hiring

An article by David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy (11/17/2010) decried the rise of a modern version of the mid 19^th-Century "Know-Nothing" movement,  generally remembered for its embrace of ignorance at the expense of growth and excellence. Similarly disheartening attempts to discredit those who show tendencies toward intellectualism or who are perceived as experts were all the rage in the 2010 mid-term elections. This is not a political blog, so I won’t go into how much this terrifies me for our society, but it does have some sobering implications for business.

People who disapprove of experts and intellectuals don’t just disapprove of them in politics (wow, I can’t even write that sentence without reflecting on how deeply strange it is). People who disapprove of experts and intellectuals disapprove of them in general.

I have been collecting a little journal of observations of anti-intellectualism since the ever-so-unimpressive-Sarah-Palin smashed onto the American reality show stage. Of course, I stopped collecting hers because there were just so gosh darned many of them. But here are a few that have managed to stop me in my tracks and make me reconsider the intelligence of people who did not seem to be mentally incapacitated otherwise:

• I would never go to any doctor other than a family medicine guy. Specialists aren’t any more skilled than anyone else, but they’ll cost you an arm and a leg more to go to them (same version of this statement recorded for auto mechanics).
• I don’t trust accountants and I don’t want one nosing in my business. I let a bookkeeper go over everything before tax time and that’s good enough for us.
• What is the point of hiring a lawyer? You still end up paying all the same fines and fees but you’ll have the legal bill tagged on too.
• My son (a primary school teacher) can use a computer as well as anyone else out there, so why would I pay some expert $10,000 to build a website my son can do for free?
• Oh, and my favorite – spouted out during a discussion about the importance of learning to be a critical thinker: “That’s the problem with the universities and all the ideas they use to brainwash children. That’s why they call it a liberal education (insert sneering tone here).”

I’m not suggesting that all experts are preferable to generalists, that experts are inherently better than anyone, or that there aren’t some really sharp generalists out there. I also accept that there are too many highly paid losers masquerading as experts. What I am suggesting is that broad-based bias against expertise and intelligence is inherently bad, because it sets the stage for mediocrity-on-a-pedestal. If this dangerous belief has wormed its way into your psyche even a little bit, and you are a business-owner, you are probably doomed.

Because at the same time that this strange idea that mediocrity, home-grown-ness, and average-Joe-ness are preferable to education, expertise, and intellectual rigor, the world has become a more competitive, more complex place – a place where people slow-on-their-feet or lacking in the abstract thinking skills necessary to grasp multi-level problems are being left behind. Fast.

If you own a business and you are counting on that business for your future wealth and retirement income, you will undermine your future if you do not seek the most talented, most intelligent, most not-average people you can find to fill critical positions and provide you with the business support and advice you require. Yes, it costs. It costs to hire talented people, it costs to go the extra-mile to sift out the good-on-paper from the good-in-reality, it costs to keep talented people, and it costs to pay for genuinely good advice and support.

It also costs a business owner to never have enough cash to pay the bills, to lose out on business opportunities because he can’t afford them, to lose customers because he’s not taking good enough care of them, to lose money because he made poor-but-avoidable choices, and to lose all that sleep and quality of life worrying about how his business is doing. Am I painting an overly bleak picture? I don’t think so. The business failure rate has accelerated from its already high rate of over 70% failures over five years. That’s a lot of lost money and lost time, not to mention ulcers and failed marriages. Want to blame it on the economy? OK, but what’s to explain the fact that that the over 70% failure rate has been documented for over a decade?

As a strategy consultant I analyze a lot of businesses. Want to know the common thread between businesses that are thriving and growing and ones that are struggling?
Quality of employees. I don’t mean just “nice” people – though that’s very important. I mean clear-thinking, intelligent, trained, intellectually competitive people who want to be mentally challenged and rewarded for great performance. The most successful business owners worry about paying the amount necessary to hire talented people in key positions, then pay it anyway because they see the long-term value. The most successful business owners work hard to understand their personal shortcomings, then bolster the business with people who possess offsetting strengths. Just like it’s difficult to stay in tip-top health if a quiet cancer is worming its way through your body, it’s difficult to run a highly competitive business if you subconsciously have reservations about the value of talent.

But what about all those people who are just average? Don’t they deserve to work too? Well of course they do. I firmly believe that there is good, rewarding, skills-appropriate work for every willing worker. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work as a retail sales person – and most rocket scientists couldn’t succeed in that role anyway. You do, however, have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist. And your marketing professionals should have experience and training in the theory and practicum of marketing, your managers should have formal knowledge and experience in the disciplines and practices of management, the best tool & die workers have had the opportunity to work for real masters, and a copy writer is much more than a person with good grammar and spelling. Whatever your critical roles, it’s your job to seek (and seek, and seek, and seek if necessary) the absolute best people for those jobs.

As I said earlier, people who disapprove of experts and intellectuals disapprove of them in general. What I didn’t say is, except when it’s deeply personal. The guy who disapproved of medical specialists? Someone he loves deeply was diagnosed with a very rare illness, one that only the top specialist in the world could hope to cure. At first he struggled with his bias against expertise, but ultimately he moved heaven and earth to get to that specialist. The result? Life for his loved one.

Your business is deeply personal. It’s life for yourself and your loved ones. When you think about it that way, doesn’t it make sense to find and keep the experts that will help you compete and profit? Don’t put mediocrity on a pedestal, not in your personal life, and not in your business. Mediocrity is not profitable. It’s not socially beneficial. Hell, it’s not even fun.

© 2010. Andrea M. Hill

There’s no doubt it’s harder than ever to get good job references. The pressures of living in a litigious society have stifled the sharing of important information. There is nothing unethical, unfair, or illegal about sharing valid reference information about a former employee, but fear of legal action is a powerful thing. Today’s column is not about being a reference giver, however. It’s about being a tenacious reference-getter.

Though there is a perceived risk that someone who is given a weak or negative reference will sue the reference giver, the incidence of such actions is actually quite low. In contrast, the risk that a candidate for employment will provide inaccurate information that inflates previous pay, overestimates their contribution, and expands their importance is very high. This is why you must work hard to get the references you need, even if some of the reference givers seem reluctant.

