Growth and Profit Solutions

9 Things Successful People Do Differently

Andrew Cooke Employee Development, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Management Development, Performance, Psychology, Uncategorized

9 tips on how to meet your goals and grow your capabilities

Do you think you can tell?
Do you think you can tell?

In Part 1 of this article, we identified why we are our own worst enemy when it comes to identifying how to improve ourselves.  Here we look at what we can do to help us, given the fact that we are not always the best person to do so.

Psychologist, Heidi Grant Halvorson, recently studied the science of success asking – Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? Decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.  As such, in her ebook – “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently” – she identified the following:

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. This gives you a clear idea of what success looks like and helps to keep you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities to work on our goals before they slip through your fingers.  To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible. Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believe you can get the ability to reach your goals is important.  , but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won’t improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Research suggests that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential.

6. Have grit – the willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Again, you can develop your ‘grit ability’.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control “muscle” is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn’t get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you’d honestly rather not do. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur. It is hard in the beginning, but it gets easier. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don’t tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it’s important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don’t try to take on two challenging tasks at once, or over-expose yourself to temptation.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do. Plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., “Don’t think about white bears!”) has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.  If you want to change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead?

So what does this all mean?

To achieve your goals overcome the common mistakes above; build, develop and apply your abilities; and use this knowledge to your advantage from now on.

What has worked for you to help you reach your goals?  Have you tips or ideas of your own that you would like to share?

Share your ideas, insights, and experience – and share the wealth!

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About Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions (“GPS”)

Who Knows You Best?

Andrew Cooke Employee Development, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Management, Performance, Psychology, Uncategorized

Can you tell how good your performance is or how you can improve?  Read on to find out, you might be surprised…

Do you think you can tell?

Those of you who are Pink Floyd fans will immediately recognize the lyrics from the song, “Wish You Were Here”.  The first part of the song, for those of you not familiar with it are below:

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Let’s be honest – yes we can!  The difference between them is immediate and obvious, and we can all do this easily. Here is another question:

“Do you think you can tell who knows you best?”

If I was to ask you that then you would probably see one word – “Me!”  Yet you would be wrong. How you see yourself and how other people see you are only weakly correlated.

The research suggests that other people’s assessment of your personality predicts your behaviour, on average, better than your assessment does. The truth is, we don’t know ourselves nearly as well as we think we do. When it comes to performance, our surprising self-ignorance makes understanding where we went right and where we went wrong difficult, to say the least.

If you want to be more successful — at anything — than you are right now, you need to know yourself and your skills. And when you fall short of your goals, you need to know why. This should be no problem; after all, who knows you better than you do?

Why is this?

The problem is our brain.  Just because its our doesn’t mean we know what it’s doing – most of what happens is below our consciousness awareness, it’s not directly accessible to us at all.  As psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson described it our unconscious mind is like a Cray supercomputer processing everything at high speed, whereas our conscious brain has the power of a Post-It note – unable to handle much and when too much is asked of it, it starts dropping things.  This means when things start going wrong we often have difficulty in understanding why.

When you fail to reach a goal you try to establish why(for example, lack of innate ability, lack of effort, poor preparation, using the wrong strategy, bad luck, etc). Of all of these possible culprits, it’s lack of innate ability we most frequently hold responsible.  As such, innate ability is the go-to explanation for all of our successes and our failures.

Research shows that this is rarely the case – for either succeeding or falling short.  If we need to improve performance we need to know where to place blame.  As we can’t find it ourselves, we need to help to find the right answers.

How do we do this – we focus not on who people are, but what they do.

To find out more, and to read the second part of this article then “Do You Think You Can Tell?” – Part 2 at growthandprofit.wordpress.com

What have been your experiences?  What works for you? Share your ideas and thoughts, and share the wealth!

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Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

3 Factors for Building Resilience

Andrew Cooke Business Agility, Business Growth, Change, Continuous Improvement, Employees, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Management, Managing Cost, Performance, Strategies, Uncategorized

How to assess and develop your organization’s resilience.

