Is Google's Problem Your Problem?

According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Facebook’s “closed social network” is steadily and noticeably encroaching on Google’s territory. As a result,  “Google risks losing the competition for Web users’ time, details of their lives and, ultimately, advertising.” (Really, did you think it wouldn’t come down to money?)

Google has been and continues to be the leader in writing algorithms for internet searches.  Trouble is, the algorithms don’t work so well in social networking, because they can’t determine how humans actually make decisions or interact socially. In other words, you really can’t plug human nature into a formula.

Creating algorithms for social interaction is, in one form or another, what many businesses are trying to do. They’re having just about as much success at it as Google. Money, time, and effort are consistently spent on strategic plans that are never fully executed, business development programs that may or may not be completed or acted on, and retention tactics that often miss the mark.

These efforts fail because often they don’t consider how the humans affected will react – or, more likely, not react. A small core of people creates something that looks terrific on paper, only to have it largely ignored by the rest of the people in the organization. We humans decide mostly with our emotions: pleasure, fear, acceptance, loyalty, happiness.

Google is learning that it is difficult, if not impossible, to reduce human behavior to reliable, predicable statistics. As business owners and leaders, we can learn from Google’s travails. We can create better programs for retention, business development and just about everything else when we remember to include those whose participation is crucial to the program’s success.

We can lead our organizations more effectively when we remember that our team members are not parts of a formula, but individuals whose decision making process is a complex blend of rational, emotional, and social elements.

Five Ways to Fortify Your Culture

If a recent survey by Adecco Group is accurate, workers of all ages are beginning to explore job opportunities, with more than half of Millennial generation employees planning to look for different jobs as the economy begins to turn around. Now is a very good time for leaders to consider organizational culture as a retention tool.

With this post, I am assuming you have a strong and supportive culture but may not know how best to leverage it. Here are five ways:

1. Consistently articulate your culture. If you can do that, you can compellingly answer the question “Why should I stay here?” when your top employee asks. You can also incorporate your cultural message into marketing and recruiting collaterals, which creates consistency internally and externally.
2. Bring your personal values to work with you. Most of us view ourselves as decent, compassionate individuals who want everyone in our lives to do well and be happy. Remember that as you lead your team members – even those who challenge you – through the ups and downs of everyday business.
3. Hire for cultural fit above all else. When you know you have a great culture, keeping it great should be your top leadership priority. Hire for attitude instead of GPA, book of business, or community connections. Attitudes are absolutely viral. This works either to your organization’s benefit or detriment, depending on how you hire.
4. Reward behaviors that enhance the culture. Every day, if your culture is as good as you think it is, you’ll find someone demonstrating it. Open your eyes; when you see the real thing, reward the behavior with a simple thank you. Communicate what you know is true: that the individual exhibiting the right behavior is what makes your organization successful.
5. Get rid of those who clearly are a poor cultural fit. This seems to be the toughest thing for leaders. It often happens that the one or two bad seeds have some kind of perceived leverage on the organization. Maybe they’re great business developers. Maybe they’re excellent producers. But when they’re not making rain or crunching out billable time, they’re busy poisoning your culture. Many good people who represent your firm’s future will leave because of the poisonous minority.

I See You

That’s the line from Avatar, which I saw recently (and, yes, I’m something of a late adopter). I see you. I can’t get it out of my head because I think it has important implications for all of us who work with humans.

Regular readers and clients know I have used thousands of words talking about gratitude, helping business people understand its importance to morale and, ultimately, profitability. But I have learned that there is something more important and more profound than gratitude, and that is recognition.

To recognize that another person exists in your world is one of the greatest gifts you can offer. In today’s overworked, hyper-connected world, authentic recognition is woefully absent. Plaques and Facebook posts and end-of-year bonuses are wonderful, but they are superficial, mere tokens of authentic recognition.

Truly seeing another human is easier than you might think. It’s as simple as stopping what you’re doing to look up and make eye contact at the person in your presence. It’s asking someone how they’re doing and then listening to the answer: offering congratulations, help, laughter, or maybe just a nod, but acknowledging that you see him or her. It is including someone who has approached your group in your conversation. It is taking a breath before you respond to a request or hit “send”. There are hundreds of other examples, but essentially, it is nothing more or less than opening your eyes to see another human being fully.

I wonder who among us has not experienced the pain of not being seen. I’m betting a lack of recognition has caused more than one disruption in your office, and maybe in your personal life. From a profitability perspective alone, seeing others – truly seeing them – has value. From a personal perspective, the rewards are incalculable.

I see you.

Business Development Training: Think Before You Spend

People in my line of work seem to think that growth strategies will be a focal point for professional services firms in the near future. Any effective growth strategy requires that at least some professionals know how to bring in clients. This involves education, whether you provide it internally or through a consultant.

Either way, it is prudent to analyze your motives for spending money and time on training or coaching. Ask your partner group the following:

1. Does your culture support consistent, long-range marketing and business development learning and efforts, as opposed to sporadic and reactive demands from individual partners?
2. If so, how?
3. If not, what are you and your partners willing to change?
4. What, exactly, will be your carrot and stick approach when it comes to business development efforts and results?
5. Will business development efforts or results affect compensation?  HINT: If business development does not at some point affect compensation, training is a waste of resources.
6. How will you handle the inevitable question: “Hmmm. Peter Partner seems to be doing fine here, and he doesn’t develop business. Why should I?”
7. How will the firm create a system of accountability for the time and expenses that go with increased business development efforts?
8. What does a successful outcome for a training or coaching program look like to you and your partners?