Do not waste your reference giver’s time with confirming dates of employment, previous pay, or other specific data related to employment. Chances are, the reference will not have immediate access to that information and will not remember it. Instead, contact the HR department of each previous employer and confirm the data you were given by the applicant. HR departments will rarely offer anything other than a confirm-or-deny response, but that’s all you need from them. Once you complete this call, you are ready to call your references.

Addressing the employment details first with HR serves to disencumber the reference call, because the experience of being asked and answering questions makes most people uncomfortable. You want to be free to have a conversation with the reference and create a climate in which they are more likely to provide the information you need.

There are a handful of questions that you should ask every time you talk to a reference. These can be modified to suit the specifics of the job for which you are hiring, or you can add your own.

1. What were the responsibilities this candidate had while they were employed by you? Always start with this question. It’s an easy one to answer, it’s nonjudgmental, and it allows the reference giver to gather their thoughts about the candidate – with whom they might not have worked in some time.

2. Is the candidate more independent or more of a team player? This is another good question to ask early in the interview, because unless the reference has strong opinions about whether one or the other is ‘better’, it is a nonjudgmental question. The answer, however, is important to you, though if you don’t know whether the role for which you are hiring requires independence, teamwork, or both, the answer will be meaningless.

3. How did the candidate get along with peers? How did they get along with subordinates? How did they get along with management? If you just ask “how did the candidate get along with people,” you won’t uncover any potentially interesting patterns with regard to authority, competitiveness, or power. So look for relationship behavior clues by asking the question in three parts.

4. How would you describe the candidate’s performance related to  ________________.  Fill in the blank with a characteristic that is important to the role for which the candidate is being considered. You may ask this question as many times as you have specific characteristics to explore.

5. How would you describe this candidate’s dependability? Look for responses to both their attendance and their ability to get things done. If the reference only answers to one of those issues, prompt for the other.

6. Did the candidate meet their business objectives, and can you describe a specific accomplishment? The reason you are asking this as a two-part question is that it is too easy for the reference to say, “oh, yes, yes, they met their objectives.” If the reference has to think about specifics, they will provide you with a less superficial answer.

7. How did the candidate respond to your efforts to suggest or assist with professional or personal development? And what types of professional or personal development were recommended during their employment? You are looking for whether or not the candidate is likely to be open to input from you and whether they value opportunities for improvement. There’s nothing more difficult than hiring someone who isn’t open to learning or changing.

8. How would you describe this candidate’s strengths? If the reference only offers you one strong quality, prompt for a second, or even a third if you think the call is going well enough to dig a little deeper.

9. How would you describe your management style, and how did the candidate respond to your style? This question is most helpful when you have asked it of multiple references for the same candidate. Comparing the answers can provide a fairly holistic picture of how a candidate responds to being managed.

10. Why did the candidate leave your employment? Many times the answer given by a reference will differ slightly from the answer given by the candidate, but when you compare them you can see that they are two perspectives of the same issue, or that the candidate was possibly unwilling to tell their former employer the whole truth. Don’t assume dishonesty if the answers are different. Look for how the two parties could genuinely believe what they believe. But clearly, if an employer says the candidate was fired or asked to find alternate employment, and the candidate hasn’t told you this, it’s a red flag.

11. Now take a moment to describe the position for which you are considering the candidate. What you will describe will be the basic responsibilities and the key expected outcomes of the job. Think about this carefully before you call – too often people don’t know how to describe a job succinctly, and the description drags on. Once you have described the position, ask: Do you think the candidate is a good fit for the job I have described? Make sure you probe their answer to understand why or why not if they don’t offer the reasoning behind their answer.

12. Would you hire this candidate again? Everyone sort of expects this question, and if they are giving a negative reference, they are probably dreading it. But your conversation so far will have made it much easier for them to answer honestly. Make sure you probe for why or why not if they don’t offer that information.

13. Based on the information I shared with you, should I hire this candidate?  This is always an interesting question to ask. Some references won’t answer just because they don’t like to speculate in that way. But there’s no harm in asking it, and the answers can be quite insightful.

14. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you think I should have?

Set aside enough time to make reference calls, and make sure that you are relaxed and in comfortable control of the discussion. There is nothing more awkward – speaking from the perspective of someone who has given numerous references – than being called and asked for a reference, only to find out the caller is unprepared to manage the conversation!

Don’t let one great reference tempt you into not calling the others. Reference checks are most valuable when you can compare and contrast the responses, and it is highly likely that the references have had different experiences, even if the differences are subtle.

There are few things more important than the quality of the individuals you hire. Most hiring managers understand the importance of careful resume review, good interviews, and background checks. But the process can not be considered complete without reference checks, because the reference check is generally the only avenue you have to investigate and confirm the candidate’s claims.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

1. Describe the most creative thing you have done in the past year. If you want engaged employees, you want people who consider their own lives to be interesting and worth engaging in! What you’re looking for in this answer is (a) the ability to choose something quickly and (b) a degree of enthusiasm about the creative pursuit.
2. What would their peers say about them? Ask them to imagine for a moment that in your search for a reference you went, not to their old boss or HR department (or teachers, if you are interviewing a very young person), but to their peers. You are looking for a sense of how they function in a team and whether they are conscious of their impact on others at their level. Most people have a sense of how to defer to authority, so true interpersonal skills and deficiencies tend to show up at the team level.
3. Please describe your decision-making approach. Ask them first to describe how they go about making a difficult decision (you may want to use an example, such as buying a car or buying a house). Then ask them to describe their decision-making approach in comparison with their peers. Ask “can you tell me five of your strengths and five of your weaknesses?” Sure, you may get perfectionist and workaholic as two of their weaknesses, but they’ll have to work harder for the other three. This answer provides tremendous insight regarding how self-aware this person is and whether or not they are capable of and willing to be honest and a bit vulnerable.
4. Please describe your most significant accomplishment in your career to date. The answer to this question reveals character, personality, ability to learn, team skills, ability to accomplish results, pace, attitude, capability and potential. Look for results achieved and the process used to achieve results, and try to get a good understanding of the environment in which the accomplishment took place. If you are hiring a young person, let them answer this in terms of a school, camp, or other group accomplishment.
5. Prepare a job-specific, realistic problem that you will be dealing with in the exact job for which the candidate is interviewing.  Describe the problem in some detail, akin to a math story problem. Then ask the candidate “How would you handle the task if you were to get the job?”  Listen to their answer carefully, and if they haven’t already addressed these things, prompt them for:

