet this is backward thinking.
If you truly want to build a great company, you need an effective, proactive process to give timely, quality feedback and manage your team's performance in a manner that is fair, equitable and totally transparent. Nothing less.
Together we'll generate an easy-to-deliver solution, customized for your team, to help you maximize your company's success. Your employees will tell you this is the fairest, most equitable and enjoyable review process they've ever experienced. And that spells MOTIVATION.
What's possible when you implement these changes? Here are results from some of our clients:
generated $13M new revenues from one employee transition
improved employee satisfaction rates
increased employee engagement
identified management failures earlier
increased on-time appraisal delivery to 96% from 64%, ensuring ISO compliance
increased sense of fairness
increased transparency in merit pay raises
decreased perceived favoritism
reduced EEOC complaints
produced high-quality documentation and avoided costly litigation
EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT
Only 52% of U.S. employees are "very satisfied" or "satisfied" with career development opportunities in their current job. (Source: SHRM 2015) In an era where employee tenure has declined to just over four years, that's a scary statistic.
A great coach develops ALL his players to build the strongest team.
We can help you identify and correct perceived gaps in development opportunities.
CareerBuilder asked workers what would entice them to stay with their current employer. The responses? "35% said an increase in training and learning opportunities, 22% said an academic reimbursement, and 21% said more specific career paths and promotions."
While there are many reasons for employee turnover, this is one over which you have control.
Bottom line: you want to retain the winning team you've worked so hard to build!
MORE WISDOM FROM JIM...
“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
“Hire for character. Train for skill.”
“A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.”
“Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people.”
“Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.”
“For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect — people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us — then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes.”
“The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.”
