Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Help - My Team Always Backburners My Priorities!

When you work on a team that must collaborate on competing priorities and yours always seem to be the last to get added the “to do” list (or sprint if you’re doing Agile), how do you advocate/influence the team to give your work/tasks priority over their own? Do you just say, “OK guys, it’s been two months and I still haven’t gotten any support from team member X to finish the Acme project. Are you going to have some cycles next week?” What if they say, “Sorry, still working on the Jones project, maybe next month?”

Along with several of my colleagues at the Intuit Fast Track blog, I weighed in on this issue:

"Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not all that surprised that your colleagues aren’t tripping over themselves to prioritize your projects. It sounds like you are approaching them with the attitude “I need you to help me with my projects,” and what exactly is motivating them to do that?

Here’s a hard truth about the business world: other people don’t care what you want or need. Human beings are selfish creatures and want to know what’s in it for them. If you need your colleagues’ assistance, you have to make them want to help you.

How do you do this? First, examine the situation from their point of view and determine their work priorities. What do they have to get done, and how are they being evaluated? Then, in your initial approach, talk about what they want and how your completed project can help them get it.

Since I don’t know what your projects are, I can’t offer you specific wording, but here’s an example from my own career. Once upon a time, my colleague Alan knew that one of my job responsibilities was to find and publish the latest Internet marketing statistics on our team’s blog. He needed my help convincing our supervisor to buy us access to a new monitoring service. While this new service would benefit Alan and his team, he knew it would also benefit me.

Here’s what he said: “Alex, I think this new service would help you research your stats in half the time. If you could mention this to Paula, that would be great.” I had no trouble supporting Alan’s cause because he had made clear that it was going to help me as well. It was a win for Alan because he got his service, a win for me because my research time decreased, and a win for the company because productivity went up!

This approach does take a bit of extra time and consideration, but you’ll more than make up for it by cutting nagging time and more quickly harnessing your colleagues’ cooperation."

For the rest of my colleagues' answers, head over to Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not all that surprised that your colleagues aren’t tripping over themselves to prioritize your projects. It sounds like you are approaching them with the attitude “I need you to help me with my projects,” and what exactly is motivating them to do that?

Here’s a hard truth about the business world: other people don’t care what you want or need. Human beings are selfish creatures and want to know what’s in it for them. If you need your colleagues’ assistance, you have to make them want to help you.

How do you do this? First, examine the situation from their point of view and determine their work priorities. What do they have to get done, and how are they being evaluated? Then, in your initial approach, talk about what they want and how your completed project can help them get it.

Since I don’t know what your projects are, I can’t offer you specific wording, but here’s an example from my own career. Once upon a time, my colleague Alan knew that one of my job responsibilities was to find and publish the latest Internet marketing statistics on our team’s blog. He needed my help convincing our supervisor to buy us access to a new monitoring service. While this new service would benefit Alan and his team, he knew it would also benefit me.

Here’s what he said: “Alex, I think this new service would help you research your stats in half the time. If you could mention this to Paula, that would be great.” I had no trouble supporting Alan’s cause because he had made clear that it was going to help me as well. It was a win for Alan because he got his service, a win for me because my research time decreased, and a win for the company because productivity went up!

This approach does take a bit of extra time and consideration, but you’ll more than make up for it by cutting nagging time and more quickly harnessing your colleagues’ cooperation.

- See more at: http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2014/06/03/my-team-constantly-back-burners-my-priorities/#sthash.HrCUcat7.dpuf

How to Be Useful Instead of Salesy

When I took the Dale Carnegie class many moons ago, I remember the instructor saying that the worst thing a door-to-door salesperson could do is show up at a prospect’s house and launch into a speech like this:

“I want to sell you a new vacuum cleaner. I saw this thing pick up dirt off my floor, and it had the best suction I’ve ever seen. I can give you a great deal on this baby.”

I, I, I. This salesperson would be lucky if she didn’t have the door slammed in her face.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again

Here’s a cardinal rule of human nature: people don’t care what you want, they want to know what’s in it for them. If the salesperson wanted to sell a vacuum cleaner, she had to first find out why the prospect desperately needed one (e.g. he was feeling frustrated and inferior because his home was unkempt, and it was unkempt because he could never get his carpets completely clean). She had to first help him identify a problem. Then and only then could she present a solution (e.g. a vacuum cleaner with more powerful suction).