Resilience

*by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

Resilience – a word more often abused than used correctly.  Resilience often is used to describe strength.   Although strength is implied in resilience, it is actually not a trait (a distinguishing quality) – rather it is a capability, something that can be used.

There are two definitions for resilience that can be used here:

  • “the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress”
  • “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change”

The Three Factors of Resilience

Resilience relies on three factors:

  1. Flexibility – how flexible is your business in terms of how it works, how it is structured and how it is organized in producing the same outcome result?
  2. Adaptability – how can you apply what you do and how you do it to produce different outcomes or results.
  3. Learning – how good is your business, at an  individual and corporate level, in learning the lessons from having to adapt or be flexible so that you can avoid repeating them (hard , painful lessons) or you can leverage them in the future (where you have had success) and understanding why you were successful or not.3 Factors for Resiliency - Overview

Flexibility Factors

  • Elasticity – can you easily expand or contract the business in whole or part
  • Alternatives – are there many ways in which you can achieve the same result, or are you locked in to one or only a few ways?
  • Interchangeable – how easy can different building blocks (people, assets, processes) be used in a different sequence and/or configuration to produce the same result or outcome?

Adaptability Factors

  • Reusability – can your core people, processes and assets be used to produce different outcomes and results with little or no difficulty?  For example, a consulting firm can reuse many of its existing people, processes and assets in delivering a new service.  However, the Boeing factory production line can only produce Boeing airplanes – it cannot produce other products without significant changes in people, assets and processes.
  • Speed – how quickly can you move from producing one set of products and outcomes, to produce new products and outcomes?
  • Capacity for Change – how prepared and able are your people to make the necessary changes? 

Learning Factors

  • Measuring – how good are you at being able to quantify or qualify the changes that have occurred, their implications and the associated outcomes?  Are you able to identify where the greatest impact, positive or negative, has been realized?
  • Applying  – can you clearly ascertain as to where the lessons learnt can be applied?  Do you understand what caused the problem and how it was solved, or where and how the opportunity was capitalized on?
  • Anticipating – how good are you at being able to replicate or avoid the lessons learnt?  For example, if you are an engineering consultancy who tried to enter a new market unsuccessfully then can you identify why?  Was it the lack of a local partner?  Cultural differences? Inability to deliver?

These 3 factors apply equally to the individual as to the business.  For real success you need resilience both personally and corporately – if you lack the resilience you may not survive the change, even if the business does.

Resilience is not about just meeting the current challenge, or having met the challenge just past, but it is about putting yourself in a better position for the future – not just going back to your original shape or form before the challenge occurred.  To be resilient you need to be flexible, adaptable and to learn from your experiences.

Two out of Three Ain’t Bad – But It’s Not Enough

So what does it mean if you only have two out of three, let’s see below.

  1. Flexibility & Adaptability – you can meet the challenge in the short- or even mid-term, but your inability to learn from your experience and apply will mean that you will be overtaken by the competition and quickly become irrelevant
  2. Adaptability & Learning – you can diversify into other areas, but you are not at the forefront of your market being weak at delivering in alternative ways.  You are at risk of being out-maneuvered by competitors and being a market follower rather than a leader.
  3. Learning & Flexibility – you are efficient at operating in your particular niche, but you are a one-trick pony, and you are at the whim of industry pressures.  You are more reactive than proactive, and your ability to become diverse, grow and spread the risk is weak.

For each of the 3 factors, and for each of the 3 components for each factor, how do you rate yourself?  Score yourself out of 10 for each component (1= Very Low, 10=Very High), and rate how strong or weak you are in each factor and relatively.

Resilience Worksheet

Which are your strongest and weakest areas?  How can you leverage your strengths to offset your weaker areas and reduce the associated risks and implications?  Are you really as resilient as you thought?

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What a Lack of Trust Can Cost You

Andrew Cooke Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, trust

Trust “Taxes”, the Costs of a Lack of Trust

Trust taxes are costs that you incur when there is little or no trust. When trust goes down, speed also goes down and cost goes up.  This is a “tax” – and this tax can double the cost of doing business.

