Hello,
Another early morning start, thick fog and I’m weaving my way through the countryside for an important meeting in Sydney.
As I drive along I’m looking at how beautiful nature is and I‘m reminded that everything I look at, every thing I see, is merely energy taking form.
As I was driving I was thinking about my past achievements and how much I disliked having to manage staff. At the same time I realise what an honour and incredible responsibility this is.
I think back to my previous business, Cronulla Fitness
Club, and the fact that more than half of my key staff are still there, and they're still a major part of
that business four years after I sold it.
The business itself is
now 15 years young, and my manager, operations manager and head personal
trainer are still involved in the club. Their service to the club would be in
the vicinity of 10, 8 and 6 years respectively. And I’m thinking that although I found managing staff wasn’t my
strength, I must have done some things right to have had that effect!
I want to share with you today some key things I have learnt about team members and employees that will be relevant regardless of your position in a business. I also want to share with you some significant research done by the Gallup Organisation.
Before I go any further, let me share with you two significant statements that both Michael Dell and Bill Gates have made about their key people. Michael Dell said that his people were his only competitive advantage. Everything else can be duplicated.
Bill Gates once said, as big as Microsoft is, if you take away my top 20 people, you’d basically take away my company.
Both of these men know the truth, that today more
than ever, if a company is bleeding people it is bleeding capital.
The best business
minds now estimate somewhere between 40 – 60% of the value of your business is
in the hearts, heads and minds of your talented employees, and that figure is increasing
yearly.
No longer will businesses be bought and sold simply on
profit and loss, and asset and liability statements.
In the largest study ever done of its kind the Gallup Organisation interviewed over 80,000 managers to determine ‘How do the world’s greatest managers find, focus and keep talented employees?’
What they found floored them and was subsequently revealed in the book, First Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham. They found great managers did things contrary to popular beliefs. They don’t believe anyone can do anything they choose. They don’t treat all staff the same. They don’t hire on skills and experience, they hire on talent.
Also, the study revealed that the factor that determines employee longevity more
than anything else is the relationship with their manager. People leave
managers, not companies. If you have a turnover problem, look at your managers.
Essentially, the studies done by the Gallup Organisation showed that the key to building a strong team could be summarised in just 6 key questions which I'll be covering over the coming weeks... So, let's start with Question One today.
Q1.
Do I know what is expected of me at work?
When I owned Cronulla Fitness Club I hired fitness trainers. These kind of people loved to help other people but they weren't comfortable taking anyone’s money for their services. This created a problem in the business as they weren't promoting themselves and were in fact, costing the business money.
I decided to hire a business coach and when he asked me what the problem was, my response was that 'they’re not selling’. And he replied, ‘Well, did you hire them to
sell? to which I responded ‘NO’.
The Gallup Organisation says that the #1 distress in business is lack of clear communication around what is expected of someone when they are hired.
You can’t expect your team to do something they weren’t hired to do.
There is nothing worse than hiring someone to do one job and then dumping a whole bunch of extra responsibilities on them that they didn’t expect to be doing.
It's even worse if you give them extra responsibilities without giving them the appropriate training.
Now is business moving faster these days? Do we sometimes need people to change roles or multi-task? The answer is "Yes".
So what I would recommend you do is call a "time out". Sit down and talk with your team and say: the game has changed, this is the situation and we now need you to be able to do this, this and this. And then ask how they feel about that.
At the Fitness Club, we called a "time out", we got them the best sales training in the industry, we incentivised them to make sales and we encouraged them to sell. And from that point forward it was always made clear that sales would be part of the job for any new trainers we hired.
So do I know what is expected of me at work?
Now this may seem obvious, but last year, I was training the management team at a Sydney hospitality venue that’s been around for almost 100 years. And do you know that after 100 years they didn’t even know whose responsibility it was to count up the till at the end of the night or order the Guiness when it ran out each week?!
The assistant manager was promoted off the floor because they liked him and yet nobody knew what he did at work each day...
Why not take a minute now and ask yourself this question: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Then rate yourself from 1 (low) to 5 (high) in terms of your understanding of what is expected of you and see if you can get to a 5, if you're not already! If you're a manager then I'd recommend you do this with your staff too...
Next week we’ll examine question #2.
Stuart