Bestselling author John Jantsch has long been teaching how to be effective on a shoestring budget, reminding us of common sense that’s uncommonly used. In his new book, Duct Tape Selling, he agrees with one of my favorite mantras that we’re all salespeople. And John suggests that in trying to get people to do anything for you – whether it’s supporting a pet project or buying a vacuum cleaner – you have to be useful.

The pitch transformed

According to John, the traditional sales pitch is no more. Instead, listening carefully is the new prospecting. With so many online tools available, we have no excuse for approaching people with little or no knowledge about them. So if you want something from a colleague, manager, or client, find out where her head is at first. And think through a message that will directly align with that state of mind.

For the rest of John's advice, head over to Intuit's Fast Track blog.

10 Ways to Juice Up Your Job

When it comes to the topic of finding one’s passion, Curt Rosengren is the man with the plan. He’s been blogging on this issue longer than anyone else I know, and here’s what he had to say on Wild About Work:

“Far too often when people’s careers start to get a little stale, they do one of two things. They either go into ‘grit your teeth and suck it up’ mode (after all, work IS a four-letter word, right?), or they do a swan dive out of the frying pan into the fire by making a knee-jerk job change, hoping they can leave that boredom and frustration behind.”

You probably realize by now that I do not advocate the swan dive approach, so I asked Curt for some recommendations for how you can re-energize your work without making any drastic and risky moves.

Take the cumulative view

Understand that the goal isn’t to make one broadly sweeping change that will make everything better. The goal is to juice up your job cumulatively, benefiting from the sum total effect of a lot of smaller changes.

Do an energy audit

Take a look at your job and say: “What gives me energy here? What do I enjoy?” and “What drains my energy here? What do I dislike?” The more detailed your understanding of what’s actually happening, the more potential you have to make choices and changes that will energize your work.

Identify your energizers

What are the underlying themes that tend to be present when you’re happiest at work? Put another way, why do you love what you love? When you feel most in your groove, what is it about what you’re doing that feels so energizing?

Consider some incremental changes

Is there anything that energizes you that you could do more of? Is there anything that drains you that you could do less of? You’re not going to turn a toad into a unicorn, but if you can even improve things by 10 percent, that’s a good start.

Adjust the “how”

Even if the actual content of your work doesn’t change in the slightest, you can re-think how you approach it so that it feels less frustrating and more energizing. A classic example is turning a boring, repetitive task into a game, perhaps seeing how much faster you can get it done from one time to the next, or looking for ways to make it more efficient. Make it a habit to constantly explore the question: “how can I approach this so I enjoy it more?”

Change why you do it

Humans are wired to want to make a difference, so spend some time asking yourself: “Why am I doing this? Who benefits? How?” Focusing on the benefits and positive impact of the work you do can mitigate feeling like an isolated cog.

Change your perspective

In this option, you don’t have to change a thing externally. All you need to do is pull your attention out of the gaping maw of negativity and direct it at the positive. Ask yourself: “What is worthwhile about this job? Why am I lucky to have it?” The more you consciously focus your attention on what’s good, the more good you experience, the more good you notice, and the less time you spend focusing on the unpleasant.

Change your story

Recognize that you experience the world through the lens of your stories – your expectations and assumptions, the meanings you assign things, etc. Changing your story can turn an identical situation into a completely different experience.

Find a vision

Another way to open up space and not feel so compressed and constricted is to put your current situation into a bigger picture context. In the next ten years, what do you want to accomplish in your career? Then, put your current position in the context of that vision. How is it a step in the right direction? What other steps can you take right now to bring your vision to life?

Quality Isn't a Fluff Concept After All

According to a study covered in a recent Harvard Business Review article, companies with highly developed quality cultures spend, on average, $350 million less annually fixing mistakes than companies with poorly developed ones. 

The research, which was commissioned by CEB—an advisory firm of more than 60 multinational companies—revealed that employees who ranked their companies in the top-quintile in terms of quality made 46 percent fewer mistakes in their daily work than employees in bottom-quintile companies. 

The High Price of Everyday Mistakes

In the survey employees reported that it takes about two hours to correct a mistake. Assuming an hourly wage of $42.55 (the median for CEB client companies), a bottom-quintile quality firm with 26,300 employees (the median head count) spends nearly $774 million a year to resolve errors, many of them preventable. Top-quintile firms, on the other hand, spend about $424 million annually.

The report’s authors, CEB directors Ashwin Srinivasan and Bryan Kurey, suggested a broad rule of thumb: For every 5,000 employees, moving from the bottom to the top-quintile would save a company $67 million annually. 