There are 7 types of “trust taxes”:

  1. Redundancy & duplication with smaller spans of control – if there is less trust, then you will find that tighter control develops over smaller areas, and that there is unnecessary duplication of resources to offset the increase in perceived risk.
  2. Bureaucracy – with less trust so procedures and systems become more cumbersome in order to bridge the perceived gap between what is needed and what is available in providing security and consistency in the work done.  In the US there is Nordstrom where its high levels of trust are reflected in its one card operating manual: on one side of the card it says – “We have one rule… – on the other side it says “use your best judgement in all situations“.
  3. Politics – more silos develop and turf wars become more prevalent.  Less trust results in individuals putting their agenda ahead of others and the business overall, it also creates a “fixed mindset” where people see the pie as fixed, so that they only way they can get a larger slice of the pie is at the expense of somebody else e.g. different departments negotiating for budget allocation will compete against each other for it.
  4. Disengagement – a lack of trust reduces staff engagement as they do not believe that their leaders have their interest at heart.  This is reflected in research which shows that 96% of engaged employees trust their leaders, whereas only 46% of employees who are disengaged.
  5. Turnover of Employees – as disengagement increases, so staff perceive roles and jobs elsewhere as more attractive which, previously, they might not have considered.
  6. Churn – low trust also extends to customers and other stakeholders who now see other businesses as more attractive and less risky.
  7. Fraud – with lowering levels of trust there is a lower level of integrity increasing the likelihood of fraud being committed within the company.

If you have a lack of trust, then you are likely to incur some or all of these taxes.  If you have a lack of trust then you need to address this. This is the subject of another blog.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here.

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

How to Focus on What You Can Influence to Get Results

Andrew Cooke Employee Engagement, Employees, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Uncategorized

You have limited time, resources and energy to expend on getting work done, projects completed and achieving the results you are looking for.  As such you need to be able to use these limited and finite resources effectively.  To do this you need to be able to distinguish between what lies within your Circle of Concern and your Circle of Influence as shown in the picture below:

Circle of Concern and Influence

  • The Circle of Concern – this larger circle encompasses  everything that you are concerned about, including those things over which you exert no control or influence e.g. the level of tax, terrorist threats, the current interest rate on loans and mortgages etcetera.  We tend to waste a lot of our time, effort and mental energy in the Circle of Concern.  This produces nothing as we are unable to overcome the inertia or have any effect.
  • The Circle of Influence is smaller, and it encompasses those things that we can do something about.  These are those things where we can be proactive and, by taking action for ourselves, address them. Here we invest our time, energy and effort on the things that we can change.  This produces results and momentum forward.

The two circles – Concern and Influence – are about the choices you make and the results you want.

The Circle of Concern is where you find people who focus on that which they cannot influence. They are reactive, stressed and ineffectual.  The Circle of Influence is where we find people who choose to focus on things that they can influence.

By focusing attention and energy on our circle of influence, people are increasingly proactive. The energy we expend is enlarging; each small victory motivates us further exert influence. We don’t waste energy on things we can do nothing about, but direct it towards what we can change. With each step we feel stronger and more creative. And so our circle of influence expands.

By focusing on what we can influence we also start to understand better what we cannot influence. We develop a better understanding of our circle of concern, and what it includes and does not include – it may even expand our circle of concern. This provides us with a fuller and better appreciation of the context in which we work, and helps us to better focus on our efforts on what we can influence. It can be incredibly liberating to realize that, in choosing how to respond to circumstances, we affect those circumstances. If we want to cope with the challenges we face, then we need to learn how we can influence them.

Share this diagram with your team, colleagues, and clients to help them distinguish between the two, what lies within their Circle of Influence whilst being aware of what lies within their Circle of Concern – and to focus their efforts on what they can influence, not that over which they have no control. This will provide greater traction, reduced stress and a more effective and productive team who can achieve results more easily.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

How Middle-Management is at Risk

Andrew Cooke Business Agility, Business Growth, Employee Development, Employee Engagement, Employees, GPS, Growth, Growth and Profit Solutions, Growth Solutions, Influence, Leadership, Leadership Development, Learning, Management, Management Development, Performance, Productivity, Talent, Uncategorized

Why middle-management is essential for business survival and the risks you run of if you lose or alienate them.

