Be Different or be dead

March 12, 2018

5 tested things to do when you feel a job change is looming

Before you do anything, stop and pause…

Examine the reasons behind why you want a move.

What’s driving the need you have to move on?
— a boss that’s making everyday a crummy day for you?
— a bad recent experience on a project that’s left you questioning your future in the organization?
— the sudden realization that there is no fit between your personal needs and the organization’s value system?
— your conclusion that the future opportunities from your current employer are limited and your long term career plan is in jeopardy if you stay?

Whatever the reason, it’s critical to get your thinking straight on why you want to change before you jump.

You should take action if moving out the only way to achieve your long term goals.

Once you go you’re gone and the likelihood of returning is slim to none.

At one point in my career I was demoted from the executive leadership team due to a company merger and I felt intense pressure by many people around me (including family) to leave the company because of the way the new leadership treated me.

Even though I was emotionally driven to leave this organization that didn’t recognize my worth, I decided to stay because I felt that, notwithstanding the short term hit I received by being demoted, in the the long run hanging in would present opportunities to regain my position in the hierarchy and continue my rewarding career.

It was the right call; it paid off.

I didn’t particular enjoy being removed from the executive leadership team and told to report to an individual who previously was my peer. But within a year of hard work and keeping my head down, I was appointed to the position of president of our exciting data and internet business and rejoined the executive leadership team.

Looking back, the easy thing would have been to pack it all in; to escape the emotionally ego draining experience I was buried in.

But, fortunately, I gave the matter considerable thought because it was a huge decision I had to make; I couldn’t afford to react to my plight and make a quick decision.

Be thoughtful when thinking about making a job change; do it for the right reasons.

Once you’ve decided to go, create a moving-on action plan

Define the things you need to do to not only get you out of your current situation but also leave with your currency strong and your head high.

Burning bridges when you leave a job is not in your long term interests; it’s dumb. Leave on the winds of elegance.

Your moving-on plan should include these 5 elements.

Dust off your career game plan and revise it based on your current circumstances

Look specifically at the organizations you are interested in and wish to target, the position you would like to get and the foxes you should connect with to help you.

Always consider your career plan a work in progress;  constantly update it because you never know when you might have to revisit it to make a move.

Revise your resume to reflect any changes you made to your career game plan

As your career game plan changes, your must your CV change to reflect the latest conditions. And keep morphing it to try and make it different from the thousands of résumés out there that all look the same. The way your career story will be noticed by prospective employers is to make it unique and have it standout from others in some meaningful way.

Meet with each of the top 5 in your personal network

Start the conversation on what opportunities exist in other organizations and get their views on how you should move forward.
Actually, engaging with your network should be an ongoing priority even when you are not looking to move — be in a constant job hunting mode; it will prepare you if and when you decide to pursue other opportunities.

Contact close colleagues in your present organization and explain why you are intending to leave

This includes bosses that you have had that you respect. It is extremely important that you leave with strong currency and personal integrity, as you never know when you might need their support in the future. NEVER close the door on the possibility of returning to the organization at some point.

Thank the people in your current organization who supported you and ask if there is anything you can do for them

A little recognition for the people who helped you out goes a long way. They will often give you valuable advice and will recommend you to people in their network.
When you decide to close the pages on the current chapter of your career, make sure your champions and allies know they each played an important and valuable role in your life.

The decision to leave your present job is one thing, but doing it in the right way is another.

Don’t fall victim to a knee-jerk reaction and an emotional exit.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.12.18 at 04:15 am by Roy Osing
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March 5, 2018

How a smart frontline can make your business successful

Source: Unsplash

How a smart frontline can make your business successful.

Every organization is looking for the ingredient that will give them a competitive advantage; make them stand out among their competitors.

In my experience most organizations turn to what the prevailing strategy development theory says which often promulgates these types of ways to outpace ‘the bad guys’:

- introduce a disruptive technology
- achieve cost leadership
- lead in product or service quality
- differentiate products or services
- form an alliance with another company
- leadership in new product development
- expand markets
- offer low prices
- achieve economies of scale and scope
- focus on a product or market sector

These are all valid ways of looking at competitive advantage, but beating the competition in the long term isn’t about the brilliance of a strategy, and it’s not about whether or not a strategic plan conforms to strategic planning methodology as espoused by the experts.

Competitive advantage is derived largely from not from what you aspire to achieve, but how you actually achieve it in the real world where organizations are challenged by unpredictability, uncertainty and constantly changing conditions.
If, for example, your strategic intent is to outdo the competition by providing excellent service quality, your success will be determined by how you execute on this goal.