        [ ] How would they go about organizing it
        [ ] What resources would they need
        [ ] What would they do in the first few weeks
        [ ] What problems would they expect to encounter
        [ ] How would you plan it
        [ ] How long would it take
        [ ] What would they do first

6. Describe five things about the training, communication, or atmosphere of this company that would need to be present in order for you to feel satisfied and successful working for us. You can’t find the “right” employee if you don’t know what that means – and the reverse is true for your job candidates. You are looking for indications that the candidate is conscious of their role in achieving a good fit. If they are going to be entirely passive in this regard, they certainly won’t be engaged.
7. How would you finish the statement “People are . . .?”  Never ask this question until very late in the interview process. You want your candidate to be fairly relaxed and feeling like it’s nearly over. The reason this question is powerful is reflected in the saying as above, so below. Even if the interviewee has been conning you with socially appropriate answers (which hopefully you have been able to pick up on), their answer will reflect their general opinions about others and some truth about themselves. As with everything else, though, be sure to interpret their answer in context! I once had a guy respond immediately with the answer “people are dishonest!” Did that mean he was dishonest? Not at all. He was a retired FBI officer, and his answer reflected all his years of experience.

What is a fair compensation rate for retail sales staff today? And how should commissions  be structured? Andrea Hill gives advice for the jewelry industry in this article in InStore Magazine.

From InStore Magazine online, April 2, 2019:

I have an employee who makes $16 an hour and 6 percent on retail (although for loose diamonds, commission is based on gross profit). She earns close to $60,000 a year but feels underpaid and that paying gross profit on diamonds is contrary to the industry standard. How can I convince her she has it pretty good?

She does indeed have it pretty good, says industry consultant Andrea Hill, owner of Hill Management Group, noting that her hourly rate is almost 50 percent higher than the average for retail salespeople of $11.50, and even more than the average of $15 paid by very high-end luxury retailers (think Gucci). The commission is also higher than the industry average of 3-4 percent on retail, although, significantly, Hill notes, “wise” businesses are increasingly moving away from such a formula to pay commission on gross margins. “In this way, sales professionals are challenged to balance the need to get the highest price possible with the need to close the sale. When commissions are paid out on total sales only, then it becomes very easy for the salesperson to sacrifice profits for the easy close,” she says. While exposure to such numbers should mollify your associate, what you really want to do is excite her about the potential of earning as much as $100,000 a year — which is what top luxury salespeople make — although that requires building a “strong book” of customers through active networking, clienteling and prospecting work. Keep in mind, however, that even the most generous commission rate won’t help if you’re not on top of your game, meaning advertising intelligently, keeping up with changing retail trends, providing the right technology for how consumers today want to shop, and maintaining an exciting inventory that reflects current tastes, says Hill. “If the retail business owner does not ensure that they are running a strong merchandising and marketing operation, then even the best salesperson in the world will not be able to turn the promise of commission into actual earnings.”

Business downsizing is beginning to happen in earnest, and it’s only going to get worse through the first and second quarters of 2009. But there is a lot of work that still needs to get done, so contract workers will be in demand for the foreseeable future. Enter the virtual team.

If you find yourself assembling virtual teams of home-based contract workers, you will need to develop new skills and sensitivities to motivate, manage, and assess them. A lot of folks will put themselves out there as contract workers while they search for permanent employment (white collar workers are going to get hit with downsizing after blue-collar, but they're still going to get hit by this).  But not every talented professional is cut out for independent contract work.

In my experience, the people who are successful in virtual work teams tend to be more motivated than the average worker. I think a lot of people try virtual work, or get assigned to virtual teams, but the ones who excel at it tend to be self-motivated self-starters. And they are the ones who return to virtual team assignments again and again (either because they like them, or because their employers recognize they are good at it and keep assigning them). These folks may enjoy the self-employed route so much that they continue to work in this capacity even after the job market opens up again. And if you want to maintain access to these folks, there are a few things about motivation you’ll need to know.

One of the differences in managing a virtual team is recognizing that your high performers require a lot of recognition. People tend to think that self-motivated self-starters don't require as much recognition as other workers, and that's a mistake. They perform for the pride and joy of performing, and while receiving the right monetary compensation is important, receiving the right recognition is critical.

When you are managing a traditional office team, you can convey recognition in a lot of ways - through brief chats to give them personal attention, by responding with laughter or a smile to something they say, by nodding at their recommendations in a meeting. When you are managing a virtual team, you have to work a lot harder to provide the appropriate recognition for their efforts.

This requires more consciousness than some people might think. For instance, a lot of people aren't good at giving specific recognition, but their body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other responses convey approval, so the employee still gets recognition. If you are managing virtual employees, you need to take the time to offer specific and effective recognition, and consider whether that recognition should go to the whole group or just the individual (there's a time and place for both).

If using email, you need to state the recognition in written words, then decide whether this is a "reply to all" or just "reply." If on the phone, it's important to include a few extra minutes for chit-chat, so they can warm back up to you as a human and sense your approval through your gift of time. I've found IM and other methods of CHAT to be great ways to send a quick "hey - haven't heard from you all day. Just checking in to make sure you're OK!" I've been told by employees that this was very meaningful to them. I've also found meeting minutes to be a tremendous source of communication beyond the details of the meeting. I take meeting minutes very seriously, because if it's not written down it won't get done, and I've always taken my turn with taking the minutes. People began to look in my minutes for a joke or recognition buried within them, and the person recognized in each case feels pretty good about that.

Don’t take for granted that your virtual team workers are just excited to get the paycheck. Perhaps they are, but with every other business around you downsizing too, the competition for the highly competent virtual workers could be high – and those are the only people you’ll want to hire.

© 2008. Andrea M. Hill

It takes a certain amount of ego to start a business, own a business, take a job as the president or CEO of a business - a healthy ego is a prerequisite to a lot of success stories. But what happens when that ego is out of control?

What happens when the personal maturity and wisdom of the business owner/leader/CEO are not equal to the task of leading employees with responsibility, empathy, and humanity?

A recent book by British Journalist Jon Ronson called The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness of Industry has even found that the incidence of psychopathy in CEOs is about four times that of the general population (4% versus 1%) - psychopathy primarily being characterized by lack of empathy, lack of guilt feelings, poor impulse control, inflated sense of self, etc.