The Challenges of Middle ManagementMiddle management.  Often described as the ‘backbone’ of the company, they provide the continuity across the business and the key people for getting things done; communicating and resolving problems up, down and across the line; translating strategy into action; leading key operational areas; have considerable expertise and experience within the business; providing linkages between senior executives and front-line staff; and are implementing and responding to change.

As such, middle management is crucial to the on-going success and survival of the business.  Senior executives are starting to appreciate their role and the impact of their work, but at a time when it becoming harder to develop and retain middle management.

Middle Management Stress & Turnover

In a recent poll by Lane4 in the UK (July 2012) more than 90% of workers believed that the vast majority of workplace stress was falling on middle management, and two in five (39%) of middle management reported that they were under severe stress.  As such, many mid-level managers are dissatisfied and would like to leave their current organization.   In harder times it is those middle managers who are your best and who perform well who find it easiest to find new roles and new opportunities.

This has several impacts on your business: firstly, the business will lose its top middle management talent, this will put an increase burden on those who are left behind; secondly, the exodus of mid-level talent seriously compromises the business’ future  leadership pipeline and its ability to have the right people in the right place to enable the business to grow and develop in the future; and finally those mid-level managers remaining will be the low-performers, who are more likely to be disengaged and who have “quit and stayed”.  All of this means that business’ ability to survive and thrive – especially in challenging times – is seriously compromised.

The Impact of Mid-Management Turnover

One of the current major growth challenges facing CEOs is the lack of key talent to enable them to grow the business.  This is exacerbated with the turnover of good mid-level manager as it compromises the business’ ability to execute the CEO’s strategy and drive results and outcomes.

Furthermore, the costs of middle management turnover are also high.  A common rule of thumb is to assess the cost of a middle manager to the bottom-line at one-and-a-half to two times their annual salary.  Assuming an average salary of $125,000 then this could mean $250,000 off your bottom line.  Alternatively, look at it in terms of the extra revenue you need to achieve just to stand still – assuming your net profit is 10%, then that is a further $2.5m of revenue required!

Practically, I think this heuristic is conservative.  Once you take into account the corporate knowledge, experience, expertise and insights that have been developed over a number of years you are looking at the loss of a very valuable contributor.  Furthermore, to recruit someone who is an equivalent is both difficult and expensive to do.

Causes of Mid-Management Stress

Middle management is under increasing stress for a number of reasons.  They are the people who have to lay off staff when the company downsizes (or more cynically “right-sizes”), in an environment of poor morale, having to do more with less, with little or no increase in salary or benefits whilst being responsible for more, a reduced opportunity for career progression, dealing with people who like them are worried and scared, and frequently being seen as an “unwanted layer” and at a high risk of being laid off themselves (often having had to lay off others first).

So what do we do?

Dealing with the Problem

In challenging times we need to maintain our middle management.  In economies which are struggling the senior executives need to work with and engage with their middle management even more closely.  It is at the mid-levels that the most important projects are, and reducing their resourcing is nigh on suicidal.  If the level of responsibility for middle management is extended, and their capacity and resources is limited or reduced, then you need to invest in their developing the necessary capabilities.  If this is not done then senior management will be faced with a “frozen” middle management compounded by cycles of low morale and low engagement.

Companies need to be resilient – leaders need to provide clear direction, they need engage the middle management and rebuild trust, and in doing so enable them to engage with their reports and teams in turn.  If you cut out the middle, then you are just left with the head and tail of the business – unable to do the necessary work effectively, and a corpse all but in name.

It may seem counter-intuitive but now is the time to invest in your middle management – this will pay off in terms of loyalty, results and longer-term growth.  Treat your key people as an investment, not a cost to be cut but people to be valued, developed and through whom you can achieve leverage and significant returns.