Actions such as providing customer-friendly rules and policies, recruiting people who have an innate desire to serve others, empowering employees to make decisions in favour of a customer and compensating teams on the level of customer service provided will enable the service quality goal to be achieved.

And notwithstanding the rise of the online world, the common element to achieving most of these actions is people.
Successful strategies typically get executed on the frontline at ‘the coal face’ between the customer and the organization — the territory normally occupied by employees in sales, banking, coffee bistros, call centers, repair service centers, retail outlets and on reception desks.

These are the people who control every moment of the customer experience.

How well do you think we would have survived the COVID-19 pandemic without frontline people in all types of roles: food preparation, hospital workers of all types, care givers, nurses, first responders, food delivery folks, and product pickers fulfilling online orders to mention just a few?

Blood flows in any organization for one reason and one reason only: the frontline.

Frontline people live your brand. They invest their emotional energy to keep customers loyal.

It’s one thing to send prospective customers to your website to learn about new products and buy them; but it’s quite another to make the engagement process so enjoyable and painless that the new product flows off the shelf and continues to provide value to the customer over the life of their purchase.

The frontline fills a critical void — Organizations are morphing to an operations topology devoid of humans.
Online research, purchase, chat and warranty claim tasks are more and more being performed by the customer themselves. And new self checkout technologies are being tested to further remove people from the cost equation and provide consumers more speed and convenience of DIY.

But even in the face of a migration to DIY, successful organizations keep a strong people element in their sales and service operations to simply be there to help a customer when they don’t get satisfaction from a technology face.

Let’s face it, precise and accurate algorithms for every customer need can’t be formulated so if a backup person isn’t there to deal with hiccups and follow up questions, the customer is not only upset, they leave telling their friends and family how crummy your service is.

The focus and attention always seems to be on the brilliance and cleverness of the grand plan and the importance of execution is given second shrift and is taken for granted.

In fact most organizations assume that the people will naturally understand what needs to be done (rarely happens without the leader’s translation of what it means to various functions) and employees will willingly devote themselves to executing it effectively (never happens without leadership convincing them of its importance and supporting them to get it done).

Keep the frontline well informed — The frontline of any organization is the key to a successful strategy and yet they are often not equipped with the information they need to handle customer questions like: ‘Why don’t you add this type of draft beer?’ or ‘Why did you take spaghetti and meat balls off the menu?’ Or ‘Why do I have to wait so long to get a customer service representative on the phone?’

Leadership, for whatever reason, generally chooses not to share the details on matters such as product line selection, pricing rationale, credit rules and customer service policies with customer contact employees.

My experience is that the frontline is rarely viewed as a critical element of strategy and that is shortsightedness on the part of leadership.

They think either that the frontline doesn’t need to know the details or that they can figure it out themselves.

I once asked a teller at a credit union why I should do business with them and not a bank. She was startled with my question and said “Because we share our profits with our members, and banks don’t” — not a compelling answer.

The truth is it wasn’t her fault; she wasn’t given the appropriate answer by the leadership who should be supporting her efforts. And so she was left to improvise and invent the answer herself.
Leaders need to be more actively engaged in promoting the importance of frontline employees, and keeping them informed should be a priority; here are four actions to make it happen.

When frontline people don’t have the information to answer a customer‘s question, they feel like idiots.

Promote the frontline’s importance — Elevate frontline employees to the top of the need-to-know funnel. Effective customer engagement creates loyal customers and long term profitability so why would you not want to equip frontline employees with every tool they need to deliver incredible moments?
And communicate what you are doing throughout the organization so everyone knows the cultural change being made.
Beats me why they seem to take the back seat to other groups when it comes to getting the information they need to talk to customers.

Determine their information needs — Ask frontline people (strike a frontline panel to help) what the top 10 questions customers ask them for which they have no answers.
And take their questions verbatim. Don’t allow their bosses to translate them into what they really mean, because all this does is distort the frontlines’ own words.
Feed the questions back to the panel and ask for sign off before providing answers.

Modify the management performance evaluation plan — Rate managers’ performance in part on how effective they are at providing the frontline with the information they need. Ask the frontline to rate managers; they will provide honest input.

As president of the data and internet company, I implemented an internal report card process that had customer service reps rate my management team on their ability to equip them with the info they needed to serve their customers.