In some cases those with out-of-control egos achieve huge financial results and market success, and are hailed as amazing business leaders - though Ronson suggests these are the anomalies, often representing short-term successes and longer-term failures. I continue to scratch my head about Steve Jobs. Of course he was wildly creative, but I just can't give him a hall pass for all the control-freakish, ego-fueled, belittling of others behavior he entitled himself to over his years at Apple. And of course, his ultimate business legacy is still undecided.

But let's not be fooled. For every ego-maniac who makes it to the heights of business, there must be 10,000 ego-maniacs who get in their own way so much that their businesses falter and fail. All of us have worked for one or more of them at some point in our careers, and if you have young adult children you've probably watched your kids suffer through at least one ego-maniac as well.

Why do I bring all this up? Because one of the most important things we as business owners can do is to constantly work on our own emotional health. When leading small teams of people toward challenging goals like positive cash-flow and profitable growth, it is essential to earn their trust and respect by being people worthy of those feelings. Of course, we all wake up on the wrong side of the bed or let our stresses get the best of us on occasion. But the more often that happens, the less our employees are capable of respecting us and rallying to our side.

Lack of ego strength shows up in a lot of different ways. The most obvious is a loss of temper or failure to communicate in respectful, civil ways. But condescension veiled in civility is almost as bad as a blow-up and ultimately leads to much deeper resentment than throwing a coffee cup. Failure to recognize that others' ideas are as good as our own - even if they are different; the inability to let others' find their own path to an agreed-upon desired end result; the need to tout our own superior concept even as we congratulate someone for their success; a tendency to discount another's intelligence or - God forbid - creativity; these are all indications of a lack of ego strength and examples of the types of behavior that lead our employees to give us less than their best.

A small business owner has immense challenges to overcome and very few resources to provide support. So here's a toast to self-awareness and emotional health - may we all find the balance between ego and humility necessary (in most cases) to achieve the long-term business success and retirement income we ultimately desire.

When my oldest child was eight years old, I stumbled upon a brilliant method of doling out consequences for less-than-desirable behavior. Instead of telling her what her punishment was, I asked her to decide on the punishment herself.

Invariably she came up with a more harsh punishment than I would have suggested – often more harsh than I could support. But what really struck me about the approach was how much she hated the process of creating her own consequences. On one memorable occasion she stomped her foot and ran from the room screaming “Why can’t you just punish me and get it over with like normal parents?”

Though we went through our fair share of trials and tribulations on the way to adulthood, now she is 25 years old and one of the most personally accountable, self-disciplined people I know, able to defer personal gratification for good cause, possessed of an incredible work ethic, and filled with a sense of purpose in her life. Can we blame it all on forcing her to come up with her own consequences? Certainly not, but even she credits that early accountability as among the most influential experiences of her life.

This reflection comes to me as I help clients prepare for the oh-so-common annual employee review process.

Recent publications indicate that human resource professionals are beginning to doubt the value of the employee review process, and many companies have abolished it altogether. Considering that most employee reviews consist of a manager making a hasty and vague list of canned desired improvements and delivering them impersonally in a 15-minute stress session, this is not surprising. Having been at the receiving end of that type of review myself, I see no value in wasting any corporate time on such activities. But what if the employee review could provide the adult version of the strong sense of personal accountability and purpose that my daughter gained when asked to create her own consequences? Isn’t there room for meaningful employee-manager exchange about goals, objectives, accomplishments, and potential?

I think there is, but it requires commitment and preparation on the part of the manager to achieve. It starts with engaging the employee in the process from the very beginning. It starts by asking the employee to be his own reviewer.

The most successful review process involves providing employees with a self review questionnaire, asking them to take time to consider their performance over the past year, and giving them the opportunity to present their assessments during a private, relaxed, sufficiently scheduled time for discussion. By putting responsibility for self-assessment in your employees’ hands you open the door to insight you could not gain if you were to review them and ask for their compliance. You also walk the fine line of approaching them as an adult peer while appropriately acknowledging your role difference, which can make all the difference between a successful or resentful working relationship.

When asking employees to prepare a self-review, suggest that they answer the following questions:

1. How did my performance contribute to my department’s achievement of our strategic goals?

2. What was the impact of my performance on the challenges faced by my teammates?
Did I accomplish goals that were set for me during my last performance review? (Please be specific.)

3. Please explain how you understand and are working to convey the company brand?
Please explain how you understand and are working to convey the company philosophy (or principles)?

4. Were there any actions or factors that inhibited your work performance? If so, please describe:

5. The new skills I have developed and demonstrated are:

6. How did these new skills add value to your team or the company?

7. How can my supervisor facilitate my contribution to the achievement of my personal goals?

8. How can my supervisor facilitate my contribution to the achievement of the company goals?

9. My goals for next year are:

Managers should answer the same questions for each employee they plan to review. A manager who doesn’t have enough information to answer those questions about each of her direct reports isn’t paying enough attention – an important form of self review for the manager.

On review day, set aside enough time (45-60 minutes) and a private space to have the discussion. Ask the employee to present his review first, in its entirety. This gives the manager the opportunity to listen carefully and learn about each direct report, which will help her be a more effective manager and will help the two of them together to provide greater value for the company and a better working experience for themselves. Once the employee has completed his review, the manager should first acknowledge all the things about which they agree, congratulating the employee on accomplishments and offering support for improvements the employee wishes to make. After that, the manager can offer insights from her own review that did not appear in the employee review. Finally, invite discussion about those points and come to agreement about the most positive goals and objectives for the coming year.

If you have a trusting relationship with your employees – and the requisite amount of confidence yourself – you can also ask for input on your own performance as a manager. Your employees possess insight about your performance that is relevant to your long-term success and different from what your boss has to offer (of course, none of this process has value without trust. If a manager has a conflicting relationship with an employee, the employee will feel set-up and unsafe when asked to come in and review himself).

One of the most common objections I hear to this approach to annual employee review is that it will take too much time. To respond to that, I like to retrieve a copy of the P&L/Operating Statement for the year. The largest company expense is almost always product cost. The second largest? Human resource. The ultimate key to competitiveness lies in the excellence and happiness of your employees. Invest in that, and you are investing in profitability.

Happy Reviewing!

© 2010 Originally published on the Hill Management Group/StrategyWerx Website, 8/29/2010. 