Creating a Culture Around Quality

Given this tremendous financial impact, CEB sought to identify the key attributes of an effective culture of quality. Contrary to popular belief, offering monetary incentives, training and sharing best practices failed to do the job. Rather, it was this constellation of factors that proved to be the most critical:

Walk the talk. It’s one thing for leaders to say that quality is important, but are they really willing to stand up for that viewpoint? In the face of everyday business challenges, will they make the decision for quality performance? If they do, they are much more likely to be successful at embedding quality into the culture.

Create credible messaging that's not one-size-fits-all. Quality means different things to different people, and one size does not fit all. For example, some people are motivated by customer satisfaction, while others are all about the cost savings. The quality message must be delivered by someone employees trust and believe in, so rather than forcing one direction on everyone, top-quintile organizations encourage front-line managers to choose the message for their employees.

Foster peer involvement. The study’s authors report that too much top-down involvement destroys authenticity, but not enough sends the message to employees that the initiative need not be taken seriously. The goal is to balance leadership engagement with peer engagement, prompting employees to develop and execute their own ideas for quality improvements as business circumstances change, and to take collective pride in their individual and departmental accomplishments.

For the rest of my tips, head over to the AMEX Open Forum.

Stamp the Cynicism Out of Your Office Culture

One of my first managers used to say a bad attitude in the workplace is like cholera. Once one person gets it, unfortunately, it spreads like wildfire before taking down the original source. And over the years, I’ve seen one coworker’s negativity significantly affect the culture of an entire team. In another small-business case I heard about recently, in which the CEO himself possessed a bad attitude, the staff became so demoralized that the entire company went under.

As the publisher of Forbes, Rich Karlgaard has seen it all, and he felt that employee cynicism was enough of a problem to write a whole book about it. In The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success, Karlgaard says, “Mocking irony, snark, and cynicism are very much in vogue, but they are also toxic to your company’s culture.”

People view cynicism as less harmful than overt negativity, and that’s part of the problem. “Cynicism trivializes the gravity of bad behavior and normalizes superior attitudes toward customers and, often, coworkers,” Karlgaard says. “But it’s also a red flag that something is awry in your company.”

According to Karlgaard’s work, what’s missing is trust. “Cynicism is the defense mechanism of people who feel unsafe and powerless. It’s an expression of the uncertainty that comes from working in an environment where ethics are lax, employees don’t feel valued, and information is withheld,” he says. 

Indeed, employee trust in companies has declined over the last few decades. The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer study, which surveys the trust and credibility of government and business, reports that in North America, only 43 percent of people trust CEOs. In fact, CEOs are the least trusted spokespeople, sitting only above government officials.  

Karlgaard hypothesizes that efforts to boost employee trust will naturally result in a decrease in cynicism and negativity. How can you build trust within your organization?

Understand that trust is both internal and external. First, there’s the external trust between an organization and its customers. Will a company stand behind its products? If something goes wrong, will it do the right thing? The second dimension is the internal trust between employees, managers and top-level management. Do leaders keep their promises? Can employees speak up without censure? Generally, what’s true externally is also true internally.

Develop a vision of a trusting culture. Hold a company-wide summit at which everyone can share opinions about what a trusting environment looks like. Include an anonymous component like a suggestion box or online survey. Get everyone’s input, from the C-suite to the custodian. Your goal should be to pin down exactly how a culture of trust translates to leader and employee behaviors. Then, come up with a list of rules, such as “I will not badmouth customers to other employees,” put them in writing, and get all your employees to sign the document.

For more tips, please see the rest of the post at the AMEX Open Forum.

 

Honing Your Core Entrepreneurial Skills: Business Acumen

This post is one in a series of tips designed to help small business owners better-navigate the challenges of today’s startup environment and is sponsored by Canon MAXIFY – the printer lineup crafted to help small business owners increase productivity so that they can focus on everything else that matters.

According to the Career Advisory Board’s 2013 Job Preparedness Indicator study, business acumen is one of the most desired but rare leadership in today’s economy.  Having strong business acumen means possessing a clear understanding of the company’s strategy and “ecosystem,” including global trends, macroeconomic shifts, and regulatory changes.  Leaders with strong business acumen can absorb information from a diverse array of sources, imagine future scenarios, and use their good judgment to make sensible decisions.