The first report card rated managers poorly; improvements in subsequent rounds were seen as action plans were implemented to address the shortfalls.

Engage the frontline in systems design — Who better to determine what information systems look like than the people who use them? Unfortunately this is rarely done.
Yes, we stipulate that systems designers determine the requirements of all stakeholder groups, but the frontline teams are not given top priority.

Frontline supervisors are asked along with managers in finance, inventory control, marketing and business development but frontline employees — those actually engaging with customers — generally aren’t given the chance to input directly to what the system should look like.

To deal with this issue, I created cross functional teams of frontline people who had the final say on how information systems that affected the customer contact process should be designed. And they were given top priority stakeholder status; others came after the needs of customer engagement were recognized.

This action did two things: first, it demonstrated to the rest of the organization that frontline needs were the top priority to support our customer experience strategic game plan and second, it showed frontline people themselves that their needs were paramount.

Frontline people are key to delivering an organization’s strategy, but leaders have a responsibility to ensure that well informed frontline employees is essential.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.5.18 at 03:07 am by Roy Osing
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February 26, 2018

How a good marketing leader can become really great

Source: Unsplash - Bealach na bà

How a good marketing leader becomes great.

Marketing’s role in any organization is critical; its leaders must be extraordinary.

Unfortunately, I don’t think marketing generally has stepped up to the challenge of doing remarkable things; in fact I think the craft is currently quite boring and unimaginative.
I offer this perspective as a guy who spent at least 80% of his 33+ year career leading marketing organizations and fulfilling the role of CMO.

Sure, the internet has spawned a plethora of new tools to engage with and sell to people, but the essence of the marketing strategy employed by most organizations hasn’t changed much. There is still a relentless focus on price, mass advertising, product and service flogging and applying traditional marketing tools introduced years ago and pushed by academics and consultants alike.

Marketing leaders must take responsibility for this state of affairs; for the apathy they have accepted from their marketing teams. They must be held accountable to move the marketing discipline from an approach that was practiced in the past, and is now underperforming given the dramatic changes that have occurred in the market.

They must take responsibility to personally lead their teams to a new relevant place, and not accept the inertia caused by their junior teams of marketing
practitioners who have been taught principles of the past.

If marketing leaders accept how their team performs its role, they can’t be surprised when lacklustre results are produced.

Parochial leaders get mediocrity.

Organizations need marketing leaders to take control; people who will not stop until their team produces unheard-of results by practising the new relevant art.

Here are eight actions marketing leaders can take if they want to stand-out and turn their marketing teams into achievers of remarkability.

1. Set short-term revenue goals

Focus on the next 24 months rather than be a victim of the 5-year plan. This shorter term view will force an execution and results focus and avoid the “hockey stick” phenomenon where sales are supposed to miraculously show up at the end of the planning period.
Set revenue targets monthly and review performance to ensure you are on track.

2. Make revenue targets bold enough that you don’t know exactly how to achieve them

Discomfort and ‘I don’t know’ is an effective way to drive innovation and creativity. If you know how to deliver your expected revenue, there is little or no incentive to do different things.
If you follow yesterday’s path, nothing remarkable happens.

3. Eliminate benchmarking as a tool for marketers to use

Copying won’t step your organization up to a higher level; it simply keeps you in the competitive herd. Ask, “How can we be different?”. Apply this question to every proposal you review. 
If a proposal from one of your marketers doesn’t move your organization towards standing out from your competitors to being a ‘different breed’, reject the proposal out-of-hand. And fire any marketer who makes the same mistake twice.

4. Stop new customer acquisition programs

Insist on seeing proposals that generate more revenue from your existing customer base as opposed to providing special deals or promotions to prospective customers who you want to attract from your competition. The truth is that customers who join you from the competition can’t be counted on for any loyalty or added revenue over the long term.

Offer any special promotions or deals to your existing customers first; reward their loyalty.

5. De-emphasize price and establish value creation as your raison d’être

Ask what value is being created for your loyal customers, not, “How can we lower our prices?”. Everyone plays the price game and it leads not to competitive advantage but rather financial ruin.

Declare the marketing rule “There will be NO price incentives offered around here!” as the way to disrupt the momentum of using boring prices as a marketing tool.
And replace the product manager position with the product value position and reward those who are prolific at creating value solutions.

6. Recruit weird people

Marketing success today is all about finding what small specialty groups desire or want (satisfying what they need is passé) and proving them with unmatched value.

