What Drives Your Promotion?

Read some interesting posts that less than half of a group of employees think they will be promoted any time soon.

Hunh?

Their idea is that if they do wunnerful work, they should be promoted?

That’s not how it works.

A promotion occurs when the organization has a need, not when an employee does work they really like.

A need occurs when somebody drops dead in the traces, or when the organization expands.

Personally, I like the expansion part better, because then the promotion criteria is simpler.

You kill it, you eat it.

I’ve noticed that endless promotion consideration based on internally focused, customer agnostic systems, generally create a suboptimal promotion. Why would you let staffers who are not clueful make up criteria for a promotion? It’s a theoretical choice for a theoretical assignment that will intersect a world of consequences.

Paying customers who can and will fire your whole organization for performance provide useful guidance. If you have senior employees making up opinion-based criteria, you’re wasting money and time.

If you’re not in an organization that paying customers are growing, you are unpromotable. 

 

And what have you done for the fleet today? ADM Art Money’s war cry.

Join us: Monday, July 1 9:45 – 11:30 am, for Google+ The Center of the Internet, at 40PlusWashington, DC – Free, informative, and entertaining.

Status Meetings – A Welcome Change

Business has changed – how we do it, where we work, what we are responsible for, and who we are working with has been radically shaken – sometimes I feel like the paint can in that shaking mixer at the paint store.

Working smart and efficiently is needed to cover the additional responsibilities we inherited as others left the organization. Nevertheless, several of the old practices seem untouched by this new reality – like the written weekly report to a manager or the Monday Morning Meeting.

An update report to the manager is a one-on-one, asynchronous communication – from writer to reader. Often in a mark-up format – freshening up the statistics while leaving the prose intact – the report shares metrics without intelligence or current conditions. Many writers see it as a time consuming task of no direct value in reaching goals and delivering results.

The Monday Morning Meetings were not efficient when everyone was in the same location – come in early or break in to the day's schedule to sit for an hour or more to speak for about 5 minutes. When locations and resources increased, these meetings became more unwieldy to schedule and virtually attend. And people resist going to meetings – too many are time wasters without obvious purpose or tangible results.

The status meeting is an effective way to share intelligence about individual and organization progress, market intelligence, and customer feedback.

A status meeting has 5 principal elements for each stakeholder to share crisply:

1. What are your goals for this week?
2. What results did you achieve?
3. What changes did you make to get better results?
4. What was the best things you learned about the marketplace, customers, competitors – what will benefit your co-stakeholders in achieving their goals?
5. What are your goals for next week?

No need to prepare handouts or written documents for a status meeting – participants will take notes on items of interest to them. Sharing goals, results, and what was learned outside the organization, is of value to all participants and can help build teamwork in the process.

Can the status meeting scale and still be effective? General Stanley McChrystal when Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) held a similar meeting: 'As We See It' session with 70 nodes around the region for 90 minutes everyday – he said this was the most effective way to tap local knowledge of enemy activities and keep all units up to date on current information and plans.

I find that it takes about 6 weeks or so of weekly meetings to understand the meeting format and get everyone participating fully, but once there it is a meeting that participants find useful. Just the collective market intelligence alone from the status meetings can magnify the scope of current knowledge far beyond what one individual could typically observe.

Worth trying, if you want to build your organization's effectiveness.

Resources – So that's how to do it!

Join us: Monday, July 1 for Google+ The Center of the Internet, at 40PlusWashington, DC – informative and entertaining.

Breaking A Bad Decision

I was working with a board faced with a major problem...with no workable solution. These are good people, who understand their business, have been at it for a long time.

They completely understood their situation, and for the last six months no optimal, hell, no viable solution was available.

This particular problem had colored all other actions, made what had formerly been a fun operation a death march.

As their consultant, I wanted to bring some light. I’m supposed to be the magic man.

We’d been through worse before. But the business has changed. Their reason for being is now called into question.

I had an opportunity to sit down with the owner. He’s a long time friend and supporter.

We agreed we weren’t making progress and we weren’t liking the results.

I suggested that since the old tools weren’t working, why not set up an internal blog, just for the board, get a promise to have each board member post their thoughts twice a week for two months.

Nobody on the outside would see our work, but maybe we would get to a different place. I would go first.

Writing a blog post requires a couple of things. One is writing, two is finding something to write. That requires getting out of your rut, finding something new.

The happy news is that a number of erroneous preconceptions got defined and fixed. Not by the readers, but by the writers.

And sure enough, it turned out that all the trust we had been building with our customers had created some requests for help. We’ve got some promising work to provide.

Will it work? Who knows? But we are getting the snap back, the confidence to create for an appreciative audience.

The original problem? It’s still there. But it’s a lot less important. If we keep doing something else, it may well go away.

New problems require new solutions.

Tips 4 The Big Chair – Get a new perspective

Ideas in Action

When I was a lad, sodas were 10 cents from a vending machine. Not being fond of sweet carbonated drinks, I told friends that it would be great to have these machines dispense ice cold spring water in bottles. Of course they laughed at such a goofy idea.