Better Feedback Means Better Productivity and Higher Morale

Engaging in effective communication is one of the most important – and difficult – things for a team to do. Communication becomes particularly difficult when we need to give feedback of an uncomfortable or possibly critical nature to a teammate. The “I Statement” approach will help you give better feedback and get better results.

An I Statement takes the you out of hurt feelings, as in you hurt my feelings. Instead, it helps you describe the behavior that contributed to your feelings getting hurt, and helps you express how you interpreted that behavior and why your feelings were hurt as a result. In other words – someone else did a behavior, and you own your own feelings. Expressing feedback in this way leads to far more productive conversations!

So here is the format of the “I Statement.” The more you use it, the more naturally it will come to you.

Giving better feedback is one of the most important things a company can do to improve productivity and morale. Most all of us want to do a good job - in our interpersonal relationships and in our work. We deserve to receive the feedback that will help us accomplish that. Using the I Statement helps everyone become more comfortable giving - and receiving - that important feedback.

Help is a funny thing. We often - in fact, almost always at some level - need it. But we don't always get it. Is that because the universe is unkind?

No. It's because we only get help when we actively seek it, we only actively seek help when we genuinely want it, and wanting help is not the same as understanding we need help.

In fact, I have known people who were aware for years that they needed help, but all the same did not want it.

The reasons for not wanting help when one needs it are probably as myriad as the genetic combinations that define us physically. Maybe we judge ourselves and think we shouldn't need help. Maybe we think help is a sign of weakness. Maybe we struggle to accept that someone else knows something we don't know. Maybe we worry what others will think. Maybe we don't like the uncomfortable feeling of being helped. Maybe we don't believe that others will do things as well as we would. I'm sure there are dozens more reasons than those.

I am confident that people who need help and don't ask for help use the justifications that they can't afford it or that they don't know who to ask as mere excuses - when someone genuinely wants help they always find a way to acquire it.

So why is this important? Because throughout our careers we all need help. We need assistance, people to whom we can delegate, people from whom we can ask advice, and people to kick us in the rear end and tell us the truth. The people who achieve the most have something in common . . . they accept the necessity and value of help, and therefore the reality that they cannot do everything themselves.

This doesn't just apply to one-man operations. I have met many entrepreneurs with 20, 30, 40 employees who still insist on having a hand in every single aspect of their business. They  are only satisfied when the people helping them do things exactly as they would do them - which is impossible, of course. Those businesses are hobbled as clearly as if the entrepreneur hadn't hired anyone.

I have been asked several times lately how we sell our services, and I reply, "we don't. You can't sell help."  I can't court people I think need help, or promote our services to people who appear to need help, you can't close someone on help. I am an adamant teacher of selling, yet in the case of my own business, selling our services is anathema. Someone who merely suspects she needs help will make for a difficult client. When someone approaches us and says they really really really need help, and are willing to make the changes - both personal and organizational - required to benefit from help, then we can get a lot of excellent work done (and make the hourly rate worthwhile for them). In the case of help, the seeker must be the aggressive one to truly benefit from it.

So ask yourself, in what areas of your life and business do you need help, and what is holding you back from seeking it? Once you have your list (we all have a list), do the inner work to figure out what's holding you back. Then go on . . . ask for help. You deserve it.

The information regarding Jim Collins’ five levels of leadership (last week) led to some interesting email conversation (thank you Lori) regarding personal work habits. If you’ll recall, a “highly capable individual” is defined as one who “makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.” It was on the topic of good work habits that the exchange was based.

Lori pointed out that there are a lot of talented people with skills and knowledge who have terrible work habits, and that she would rather work with less talented, less knowledgeable people any day of the week. She makes a very good point.

Just the other day while working with a client on a hiring policy, we had a long discussion about what we were hiring for. It is generally easier to train work skills than to train someone to be a team player or to train them to have discipline or a good worth ethic. With a few obvious exceptions (surgeons pop to mind), give me an emotionally mature, self-motivated, less experienced person over an undisciplined, undermining or emotionally unstable talented person any day.

You know the type. The manager who never gets any of her work done on time, who is always rifling through a stack of unruly looking paper, frantically behaving as if she has the completed assignment in there somewhere – when everyone, including her, knows it’s not done. Project managers from other departments make jokes about who has to take her as a resource on their next project, because nobody wants to chase her down for the constantly overdue action items. But when her subordinates are late with an assignment or let a detail slip, watch out – the blame finger will standing at rigid attention. It doesn’t matter how much this manager knows technically about her area of responsibility, because the negative energy wrought by the dysfunctional behavior undermines the whole effort.

So what are good work habits? An extremely important work habit to develop – which is frequently overlooked – is the ability to focus at the right level of detail. Some people only focus on the big picture, and don’t know when it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty. Other people latch onto some microscopic detail and distract the rest of the environment with their inappropriately applied zoom feature. Both types of people have bad work habits (or, perhaps, demonstrate good work habits only a small percentage of the time). If you want to contribute meaningfully to an organizational effort, you have to develop the ability to go from microscope to telescope, and you have to know when ordinary glasses are all that is required.

Another important work habit is advance preparation for meetings. This seems so basic, but it’s astounding how many people show up for a meeting without having read the meeting materials, done preliminary research related to the meeting agenda, or given even a few minutes of reflection to what they intend to accomplish in the meeting. And let’s not forget how many meetings don’t have an agenda even posted in advance (a terrible work habit). Considering the expense of most meetings, each one should be prepared for as if preparing to negotiate the price on a new car. Corporate values would increase overnight if people would just prepare in advance for their meetings.

A work habit that is somewhat controversial due to the record creating component is that of journaling. If managers would all journal – keep notebooks that don’t have perforated pages (so don’t fall apart), mark each of their action items with a readily-recognizable icon in the margins (the better to cross off, my dear), and record decisions made and key points of discussions held, corporate memory and achievement would increase dramatically. Of course, the lawyers frequently don’t like this, because then there is a written record that could be subpoenaed in litigation. But it seems crazy to sacrifice achievement for fear of litigation, and it seems much simpler to just never do anything unethical or illegal (of course, that’s a topic for another day). Journaling is a great work habit.