Start to populate your marketing teams with these types of people who can relate better to these curious customer segments. Look for contrarians. People who have bizarre ideas and question the common ways of doing things. People who hate fitting in.

You need a team of weirdos to carry your mandate breakaway from traditional marketing ways.

7. Expand your marketing team to include the frontline

The new marketing excellence is produced by understanding the deep innermost secrets of people you want to serve. The customer-facing frontline in any organization is THE most effective receptacle for customer learning; what customer’s desire. Recruit these people even if they don’t meet your “minimum education standards” — which are largely irrelevant in most cases anyways.

Get their ideas and implement them. And tell the rest of the organization what you are up to; hopefully they also will recognize the value of the human face to the customer.

8. Develop a competitive claim that is more than just hot air

The new marketing leader is not guided by aspiration. They are practical people who covet granularity, clarity and precision when it comes to defining why people should buy from their organization and none other.

Be clear and specific that the value you deliver to your customers is distinct from your competition. Create The ONLY Statement for your business.

They focus their attention on answering the killer question, “Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?” and purge comparative notions like best, number one and leader as ways of describing their market value proposition.

Marketing leaders must step up their game and take personal ownership of the changes needed to stay relevant and survive. Their organizations depend on it.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.26.18 at 04:18 am by Roy Osing
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February 19, 2018

How the best leaders inspire great teams that work together

Source: Pexels

How the best leaders inspire great teams that work together.

How the best leaders get people working well together.

A colleague of mine, Ron Cox, Founder and CEO of Tailwind Consulting in Tampa Florida says that “a staggering 95% of employees in a company are either unaware of or do not understand the strategy”.

No wonder execution fails!

One of the biggest issues in any organization is the lack of congruence between what the strategy says and what people do on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy says one thing and not only do people do another, they do different things out of sync with the strategy.
Massive inconsistency and dysfunction results.

This is a failure of leadership.

Leadership tends to place more focus on direction-setting rather than on determining how the strategy will be executed.
Precision is applied to ‘getting the strategy right’ and not how it will be implemented in the trenches where the real work gets done.

The gap between strategic intent and actual results is due to this skewed attention.
If only 20% of leadership’s attention is placed on the details of how the strategy will be implemented, the strategy will likely be hit and miss as employees find it necessary to execute the plan the way THEY believe it should.

Effective business plan execution occurs when there is clarity between the functional roles that employees play in the organization and its strategy.

It is about translating the strategy into what it means to each function involved in delivering it. What specifically should the call center rep do differently? The product analyst? The sales person? The internal audit manager?

If at the most granular level each employee in the firm doesn’t know how to behave and what results to produce within the context of the new direction change will simply not happen and improved results expected by the new strategic game plan won’t be achieved.

Line of sight

Line of sight to the strategy means what it implies; each employee can “see” the strategy from their position and they understand what they specifically need to do to contribute to the strategy.

If direct line of sight is defined for every role, flawless execution results whereas indirect line of sight results in people having a clouded understanding of what action the strategy demands.

Most leaders absolve themselves of ensuring activity and strategy are aligned. It generally gets relegated to functional heads to sort out by declaring their priorities that THEY contend are homeomorphic with strategic imperatives.

The problem with this process is that subjectivity is introduced at a very high level in the organization and is magnified again and again as teams are asked to do the same thing through middle and junior management levels.

And the tipping point, of course, is that leadership doesn’t approve detailed functional plans which would at least show whether they were bordering on out-of-alignment or not.

Any inconsistencies between activity and strategy at the highest level in an organization are multiplied by an order of magnitude factor before it reaches the frontline people.

Under these conditions it’s not difficult to see why strategy and organizational activity diverge and not converge.

What can leadership do about this problem?

First, ease the precision around business plan creation and tighten it up around execution. Get comfortable with getting the plan “just about right” and applying rigour to implementation and adjusting the plan on the run.

Next, take ownership of aligning organizational activity to strategy.

Alignment plans

Institutionalize ‘Alignment Plans’ with functional heads; ask for sufficient granularity to the determination of whether or not a team has direct line of sight to the strategy or not. Make them work at it until they get it right and your leadership team approves.

Alignment Plans submitted to the leader should:

▪️ Define the key elements of the strategy that everyone in the organization must align with.

There are many dimensions to any strategy but it is critical to prioritize and focus on the critical ones. Greater alignment success will occur by focussing on a handful of the critical strategic imperatives rather than trying to ‘herd the cats’ around a dozen.
                         
▪️ Define what needs to change in every functional team with an action plan to achieve it.

