If the balance of power was completely upended, and bosses could be fired by their employees – how many would have their jobs tomorrow?

Not many, in our estimation.

Leadership figures that bring value to their employees would be the only ones that survive. A philosophical exercise, to be sure, but one we think deserves some analysis when you endeavor to create a company culture and recruit talented, driven individuals. Task driven, top-down management styles may be great for running an assembly line, but fail miserably when applied to multiple site location management where trust is required; you simply cannot be in two places at once.

Position Power is easy to understand. Employees view the term with reference to a controlling manager; hence the negative connotation that comes from experiencing managers using it. When your staff does things because of what you will inflict upon them for non-compliance, you poison the work environment and must constantly supervise them. This makes it impossible to manage multiple locations; they simply do not care about your goals and have no trust in your leadership.

Personal Power takes much longer to develop, which is why only managers with the proper level of personal and social skills can employ it effectively. Employees will quickly see your actions, determine your intentions, and judge your integrity. You must bring value to their employment in excess of a paycheck. Continuing education, training, and rolling up your sleeves and helping them succeed are great ways to earn the trust necessary to groom and retain the personnel necessary to grow your business. All of this takes time and effort; you cannot fake your way through this, but the results are well worth the investment.

We suggest taking a look at the current level of education, training, and interest you are providing directly from your office, not just the HR department. If you would like to discuss how best to implement this, please contact us for a free consultation. Your employees may not have the power to fire you, but they are certainly in charge of your success.

You’ve been plugging along, doing fairly well.  Your company offers a variety of products or services and you have a solid group of employees who are genuinely liked by your customers.  Your pricing is reasonable, and your staff does not experience too much push-back from their prospects when trying to grow your customer base.  Suddenly, you find yourself faced with a new competitor; one of those high volume low cost models has set up shop in your market, generating a buzz with their cut-rate, loss leader pricing.

Suddenly your sales personnel are asking questions.  How can we compete with them?  Our customers are going to go there to save money, or ask us to lower our fees, etc.  You start to worry about the competition and what they are doing, completely forgetting what you do best.  The first couple of cancels come through, and you hit the panic button – we have to match them with price.

In most every instance, this is the worst thing you can do.  Unless you have been running roughshod over your current and potential customers, delivering shoddy service, questionable sales tactics, and alienating your market, you do not need to lower your price or standards.  (If you have been doing these things, you’re already dead in the water).  Think of the things you provide that the discount model does not, and emphasize these.  Create some new programming or add an amenity, etc. It’s going to take leadership to distinguish your product now, not just advertising.  Employees must value your product and pass this feeling on to your members. 

I have seen too many operations panic and discount their pricing, only to destroy their brand, antagonize their current customers, and ultimately end their operations.  Stay strong and have a plan – don’t lose your dream to a model that promises nothing, and delivers less.

Contact us today and set up a free 1 hour consultation to help you with competition or any other business needs

Do I really want to open this? That sentiment is felt daily, across the world, by managers and owners of every type of business you can imagine. You know the previous day’s results were not good, and the last thing you want to do is confirm it by examining the daily report. We have all felt that way from time to time; however putting off analyzing your daily reports is like leaving an unpaid bill on your desk. No matter how long you leave it there, the news is not going to get better – indeed it will only lead to more trouble down the road.

Open the report.

You need to be able to scour the productivity reports in order to determine what went wrong, what you did well, and what your staff did to prevent today from being a repeat of yesterday. Spend the time necessary to gather information for a production call that will be informative, motivating, and relevant – not just a rehash of what happened yesterday. After all, if your staff needs to be informed of what the final score was yesterday, you need a new staff. Good employees will realize that you are paying attention to their progress. By drilling down into the KPIs that affect your business, you will find positive things to counter the negative impression that a tough day can leave on a team.

How many contacts were made, and what were the results? Which employees are performing well and which ones need training? These are but a few of the dozens of metrics that must be analyzed in order to ensure your company is following a plan for success. A bad month can turn around when daily efforts are graded using KPIs rather than the final results, coupled with training on the proper techniques and behaviors that drive success. Focus on positive aspects/behaviors of the previous day’s performance and point out how they will increase sales, and the compensation of those who perform them. Then spend 15 minutes training on these topics.

If you do not have this reporting available to you, or if you do not trust the data, contact us and we will install it for you. There simply is no substitute for diligence when it comes to tracking performance, and waiting to the end of the month to see how you end up is a recipe for disaster.

https://businessfixpros.com/sales-services/

As we work with companies large and small, we see a management trait that is stultifying innovation, stifling new ideas, and thwarting open discussion.  Leaders who are too vested in their own opinions and view other opinions as an attack on their expertise are becoming more common.  I have personally seen ego-driven C level executives not only override other’s ideas without considering them, but then force everyone in the board room to parrot their particular point of view.  Whatever the cause, it is detrimental to your company’s growth and agility, and leaves you unable to adapt to new competition or market shifts.

Being too invested in your own ideas and failing to consider how you could be wrong makes it nearly impossible to be open to something new, especially if it contradicts your current assumptions.  This will result in your managers bringing you only those projects and ideas they feel will align with your current “world view” and forego other ideas as being too risky to bring up.  Your competitors are more likely to break ground with an exciting new innovation if this is your company culture.

The HIPPO effect is another way that small to medium sized companies compromise their innovation.  HIPPO stands for “highest paid person’s opinion”, and many meetings simply end up defaulting to what the boss thinks, rather than pursue ideas from the trenches.  Great ideas from people who actually sell your product or deal with your customers can be lost in an environment that values status over new input.

Finally, your organizational chart could be the problem with fostering innovation.  Chain of command works well with issuing orders and executing decisions, but it can bottleneck any new ideas or practices. Creative ideas that come from the middle or lower levels of a hierarchy have to work their way up through a series of managers, each with the power to veto but lacking the authority to implement the idea.  Changing a communications policy and allowing for ideas from the field to be vetted from the top, without having to hurdle mid-level managers, can do wonders for innovation and company morale.

For more on this and other topics, BASE offers a free one-hour consultation that you can register for here:

https://www.businessfixpros.com