My bottled water idea was a lark – just a dream – because there was no action or plan to develop it further.

Ideas without action are not a unique occurrence – this is the fate of most creative thought. Even if an idea is written down but introduced by “they should...” - it merely entertains your mind and does not create value unless you take action.

Think about it – how does innovation and knowledge create value? It comes from taking action on an idea, not just the idea alone, and applying it to get results.

Health care is changing radically due to the new law and supporting technology is evolving rapidly in response to its needs. The Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health and Google Glass Meetup got together this week to start a conversation about how to use the emerging technology of wearable information devices as a tool for providing better health care delivery.

Keith Montgomery, Executive Director of Center for Total Health, describes his organization's role as a place for conversations which lead to new ideas for improving health care. What I noticed is they are not looking for new science, they are looking to get patients to be healthier by doing what we know works.

Antonio Zugaldia, an organizer of the Google Glass Meetup group, demonstrated the glasses (which are equipped with a computer, camera, heads-up display, and internet access), and was just released to the developer community. The user can transmit what she sees and receive data and graphics on Google Glass heads-up display.

Center for Total Health and Google Glass Meetup brought together health care practitioners, consumers, and app developers to talk about needs and potential solutions using this technology. By the end of the evening, several possibilities had been identified – like the emergency room doctor who thought having the patient's information and vital signs available through while he was working could improve triage diagnosis and care delivery.

While this conversation might currently be similar to a boy telling his friends about vending bottled water, Center for Total Health, Google Glass Meetup and Google are committed to caring it forward to action – results – value.

The incentive for continuing to talk is the consumers and developers are sharing their needs and solutions – asking stakeholders what they need speeds up the development of useful solutions.

The larger conversation is how to change behavior of health care consumers and providers to improve patient outcomes. For example, technology can permit a patient to monitor their health and improvements from modifying their behavior.

Ideas are plentiful and worthless – action creates payoff.

Open Source Leadership – the new paradigm

Lessons From My Foot Doc

One of the best communicators I know is my podiatrist.

Any time I see him, he’s quick, precise, and I’m immediately better. Here’s some of the things he does.

Years ago I met him, he noticed my book. “Tocqueville? Democracy in America? I haven’t read that since high school.”

“TJ?”

“Yup.”

In ten seconds, he had used my stuff to establish his mastery. He knew my book, I knew his school.

I explained my symptoms, he named it, what caused it, and how it was fixed. Four minutes.

I don’t give professionals much trust until they earn it. This guy is driving the bus in four minutes.

Then he taped up my foot with three, one foot lengths of tape.

I’m a jock. I play hurt. I figured I’ve been taped for football, wrestling, lacrosse, hockey, and tennis probably over 10,000 times. This guy uses three pieces of tape and takes the pain away.

“Hey, that’s some taping!”

“Yup, I’m pretty good.” Grin.

Took a couple of months, but I followed his regimen and cured. Working out is breaking down and bringing back the body. This was more debilitating than usual, but the cure worked the same.

Last week – I went back to see the foot doctor. Actually, two weeks before I had sent my wife to him and he had again provided sudden service. I have been in small pain for a couple of years and suddenly figured, “I know a great doctor. Why don’t I go get fixed?”

He didn’t remember me. He didn’t remember my wife, who had been in four hours earlier for a followup. Then, “oh yes, oh yes, of course I remember!” Yeah right. He just wanted to do the diagnosis.

Listened to my description (rehearsed and read) for a minute.

“I bet this hurts.” One finger. Stars and planets!

“I bet this doesn’t hurt.” A light thumb right next to the pain point. He’s right.

“Okay. Here’s the situation” A one minute explanation. Then,

“I used to have a rack of brochures. Now I just go to Google.” Picture of a foot with drawings on it.

“And here’s the skeletal view.”

He screws up his face like he’s thinking. I ask, “What are you working on?”

“I’m trying to figure out how much you need to know.”

“What are my options?”

“Well I’m going to order an xray just to show I’m right. However, if you want, I can also order an MRI so you get a better picture.”

“Will an MRI help you?”

“No, I already know the problem.”

“Well I’ve looked at MRIs before and I never learned anything. And let’s re-establish, you’re driving this bus.”

“Good. Here’s what we’re going to do...”

Best things I learned.

1. Establish mastery in a couple of seconds. If you can’t, notice more and learn quicker.
2. Show ostentatious mastery in the little things. Creates trust for the big things.
3. Nobody cares what you know. What do you know about me?
4. The faster you move, the less extraneous crud comes into play.
5. You can be totally respectful without really caring. Respect is not care, but constructively focusing. If you care and don’t know what you’re doing, I really have other priorities.
6. Don’t offer more than the customer wants to buy. If you have to offer more, your solution is wrong.

Sales Lab Model – a good place to start.