Finally, be sure your firm’s growth strategy is in place and known by every team member. Spending money and time to teach anyone to develop business when there is no carefully crafted or well communicated plan for the firm’s future is like shaving with a dull razor blade: often painful and rarely effective. The crucial difference, of course, is that razor blades are a whole lot cheaper.

Strategic Questions for Strategic Planning

If they aren’t planned and facilitated effectively, strategic planning meetings can easily become one or all of the following:

• Snooze fests
• A game of Liar’s Poker
• Boxing matches
• Coffee klatches

Not one of these is worth your time or money. To base your strategy session on substance and get started on a real plan, be sure you gather the following data from your partners:

• Do you want more of a specific type of work?
• Do you want stronger people to do the work?
• Do you want to rid yourselves of certain clients? Can you afford to?
• Are you content with the money you make?
• Do you want to work more or less?
• Will your current managing partner remain in that position for the foreseeable future?  Has a successor been named or even considered?

It’s critical to find out what the firm’s owners want, and then determine how those desires intersect with marketplace and operational realities. This isn’t all you need to do to chart your firm’s course, but if everyone can agree on the answers to the questions above, you’re on the right road.

Choose Discomfort

• A senior level person in your company comes to work grumpy as a crocodile one day and perfectly pleasant the next, dealing with co-workers according to his mood.
• One of your employees has trouble understanding that personal calls are just that: personal. She’s on the phone in her cubicle several times a day, sharing the details of last night’s date. Everyone within earshot gets to know, too.
• Your best business developer pitches a scathing fit in his secretary’s cubicle when things don’t go as planned.

Lucky you. As the owner of a business, you have the challenge of deciding whether and how to respond to situations like these. And they happen every day. Each situation is different; each requires its own thoughtful response. It also requires a willingness to enter into a potentially uncomfortable conversation.

It’s interesting that most business owners feel fully capable of dealing with the technicalities of running their enterprises. The internal issues, however, cause plenty of stress. Owners know through experience how costly internal drama can be, both in terms of short-term productivity and longer-term morale and turnover. Ultimately, though, business owners are just like everybody else: they avoid conflict because it’s uncomfortable. They sit on their hands and hope the situation will resolve itself.

Rarely do conflicts like these resolve themselves. In fact, it’s likely that the perpetrators don’t even realize they’re doing something wrong. Why? Because no one tells them. Sure, they might receive one of those useless emails that tries to correct everyone’s behavior while achieving nothing at all (except perhaps to irritate those who aren’t misbehaving). And they might hear something about their general attitude in an annual evaluation, if their supervisor remembers to mention it. But they don’t receive the most useful thing of all: a one on one conversation that clarifies the immediate issue and seeks a resolution. They don’t receive it because you, the business owner, don’t want to be uncomfortable.

It is well worth your discomfort to confront difficult internal issues. By having what may be an awkward conversation with an employee or partner, you help the other person become aware of his or her behavior and offer an opportunity to change it. Valuing your own comfort over clear communication and prompt action creates backlash: your challenging employees continue their inappropriate behavior, because they are unaware; productivity decreases because everyone else is dealing with the challenging employee except you; and morale drops when your best employees see that bad behavior is unacknowledged and sometimes even unintentionally rewarded when you do nothing.

The next time an internal issue arises, take a deep breath. Then have a face-to-face conversation with the employee about your expectations and how they’re not being met in a particular situation. Be specific. Make it clear that you want improved behavior and ask for their cooperation.  Tell them how much you value their good work and that you want to see them focus on doing more of it. Find a way to leave the conversation on a positive note.

Though your palms may sweat and your heart rate may increase in the knowledge that you have a situation to deal with, deal with it anyway -- sooner rather than later. It’s the best way to change things for the better.

We Need a New Clause in the Social Contract

The latest display of rage (in this case, a fed-up flight attendant) ought to stop us all in our tracks. The picture of a you-have-tap-danced-on-my-last-nerve flight attendant hurling invective over the PA system at yet another rude (not to mention uncomfortable, cramped, stressed) passenger, then escaping via the emergency evacuation chute is kind of funny. I’m sure it will be fodder for the joke writers at every late night talk show.

While it’s easy to smirk, we need to think beyond this single incident and consider that it’s only one of many acts of rudeness and incivility that occur every day. Life is more stressful, more crowded, more noisy than it was even ten years ago. Put a lousy economy on top of that, and you have a recipe for rudeness and, as Mary J. Blige so aptly describes it, hateration.

All this hateration causes pain. It hurts the person who reacts to rudeness with rudeness and it taints everyone who has to witness it. Hateration benefits no one, not even the hater. So what’s a society to do?

Instead of instituting a Politeness Police, let’s simply agree to monitor our own behavior. Let’s insert a clause into our individual social contracts that clearly defines how we will conduct ourselves – not just when things are going well, but when we’re thrust into stressful situations rife with potential rudeness and conflict.

Let’s choose civility. Let’s choose kindness. Let’s take the high road, shall we? Because the low road is awfully crowded.