As an entrepreneur, business acumen is essential because you must be able to see and communicate the big picture, and you must have a working knowledge of all functional areas of your organization – from accounting to public relations.  Successful business owners leverage business acumen to stay on top of the market and outsmart the competition.  They are highly visible and skilled at using that visibility to their advantage.

If you don’t consider business acumen to be one of your strong suits, here are a few suggestions to brush up before launching your business.

Increase Your Financial Literacy

A good first step is to learn about the most important financial documents you will be responsible for as a business owner.  For instance, do you know the components of a balance sheet?  This document is a snapshot of a business’ financial status at a given point in time, detailing assets, liabilities, and equity.  Are you familiar with income statements?  These tell you the earnings and profitability of a business for a specific period of time (quarter, year, etc.).  Can you put together a cash flow statement, which lists the sources and use of cash and provides information about your business’ investing and financing activities? 

Financial literacy will enhance your business acumen because it will allow you to keep tabs on the health of your business and make better, more informed decisions.

Read Business Publications

Keep abreast of current business issues and events via the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Economist.  As you peruse these outlets more frequently, you will start to notice re-occurring trends as well as common economic and business drivers.  You’ll also learn about your industry’s leaders, competitors, customers, processes, and innovations, thus gaining a solid understanding of your business’ place in the world.

By familiarizing yourself with global sources, you will also increase your global competence, an element of business acumen that involves knowing how to do business effectively in different cultures.

Get Cross-Functional Experience

Partner on projects with other parts of your organization and master what they do.  Get mentored by leaders who have skillsets you don’t.  In asking for help, suggest a one-hour, high level information transfer meeting to start.  Ping each person for resources you can use to follow up and gain more in-depth knowledge.  As you learn, engage your mentors in discussions to master how they think about an issue.  While you are picking the brains of the smartest people you know, don’t forget to consider ways you can assist them in return.

Tap Into Training Resources

Whether you are currently working at an established organization or just immersing yourself in the entrepreneurial community, you can sign up for business acumen boosting coursework in the form of in person seminars, conferences, or webinars. The U.S. Small Business Administration, SCORE, and outlets such as Entrepreneur, Inc., and Fast Company, frequently sponsor free events. Many community college courses and online courses from vehicles like Coursera are also relatively inexpensive.

When targeting business acumen specifically, you might review the content taught in top MBA programs and piece together less time-consuming and more impactful ways to learn the same information.

Please stay tuned for the rest of the posts in this series, which will include advice on enhancing your self-discipline, risk-tolerance, and management skills.

Canon will be spotlighting several small business owners on its social media channels throughout the next several months, so be sure to leave a comment and share your thoughts on this post using the hashtag #MAXIFY  in order to qualify. If you are a U.S.-based small business owner (1-9 employees) and have faced a unique business challenge in your first year on the job, let us know! We’d love to hear what line of work your small business falls within and what you feel is the most important takeaway from this post.

We’ll also be rewarding select small business owners with a prize pack including the Canon MAXIFY MB5320 printer as well as other essentials to help you run your business more efficiently. So don’t forget to leave a link to your website or social media pages that way we can see how well you’re marketing your business and get in touch!

Career Lessons from an Unconventional CEO

Fred Cook, the CEO of PR juggernaut GolinHarris, has worked with Jeff Bezos, Michael Eisner, and Steve Jobs. You would expect him to have attended the best schools, gotten the best grades, and racked up marketable skills before he could legally vote. But the best thing about Fred is that none of those things are true.

As he describes in his new book Improvise: Unconventional Career Advice from an Unlikely CEO, Fred got to where he is through a diverse set of experiences that includes pool hustling, selling Italian leather on the streets of Florence, and getting arrested while working as a doorman at a five-star hotel. The career lessons he mastered at each stage of his colorful career became his credentials. Here are some of the highlights.

Lesson #1:  Learn to Play Pool

As a pool hustler, Fred spent most of his time huddled around Brunswick pool tables arranged geometrically on ornate floral carpeting speckled with 50,000 cigarette burns. To prove his prowess, he wielded a 19-ounce, inlayed Willie Hoppe pool cue that his parents gave him as a bribe for completing confirmation class. He learned to think of his life experiences as balls on a pool table. If there are only two, your shot options are limited. But when you have fifteen, the combinations are endless. Fred now works in a business of ideas, and he finds that his pool hustling career allows him to generate more than most people. It’s not that he’s smarter or more creative – he simply has more options to play with.