So what are you going to do?

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How Trust Drives Results

Andrew Cooke Business Agility, Business Growth, GPS, Growth and Profit Solutions, Performance, Productivity, Profit, Revenue, Survey, Uncategorized

What do high-performing organizations focus on as opposed from low-performing organizations, and what differentiates how they do it?

Businesses are under pressure, there is no doubt about that – but what are businesses focusing on and why in these difficult times?  A recent report from Interaction Associates (Building Trust in 2012) found the top 3 priorities for business to be:

  1. Top line/revenue growth
  2. Profit growth
  3. Improvements to Productivity and Efficiency

No surprise here – but what is interesting is the way in which high performing organizations (those whose net profit grew more than 5% over the last year) and low-performing organizations (those under 5% over the last year or shrank) approached this.

High performing organizations focused on achieving this by focusing on the people aspects of the business, these include:

  • Customer loyalty and retention
  • Attraction, deployment, and development of talent
  • Business agility (speed, flexibility, adaptability to change)

Low-performing organizations focused on:

  • Improvements to productivity & efficiency
  • Cost reduction/becoming more efficient
  • Business agility (speed, flexibility, adaptability to change)

The focus here is more on the systems and processes to drive results and create agility, rather than having the right customers and right people to drive both revenue and profit growth (as with high performers).

So what does this mean?  Greater growth and profitability is driven by people. Systems, process improvements, and cost reductions can contribute towards growth – the only problem is that there is only so many times that you can cut the lawn before it starts to die off.  Conversely, focusing your attention on business and resources on the right customers and talent, rather than squandering it in a shotgun approach, enables you to grow the business with no limit on the upside.  For this, you need to inspire trust.

The key question then is this: are you trustworthy?  More to the point do your customers and staff think you are trustworthy?  What do you think you are – honestly?  And how would you assess how trustworthy you are? Share your thoughts here.

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How to Bait Your Hook

Andrew Cooke Efficiency, Employee Development, Employee Engagement, Employees, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Management, New Managers, Perception, Performance, Productivity, Profit, Survey, Uncategorized

What do good anglers know which we can use in driving stronger business growth and results?

Fishing is one of the most popular leisure time pursuits in the world.  There is something about going out there, rod in hand, to capture that ever elusive fish.  This takes time, patience, skill and – let’s be honest – a bit of luck.

One thing that experienced anglers do is that they don’t waste time in an unproductive location.  You can try a few casts, change the bait, but if the fish are not biting then it is time to move on to a new spot.

We need to be like good anglers – if the fish do not bite quickly, then be prepared to move on and try elsewhere.  You might try for the same fish in another location, or using different bait or lures, or even go after another type of fish.  You want to be in a market where you will get a positive reaction as early as possible.

Doing this will save you time, money and embarrassment – it will also allow you to learn from the experience, and to apply it in future fishing spots.  What we do or how good we think something is not important.  There is only one judge out there and that is the market, and the market only cares if what you’ve done meets its needs.

The lesson here is that business is not about us, it is about our customers.  The question I like to ask to illustrate is this: “Why do people buy a quarter-inch drill?”

I get a lot of answers – to hang a picture, for home improvements, to replace my old hand-drill etcetera.  They are all wrong.

The answer is simple: “To drill a quarter-inch hole!”

Customers are not interested in the features of the drill – such as its colour, whether it is turbo-charged, the special safety grip it has etcetera – they are only interested in the outcome from using it.

So if your product or service is not getting traction or garnering the sales you want then you need to do three things:

  1. Check that your product or service provides the outcomes that the customers/market need (have your hook properly baited);
  2. Be prepared to change fishing holes if the fish aren’t biting
  3. Continually learn from your experience so that you can:
  • produce a product/service that better meets the needs of the market (don’t confuse this with a better product which has more features but still fails to address the needs) and;
  • find and locate better fishing holes more quickly.

What do you do to find the right fishing holes?  How long do you wait before you move to a different location?  Are you really focused on delivering the outcomes a customer needs or delivering the product or service itself?