Some bad work habits would be laughable if they weren’t so pernicious: answering your phone during a conversation with someone else or during a meeting (why do we think voice mail exists?); wandering out of meetings when our presence is requested or required – and forgetting to wander back in again; having conversations and arguments over email that would be better addressed in meetings, and making decisions or having important discussions without key people present all come to mind. Other bad habits were supposedly bred out of us during grade school, like our aforementioned manager who fails to complete work on time, poor attendance, sloppy work, poor grammar and spelling, basic math mistakes, and jumping to conclusions. And the really big one - the person who spends all their time acting like they work harder than everyone else, when in fact they work very little.

I’m not saying I don’t value people with tremendous talent, intelligence, and drive. I am saying that if you’re going to go to the effort to develop those admirable qualities, why waste your potential impact through sloppy and inconsiderate behaviors? Let’s all sing the praises of good work habits. I know that just typing that sentence made my old school Principal, Sister Lucy, smile sweetly wherever she is.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

I don’t know if you follow the Zits comic strip, but it’s one of the comics I check out daily in our local paper. I became interested in it this summer, because the comic started focusing on the challenges parents face when their children are learning to drive, and at the same time my (then) 15-year-old son was getting his permit.

I have taught a number of children to drive so I’m no newcomer to the driver training space. Even after all that practice, it can be stressful at best, and sometimes harrowing. But the process – when well done – is an excellent model for training. Students are required to gain a certain number of hours behind the wheel, accompanied and instructed by a responsible adult. In many states the students are required to keep a training log of hours, whether those hours were done at night or during daylight, and how long they drove each session. Once they pass their test they are given a provisional drivers’ license, which gives them privileges to drive, but with restrictions. Here is the Zits strip from today:

All of this makes sense, right? Not only do we want to protect all of the other drivers on the road, but we want to protect our children. When training is this close to home, we take it very seriously.

So why are we so flippant with business training? We bring a new employee in, we throw them into a job with somewhere south of an hour of orientation, and we expect them to be successful. This isn’t good for the driver or the other drivers on the road. In the case of the new employee, they have probably left another job to join the company. Failure to provide them with excellent training can lead to job loss and economic hardship that would not have occurred had they been properly assimilated. Other employees suffer because their new colleague is not as efficient or effective as they need them to be. Nobody’s interests are served.

Assuming even a highly trained or long-experienced professional will not require training is also unfair. So much of learning to do a job well is learning the culture and practices of the company – and those things vary dramatically from organization to organization. Just learning the acronyms requires a pocket handbook that to my knowledge no company ever provides.

US voluntary turnover rates are at 23.4%, and involuntary turnover adds another 10-12%. That means that companies are losing 33 – 45% of their employees annually. The cost of finding and assimilating new employees to the point of full contribution is frequently figured at two years of their full starting salary. There’s not much business knowledge I would take from most State Departments of Transportation, but I think the driver training model might be a good one to emulate.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

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When it comes to survival, innovation, and evolutionary improvement, no business theorist has anything on Mother Nature. Her success record running the business of Earth is quite undeniable. Even as her most destructive creatures grow increasingly effective at polluting and fracking and discarding, she continues to evolve and survive.

Business owners and leaders can learn a lot from Mother Nature. And the lesson that supports all the other lessons exists in all of us, in our DNA. She figured out a long time ago that the more you mix up the DNA of things, the stronger those things would be. Oh, no doubt she developed some beings destined for dead ends (Neanderthals, perhaps Aardvarks), but those relatively few false starts didn’t turn her off on evolution. No, she kept going, full steam ahead, committed to the idea that DNA could be strengthened, could survive, if it kept seeking and accepting new elements.

Of course, organisms do reject certain DNA modifications, and some DNA modifications can lead to disease and death. The process of evolution can be messy. But the one constant is change, the structural variations that lead to human and plant genetic variation. The other constant is that the less the DNA changes, the more likely it is to suffer disease and undesirable mutation – which is the scientific reason why close family members are discouraged from procreating (that and the blech factor).

I read yesterday that Starbucks employee demographics include over 40% minorities, which is within striking distance of the actual ratio of white to non-white people in the United States. But Starbucks doesn’t just tolerate the diversity. They honor and embrace business diversity as an important part of their company culture, whether through their constant and high-quality focus on professional development for their employees (75% of store and district managers are internal promotions), or by creating forums for employees to openly discuss the issue of race in America. They’re not perfect (see above: evolution can be messy), but Starbucks is working hard to keep their DNA as diverse as possible.

As a strategy consultant to small business owners, I spend an extraordinary amount of time in workplaces that are homogeneous at best. Some of this is natural. If the business only employs three people, and those three people are mom, dad, and junior, then the gene pool is pretty slim. But this lack of diversity extends way beyond small family companies, and it exists in companies owned by people of all cultures. Even when there is ‘visual’ diversity, with a token someone-or-other as a nod to social compliance, I often observe that the token person is sidelined, either through genuine bigotry in the back office or passive discrimination in the form of un-inspected biases present in the other members of the group.

This isn’t just about race either. Businesses that won’t hire millennials, senior citizens, people with tattoos, gays, trans-gendered, people of different religions, the differently abled, people who dress funny; those businesses are crimping their DNA just as surely as a business that won’t hire someone of a different race or culture.

Why do we need these people, these different people, to work with us? Sure, it’s the right thing to do, but I’ve noticed that this doesn’t motivate a lot of people.  No, it all goes back to Mother Nature, or at least, that fatty organ that sits in the center of your skull. That organ, your brain, may be the consistency of warm butter, but think of it like a muscle (really it’s not, it’s mostly fats). But still, think of it like a muscle. If you don’t use a muscle for a long, long time, it atrophies. When you go to use it again, it fails you. If you only use a muscle one way – for instance, if the only time you use your lats (upper back) is to put away the dishes – then your muscles will fail you if you must throw a punch to protect yourself or push something heavy.

Your brain has similar characteristics. It builds itself around the things you do all the time in all the same ways. If you find yourself in a rut, there is an actual rut in your brain, a tiny groove that reflects that you are doing things the way you always do them. The brain can be a lazy little guy if we don’t stimulate it. And businesses can become very, very lazy entities. Businesses readily fall into the rut of doing things the way they always did them. They look at all potential customers as a mirror-image of themselves. When they consider their competitors, they start from assumptions that are borne of their own thinking patterns. They fail to evolve. Neanderthals. Aardvarks.