Lesson #2: Hang Out with Bums

At the Arc Lanes bowling alley, Fred was mentored by dropouts and derelicts with names like Red Dog, Baby Pod, and Fat Beckham, who were collectively known as the Arc Bums. The criteria for becoming a Bum included a high school diploma, no visible means of support, and time in jail or reform school. As a young person from the right side of the track, Fred was very different from this crowd – and that was what made the experience worthwhile. “Most of us like to hang out with people just like us, but that’s a problem because we never learn how to deal with other types of people,” he says. “If you’ve already assembled a cast of curious characters, learn from them. If you haven’t, move to Las Vegas.”

For the rest of Fred's lessons, check out the full post at Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Big Brother May Soon Be Watching You

I’ll admit it: my personal experience with wearable technology is limited to FitBit, which tracks my daily physical activity and uploads it to an online fitness program. But recently, the University of London took wearables to a whole new level. In partnership with Rackspace, it conducted a one-month trial with 120 participants at marketing firm Mindshare to assess if wearables could in fact boost employee productivity.

The resulting research paper, The Human Cloud at Work: A 2014 Study into the Impact of Wearable Technologies, indicates that the answer is a resounding yes. Participant productivity jumped 8.5 percent and job satisfaction climbed 3.5 percent.

The participants were equipped with one of the three devices – the GENEActiv high-velocity accelerometer wristband, which measures movement and activity; the NeuroSky Mindwave portable biosensor EEG, which monitors brain activity; and the LUMOback posture and activity coach, which issues a pulse to remind its wearer to sit up straight.

Brave New World

Readings from the devices contributed to the employees’ Performance At Work (PAW) scores and allowed the researchers to develop rich behavioral and lifestyle profiles for each participant. Consider the following story developed for a woman they called “Chloe:”

“Chloe’s mid-sleep time is 3:45 am, which is in the later quartile and would suggest she is younger as mid-sleep time tends to get earlier with age. She’s an owl rather than a lark but not a party animal. Her sleep time is average (7.5 hours), as is her quality of sleep. She is generally active, but not a gym bunny, although she often has long sedentary periods in the office, which can be interpreted as a longer-term potential health risk. She has regular rise and bed times and has used the devices consistently, so is likely to be a conscientious individual. Given the fact that she is an owl, she is likely to enjoy a lie-in at the weekends. She has a short commute (it takes her less than 90 minutes to be at work from waking) and doesn’t have children.”

So how would managers use this information? Well, in Chloe’s case, there is little cause for concern. But what about an employee who comes into work for an important meeting after having slept only a few hours? What if an employee who turned off his monitoring devices at a particular time in the business day? Would this cause a micromanager boss to wonder what he’s up to?

Despite how Big Brother-ish this all sounds, since wearable technology gained momentum in the consumer space a few years ago, businesses have been eager to use it to gain an edge in the competitive 21^st century economy. And corporate investment is one of the main reasons the market for wearables is expected to swell to $3 billion this year.

For the rest of the post, head over to Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Are You Hiring the Best People to Manage Your Projects?

When you bring in new project managers, do you do so strategically?

Interviewing is subjective, of course, but for the essential job of Project Manager, you want your process to be as bulletproof as possible. After all, ending up with a bad Project Manager could cost you big time. Fortunately, PMO director Russell Harley is here to share his best practices for making the right hiring decisions upfront.

Alexandra Levit: Russell, what’s the biggest mistake that hiring managers make when recruiting new PMs?

Russell Harley:  They use generic job descriptions. You’ll see things like “good communication skills,” “be a self-starter,” and “work well with teams.” Well, job descriptions like this will quickly get you overrun with responses that are hardly targeted. So instead of wasting time with vagaries, describe the details of the actual project, and if you want it done using a certain methodology, say so.

While stellar project managers can usually work on any type of project, there are certain projects we really enjoy doing versus ones we are capable of doing but would prefer not to. By putting the specific needs for the position into the job description, you are far more likely to get responses from project managers who really want to do that type of project. And wouldn’t you rather have someone leading the team who doesn’t think of it like a dentist appointment?

Alex: Do you recommend hiring PMs for specific technical skills?

Russell:  Someone once commented on my blog that a good project manager’s knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep. Technical skills can often be learned, but excellent PM skills are harder to come by. By requiring PMs to have very specialized knowledge, you will dramatically reduce the pool of applicants, and an outstanding PM who could do amazing things for your company might be left out. Deciding on what is truly needed for every position will save you time and attract the right people.

For more of Russell's tips, have a look at the full post at Intuit's Fast Track blog.