Share your ideas, insights and experience!  Share the knowledge, share the wealth!

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Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Creating KPIs that drive engagement & performance

Andrew Cooke Continuous Improvement, Efficiency, GPS, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Performance, Productivity

How to create KPIs that drive engagement and performance

Setting KPIs

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. 

Although this is true many companies don’t know what to measure or, if they do, they don’t know how to establish KPIs.

Why is this so important?

KPIs drive behaviour – if you know you are being evaluated against certain metrics then you will adapt how you work and how you perform.  This sounds good, but it can also be highly counter-productive, especially if you don’t know what to measure or measure the wrong thin. The result: bad management, mixed messages, confusion and employees focusing on the wrong thing.

You need to establish and develop your KPIs with care. Have too few and you may have an unbalanced “portfolio” of KPIs, have too many and it becomes a case of “everything is a priority, nothing is a priority”.

KPIs vary for different areas and different roles – but they are all underpinned by one factor: the company’s strategy and operations.  As such your KPIs are the indicator of where the company is headed. But it is also the one area that many companies mismanage as they are not thinking about how a KPI is helping the company to meet its targets.

Goals are not KPIs

A common mistake is to confuse KPIs with goals. The two are not the same.

For example, a company wants to achieve a $100 million of sales – this is often assumed to be the KPI when it is not.  In this example the KPIs there should be about the sales process. The KPIs might be about how many new customers, how many customers visited gave a repeat visitation, how many of those visits ended up in a presentation and how many of those were closed as deals. The KPI has to measure the process. You want the KPI linked to the corporate goal but it is not the goal itself.

When looking at the process you are measuring make sure that the KPIs relate to the corporate goals.  For example, having a KPI of sales reports in time does not drive sales – it only supports the process.  Furthermore every industry has formal KPIs (often found in the job description) and informal KPIs that are not written down. Like incongruent KPIs pulling in different directions, they can leave employees confused and disenchanted.

KPI is about Performance, Not People

KPIs are not about measuring people, they are about the process.  The KPIs are there to measure the performance of the organisation and KPIs are tools that people can use so that they can work not just in the business but also on the business, in other words improve the way the business works and improve its performance. They track the strategically important goals and objectives of the business.

Developing KPIs

It is absolutely critical for managers to develop the KPIs in consultation with the employee.  Developing them in isolation and imposing them on high creates, at best, a lack of buy-in and at worst total disengagement.  People want to succeed, and they want to be involved in how they succeed.

When discussing this you need to talk about three things:

  • What the person is employed for, and
  • What is going to give them satisfaction that will ensure they stay loyal and motivated; and
  • How this relates to the company’s main goals

Once there is a shared and common understanding you need to discuss the KPIs that are most effective and relevant to the processes that affect how they work and perform.  This is not to say that each individual has their own unique set of KPIs, rather that there is an agreed and understood portfolio of KPIs that complement and reinforce each other, whilst aligning the individual and team(s).

Monitoring KPIs

KPIs need constant monitoring to have relevance.  If they are measured, for example, only on a quarterly basis then it becomes like an exam.  It is viewed as being extraneous their job, rather than intrinsic. This creates a feeling of irrelevance, a lack of commitment to the KPIs and people having to be forced to comply – creating ineffective KPIs and reduced performance.

So what have you done and what are you going to do with your KPIs?  Talk to your people. Be clear on your goals, understand the key processes to be measured, and make the KPIs relevant, meaningful, measurable and review.

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9 Ways to Accelerate Customer Loyalty

Andrew Cooke Coaching, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Leadership Development, Management, Management Development

9 questions to ask to help you keep clients loyal – now and in the future.

 

Customer LoyaltyLast week we looked at the difference between client satisfaction and client loyalty, and the mistake commonly made by leaders in the belief that client satisfaction and client loyalty are positively correlated i.e. that higher the level of client satisfaction the higher the level of client loyalty.