When a business embraces many different perspectives, thought processes, world views, and communication styles, it fires up the collective brain, which – when stimulated – is more than willing to create new grooves. They improve the way they do things, they envision more multifaceted consumers, and they outthink their competitors. They evolve.  It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg thing; Did the business that welcomed diversity make the people within it more diverse, or was it people that were willing to be diverse in the first place that welcomed and created a diverse workplace?

The business case for diversity continues to build, and business owners who ignore it do so at their own peril. Learning to embrace and fully incorporate people with different backgrounds and experiences, even if the differences sometimes confuse you or even make you uncomfortable, will improve your business bottom line.

Published on InStoreMag.com, the letter expresses why it is important to pay jewelers what they are worth, and how the jewelry store can (should!) benefit from that worth by building brand value.

At a time when consumer interests are clearly shifting to products that provide customization and offer a sense of individual identity, jewelry stores with custom offerings stand an excellent chance of attracting a new clientele. At the same time, it's easier than ever for a talented artisan to strike out on his or her own, using the power of the internet for marketing and operational systems, and taking advantage of the affordability of tools and equipment once too expensive for start-ups.

Jewelry retail stores can embrace the jewelers and pay them well to bring them into their businesses, or they can compete against them in an increasingly disrupted jewelry market. Store owners who see the truth in this will surely benefit.

I encourage you to read Mr. Geller's letter. This is something that has needed to be said, and more important, needs to be heard.

I'm a big fan of consultants, and not just because I launched a consulting firm this year. I've hired consultants often throughout my years as a chief executive at several large firms, and have found their assistance to be invaluable. I start with the premise "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room," and go from there.

I had to figure out how to use consultants. Nobody taught me, and I used them incorrectly several times before I learned my lessons. Interestingly, the consultants themselves were rarely willing to tell me what I needed to know to benefit from them the most. So this column is for all those willing learners out there who may wish to hire a consultant and want to know how to extract every dollar of value.

Hire the Right Consultant

This sounds crazy simple, but it's not. It seems like every laid-off executive from one coast to the next is a consultant. Many consultants claim to have skills they cannot actually demonstrate in real life. Just because a person has ideas about marketing doesn't mean they've actually tested those ideas on their own budget. And just because someone worked directly for a CEO, say, as an HR Executive, doesn't mean they know beans about how to lay out a business strategy.

Vet your consultants carefully. Make sure the consultant has actually had a job directly in the area of expertise for which you are seeking their advice. Ask them to tell you about their biggest mistakes in those roles. One of the things you are paying for with a consultant is the opportunity to learn from the consultant's mistakes and possibly avoid making some of your own. If they haven't made any noteworthy mistakes, they either weren't doing much or they weren't doing it for long.

Do your due diligence. Interview carefully and check references. While it is much easier to cut the cord with a consultant than an employee, you risk spending a lot of money on inadequate consulting services before you realize it. Hire a consultant with the same care you would hire an employee.

Ensure potential consultants enjoy the highest level of professional respect for their integrity and business ethics. This person will be in a position to suggest that you do certain things with your business. You don't want to be at the starting gate wondering if you are about to do something shady.

Ask potential consultants how they would approach specific issues in your business. If they are reluctant to discuss their methodology, either they don't have one or they are paranoid that you will take their idea and run with it. A good consultant isn't just selling a great methodology - she is also selling her thought process and her ability to analyze issues and grasp nuances. A confident professional will happily discuss actual business issues and give you lots of ideas about how you could resolve them - with or without her.

A Consultant is Not a Contractor

This is an area that is often confusing. A consultant is someone who advises you on your business or a segment of your business. The consultant participates in reviewing history, analyzing performance, and making recommendations about how to proceed. Typically this work is done with the expectation that people within the organization will be taught to do the work the consultant is spearheading. A good consultant is an excellent teacher, handing off business knowledge with each recommendation, analysis, and suggestion.

Consultants are often confused with contractors. A contractor may be hired to manage a specific project or do specific jobs. This person sets his own schedule and bills by the project or by the hour. The contractor may or may not set direction (he may take direction from the consultant).

When the Consultant is Doing Nothing

Beware any professional who blazes through your doors with suggestions flying. Sometimes the most important work a consultant can do is observe. Every business that is still in business is doing many things right. A good consultant doesn't wish to undo those things - she wants to supplement and refine them. So if she tells you she needs time to observe, ask questions of your staff, and observe some more, trust that.

A Consultant is Not a Magician

Just because your consultant knows how to do something that you don't doesn't mean she can make it happen tomorrow. Are you looking for cultural change? Give it two years. A major shift in your brand perception? Minimum 10 months. Implement a new selling strategy? Same. Implementing new operating systems? Six months to plan, 4 months to implement/go-live, 2 more months before people stop complaining, a year to true benefits. A consultant's superior knowledge and experience in an area of change can make the process go smoother, but some things take as long as they take, and many things are dependent on your organization's acceptance and participation style.

A Consultant is Not a Genie

If a person tells you he or she can guide you through a major business initiative without making mistakes, run for the exits. You aren't paying for the benefit of someone who never makes mistakes - that doesn't exist. You are paying for the benefit of someone who makes more sophisticated mistakes because the dumb mistakes are behind her. You are paying for the benefit of someone who knows her craft well enough to suggest something new and possibly groundbreaking with reasonable expectation of success. You are paying for the opportunity to take it up a notch, not play it safe. If you just want to play it safe you can do that without consulting expense.

You May Not Always Understand - or Agree With - Your Consultant

If you already knew everything you wouldn't need a consultant (remember the saying "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room"). If your consultant is truly an expert, she will talk about things you don't understand. Ask her to break it down for you, explain where she is coming from and to help you understand it. That's an appropriate role for the consultant-as-teacher.  But if you're arguing with your consultant about whether or not she is right, take a step back. You may actually be arguing about your fear of taking a risk or your need to understand something better before you proceed - and those arguments are understandable. But if you're arguing about something you don't know as if you know it, what's the point?

Your Consultant is Not Your Employee

Your consultant is not your employee. Your consultant should be a challenger, ruffle your feathers, and tell you want you need to hear (versus what you want to hear).  Your consultant should be unwaveringly direct.

Your consultant will not drop everything when you need her. If she's good (and remember, that's what you need), she has lots of other customers.