If the organization is pursuing a new or revised strategic direction, there will most certainly be projects, company values, people skills and technology that will have to be re-vectored to enable the execution of the new plan. Details of everything that needs to change must be defined in detail.

▪️ Identify activities, projects and behaviours that have to be dropped in order to take on new activities required for alignment.

Leadership is just as much about what has to be stopped as it is about what has to be started.

If out-of-alignment activity is not stopped, additional unnecessary resources will be most certainly requested. All non-strategic activity must be isolated and resources removed and redeployed to new challenges that must be undertaken.

Personal initiative

If you’re an employee in an organization that chooses not to impose a process to explicitly align activity to their strategy, take personal initiative to align your own work priorities to what the organization wants to achieve.

Successful careers are built on the backs of the organization’s strategy and those that execute more effectively than others are quicker to reach their personal goals.

These personal actions will propel you forward.

#1. Translation

Help others translate what the strategy means to them in the organization.

Once you have determined your own line of sight, help others through the same process.

Everyone needs to understand the new things they will have to do and the CRAP they will have to dispose of. Unless this translation for all employees is done, the organization will be frozen in momentum management and no progress in the new direction will be achieved.

Get involved in organizing and leading workshops with various departments in the company and explore a new blueprint for each that represents the new course for them to follow. 

The role of translating the new strategy for various employee groups is one that rarely gets performed. It’s a difficult task as it requires an intimate level of understanding of the strategy.
You can’t drill a strategy down into individual action if you don’t truly understand it at a detailed level.

If you’re a leader, you must dedicate much more of your time seeing that people treat this as a priority and hold them accountable.
Wander through the workplace asking people to clarify the top three things they are going to do to help deliver the new strategy and what dozen-or-so things they are going to give up.

And get the expectations hard wired into the performance planning process. It is the difference between an effective one where everyone is working in parallel to support a common purpose, and a dysfunctional one where people are working at odds with one another to deliver some things that are on strategy and other things that are not.

Synchronized outcomes release the power of execution - and competitive advantage; inconsistent outcomes zap the energy of the organization, encumber execution and impair competitive success.

#2. Set your calendar

Let the organization’s strategy guide your daily calendar. The ultimate manifestation of direct line of sight is a calendar composed only of activities relating to the outcomes you have deemed necessary for you to deliver the new strategy.

If you can’t strategically relate a particular activity you plan to do on a given day, question why it is occupying your time.

Zero base your calendar and build it through the weeks and months ahead in the image of your strategy.
If you are in a leadership position, ask to see the calendars of those reporting to you. Is each of them doing the things required of the new direction or are they continuing on as custodians of the past?

#3. Communicate the strategy personally

Communicate face to face with others in your organization as the most effective way of injecting the emotional component necessary to get people to believe and act.
E-mail blasts to a broad distribution list, employee newsletters and other mass means of communication don’t work as effectively. Use technology like ZOOM if physical distancing is a challenge.

These mass communications vehicles preclude the ability for people to engage in a conversation to enhance their understanding of where the organization is going.

You need to press the flesh even if it’s virtual, and make it matter by showing up in person, explaining the strategy and answering the tough questions.

In non-pandemic times, I used ‘Infonet sessions’ as well as the bear pit to communicate the company’s strategy to all employees.

They required high levels of energy and were extremely time consuming, but what else could be more important?
People in the organization need to understand where it is going and they have a right to challenge it if they are not convinced it is appropriate. You can’t capture their hearts and minds if you’re a ‘no show’.

#4. Use the strategy as the context for solving problems

When confronted by a business problem or issue, always assess it and talk about it with others from the perspective of your strategy.
Create the strategic context for the discussion and then assess your options. What does your strategy suggest is the appropriate action to take?

It’s an effective way to increase understanding and awareness of your strategy and establish you as a leader and the strategy hawk for your organization.

People suddenly forget that they have set a new course in motion for the organization and they look for solutions to problems in the old strategic context.

The opposite is also true; people often don’t relate the visible changes being made in their organization to the new strategic direction that has been put in motion. They don’t get that the cause of the changes they are witnessing is the new strategy.

Assume the role of connecting the dots for people in your organization. Reinforce that the changes that everyone is seeing are the result of your new strategy.

Line of sight leadership is necessary to build teamwork and commitment to the organization’s strategic intent. Take a personal role is making it an essential ingredient in your culture.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.19.18 at 04:19 am by Roy Osing
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