Research has shown that the more value you deliver, the more satisfied your clients will be. The more satisfied they are, the more likely they will be to stay loyal to your firm and refer other clients to you.  There is good logic here, but it makes an assumption which is often not explicit or valid in most instances.

Have you ever had a client for whom you have delivered value, for which they are highly satisfied – and who have then awarded a deal to someone else for any reason?  Most people have had this experience.  We have found that there is a disconnect between our delivering value and our realising client loyalty.

The fault is ours, not theirs.

If we are to keep our clients’ loyalty we need to focus on our clients’ perception of your value and our clients’ perception of your differentiation.  The flawed assumption that is often made is that we look at the value delivered, and how we differentiate ourselves, from our perspective not that of the client.

If you want to keep your clients loyal, you need the answers to nine questions—some of which are focused on the clients’ perception of your value, and others on the clients’ perception of your differentiation.

Five Questions for Valuevalue men

Question #1: What value do clients perceive regarding our general category of company and services?

Perhaps your clients value that you are a diversified marketing company, not just a website firm. Or, that you are a specialist in XYZ, not a generalist. Perhaps they value that you are a family business versus a corporation. How clients perceive your type and category of company will resonate with many buyers.

Question #2: What is the value clients perceive regarding us as a firm?

You might find that clients value your innovation and don’t care as much that you’re periodically unresponsive. Or, that they value your client service excellence, but your technical reputation doesn’t matter quite as much. Maybe there are areas they don’t value or where you are falling down in your delivery.  Clients are not interested in what you do, rather they are interested in the value that you can help them realise.  Be clear on what value they see from your business, and where this value is created, and when, and for how long it lasts.

Question #3: What value do clients perceive regarding the specific services we offer?

This allows you to know what’s working for clients, which services you offer that are the strongest, and where you deliver the best value.

You might also learn that your clients don’t even know you offer particular services. Familiarity, in this case, breeds contempt – one side assuming the other knows, and the other not knowing because they’ve never been told.

Question #4: What value do clients perceive in solving the specific problems they currently have?

We all have problems, but not all problems are created equally. If you know the key priorities for a client, then you can help the client tackle them.  Don’t assume that the client always knows what the problem is – by framing the problem appropriately you can help them to see problems clearly, or to see problems that they never realised they had, or that they had failed to anticipate.  This can be exceptionally valuable to a client.

Question #5: What value do clients perceive they might get if they could solve certain problems or accomplish certain things that they aren’t focusing on right now or might not see as priorities?

In doing this we help clients to create a better future or one that they may not have even known was possible. By helping clients solve problems they didn’t know they could solve, and making improvements they didn’t know they could make, service providers score higher on satisfaction (that, as we mentioned, is an indicator of future loyalty).

differentiationFour Questions on Differentiation

Question #6: What different options do the clients perceive they have regarding different categories of companies that can help solve problems or achieve goals?

Sometimes it doesn’t matter as much which specific companies your client might view as what the other options are that they might be considering.  As such you need to know the types and categories of companies offering services in your region. For example, as a management training company, with a core set of services in classroom training, you need to know if your buyers are considering e‐learning providers—and how to position yourself against them

Question #7: What different options do clients perceive they have regarding specific companies that can help them solve problems?

You need to know your distinctions, advantages, and disadvantages when compared with them. This is from the client’s perspective – not yours.

Question #8: What different options do clients perceive they have regarding specific services available to help them solve problems?

How do clients perceive they can solve their problems?  Can you create options around what they need, rather than what you, to help them think about how they could use you – rather than should they use you!

Question #9: What different options do clients perceive they have regarding other ways to solve problems, such as internal staff?

Competitors are not always the biggest source of competition.  Competition also comes from the option of the client doing it themselves, not doing it at all, changing the scope and extent of the project, or giving preference (and thus some or the entire allocated budget) to other internally competing projects and priorities.

Next Steps

Go through these questions with your clients.  Get it from the horse’s mouth.  Compare this with how you see it, where are the biggest gaps, and which areas are the priority for addressing.

Thanks to Mike Schultz of Wellesley Hills Group whose work provided the basis for much of this article.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.