Good consultants aren't cheap. You want a consultant with the skills and experience to be paid at the top of her field, and her hourly rate will reflect that.  Think of it as rent-an-executive for business owners who otherwise couldn't afford that skillset.

Still Want to Hire a Consultant?

Does this sound daunting?

Well, business is demanding. It makes us take risks, spend money we don't want to spend, and put our identities and self-worth on the line. We hire consultants to help us take those risks and make necessary changes.  An excellent consultant can make a huge difference to your bottom line and your optimism for your business. Once you find the right one, remember that she is not a magician, a contractor, a genie, or an employee. Plan it right, and you'll have engaged an expert, a business partner, and a support system.

Sometimes I listen to parents complain bitterly about things their toddlers – or teenagers – are doing; things which are totally age-appropriate. If you’re like me, you think to yourself, “as long as you're a parent, you would have a better time if you learned about the developmental stages of children.”

I had a friend who once decided to ride his bike from Albuquerque to Santa Fe – a 65-mile trip. Half way through his journey – and in the middle of nowhere – his bike broke down and he didn’t know how to fix it. If you’re just riding your bike around the neighborhood, you can get away with not knowing any repair skills. But if you’re going to start making long treks in sparsely populated areas, you need to learn how to fix your bike and own the proper tools.

There are probably many things you wouldn’t do without learning a lot about them and practicing first: true wilderness camping without survival skills, throwing a huge self-cooked dinner party without cooking skills, sailing a boat in the ocean without navigational and boating skills.

Are you running a small business without small business success skills? If you are, it’s going to cost you.

As a small business – or even a micro-business – owner, you must do all the things the CEO of any company does; decide what to sell and how to sell it, whether and when to hire help, manage customer service, operations, and finances, make decisions. Even if you don’t have formal investors, you are managing a huge investment – your own. Your investment is the time you spend, the money you put in, and the profits you roll back in. You are responsible for all the same things as any CEO, but without the qualified support staff to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.

I was the CEO/President of several corporations over the past 30 years, from a $2million/year marketing agency to a $100million+ jewelry company and a $600million+ apparel company, and now I own a multi-brand consulting agency. The skills I needed between the $2 million level and the $600+million level were remarkably similar. I didn’t need to “be” an accountant, but I had to know how to discuss finances intelligently with my accountants. I didn’t need to “be” a production manager, but I needed to understand what my production managers were doing and how to help them be more successful. I didn’t need to “be” the computer network manager, but I needed to be competent enough to weigh the suggestions my network managers made and make good decisions.

When I first took over the apparel company, I realized that my accounting skills were lacking to do the analysis at that level. Did I go back to school to become an accountant? Absolutely not. But I did go take a class called “Financial Management for Non-Financial Managers” offered at a local community college. That, plus a lot of attention and practice, turned me into a strong financial manager capable of not driving my accounting staff crazy, and more importantly, of being the CEO my company deserved. Every year of my career I have added more business skills to my portfolio, and I continue to do so today. You must do this too.

You probably already know how to make and/or acquire the products and services you sell. This is the starting point for most entrepreneurs. But there are several business skills you must cultivate in order to ensure the survival and profitability of your company. These small business success skills include:

• Basic understanding of financials and financial management. You don’t need to become an accountant (in fact, paying a good accountant is one of the most important things any small business owner can do). But you must understand your role in financial matters, how to work with your accountant, and how to steer your company in the right direction.
• How to not just make a strategic business plan, but use it for ongoing business development and improvement.
• How to express your business strategy as a Brand, and how to imbue your whole organization – from product idea to post-sales satisfaction – with Brand elements that stick with customers and keep them coming back for more.
• How to hire, train, discipline, fire, and motivate employees. Even if you have only one employee, you need these skills. Otherwise, you risk paying someone to work for you without getting the full value of that pay.
• How to set up the necessary business systems to manage your customers, sales, inventory, marketing, operations, and accounting. By systems I don’t necessarily mean expensive computer software – the solutions can be anything from KanBan cards to computers. But you need to know which systems you need and how to set them up.
• How to manage your inventory to ensure high service levels, solid margins, happy customers, and no excess taxes. Inventory is about way more than just buying goods and making them. You must understand the role inventory plays in your company, and how to manage that role carefully.
• How to create and manage a sales and marketing plan.
• How to set up sales and customer service programs that drive volume and profits, whether you’re selling to business clients, through retail stores, or directly to end consumers (or any combination thereof).
• How to not only create and sell products, but manage product and product line profitability.
• How to prospect for new customers –from finding new potential sources for sales to keeping them interested, and learning how long it takes to convert a prospect to a loyal customer.
• How to decide which operations to keep in-house, which to outsource, and how to manage both types.

Being a business owner is a big task, and I’m not going to pretend that list is a quick or easy thing to master. But if you start learning these skills right away and keep picking them off one-by-one, you’ll become a better CEO from the moment you start . . . and the time is going to go by either way.

This is a link to a chart of these skills. It is structured as a pledge; a pledge to yourself to pursue and cultivate the skills you need to succeed. I encourage you to print it out, post it in a highly (and daily) visible spot, and check each one off as you tackle it. And here’s to you, on the road to becoming a highly competent – and vastly more satisfied – CEO.

Are you experiencing the leadership challenge in your business now?

One of the most constant things we must do to run a successful business is lead, and that's really hard work. Leadership requires a lot of consistency and discipline. In a very big business you can distribute that leadership among many managers, and as long as most of those managers are effective in that role the overall business does OK. But in a very small business, any deficiencies in leadership can quickly lead to morale problems and other types of dysfunction in the workforce. This is the small business leadership challenge.

It's one of the biggest challenges facing small business owners, because they are not only faced with the constant demands and worries of the business itself, they must also take leadership roles for which they don't always feel equipped or perhaps even interested. Dealing with the people aspect of running a business is often more exhausting and demanding for small business owners than cash flow, financing, or sales struggles.

The good news is that these skills can be honed over time, but it's not always the way you want to spend your energy, so it's a challenge. And it's a challenge unlike developing new computer skills or financial knowledge. It requires looking hard at yourself and evaluating how effective you are inter-personally,  what you can do to be a better communicator, and how you can express your irritations and frustrations in positive ways even when that's not what you feel like doing.

If you have more than three employees, take a look at your current business experience and analyze what percentage of your frustrations are people related versus business/task related. It may be that you are experiencing the small business leadership challenge right now.