Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Microfeedback: The Future of Management

A few months ago, I attended an employee engagement workshop. The facilitator suggested that millennials require performance feedback more than once a year. “Maybe once a quarter,” she said.

More like once a day!” I couldn’t resist calling out.

I wasn’t kidding. For the 80 million millennials who now make up a majority of the workforce, no news is bad news. If they don’t hear from their managers frequently, they think they’re doing something wrong and quickly grow disillusioned.

Nevertheless, an open door policy in which employees are invited to stop by a manager’s office for extended feedback sessions multiple times a day simply isn’t practical. So what’s the solution?

The innovative concept of microfeedback originated in the consumer space and consisted of collecting a small amount of information from customers at key moments in their shopping experience. The goal was to gather relevant customer feedback for a more accurate assessment of their satisfaction.

Think about this, though. Why can’t the idea of microfeedback be extended to performance management? We certainly have the technology. Intra-company messaging systems like Yammer, Skype for business, and Slack are growing exponentially and with some groups (like millennials), are even  more popular than email.

Imagine that your direct report gives a status update in the departmental meeting for the first time. You think she did an exceptional job, but instead of noting it in her file to be reviewed in six months (or worse, forgetting about it completely), you send her a “thumbs up” emoticon via Slack. The action takes you less than 30 seconds, and yet your employee has a piece of encouraging feedback that will make her day.

For more where this came from, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

How NOT to do Change Management

Change management is difficult, especially when it involves a complex structure like an organization. But some techniques are better than others, and here are a few you’ll want to avoid next time around.

Driving from the bottom instead of the top

Any successful change strategy requires the enthusiastic involvement of managers and employees on the ground, and bottom-up goal setting is terrific for innovation and morale. However, unless you work in an organization with no hierarchy whatsoever, your proposed change won’t go anywhere without executive buy-in and ongoing support. So get it and get it early.

Assuming everyone shares your opinion

It’s a mistake to believe that the majority perspective mirrors yours, even if a certain point of view seems obvious. For example, it’s tempting to think that everyone would naturally support a flexwork or citizen development initiative, but without polling and/or focus groups with groups in all functions and roles across the organization, you really can’t be sure of anything. Even if you’re inhigh-growth mode and are under pressure to take action, do your due diligence before pulling the trigger.

Relying exclusively on logic

It’s necessary to build a bulletproof business case full of rational and objective arguments for your strategy, but don’t forget passion, fire, and story. Unless people can feel the problem you are trying to solve, they won’t be motivated to help you. There’s a happy medium here, though. You have to be able to create a sense of urgency without coming across as over the top.

Force-fitting a strategy that’s at odds with the culture

Corporate culture is an unseen, but tremendously powerful force. In any organization, so much goes on behind the scenes of organizational charts, mission statements, and annual reports. Gaining an in-depth understanding of what drives your culture is a critical step in undertaking any change strategy, even those that aren’t technically “culture” initiatives.

For more ways NOT to do change management, check out the full post on the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Do You Have One of Those Time-Waster Personalities?

When I met Dana Brownlee, the founder of corporate training company Professionalism Matters, we got to talking about time wasting habits. It turns out that certain types of people are actually prone to ineffective time management.

Being the productivity nut that I am, I naturally probed a bit deeper on this one and asked Brownlee to describe her four personality types, and how to stop struggling if you have one of them.

The Fire Extinguisher

This person has no real plan for their career or even the day ahead. All she can do is focus on the latest fire or the most recent request in front of them, with no organized system to manage all of her tasks. Brownlee says this time bomb approach explodes when something really important falls through the cracks.

The Checklist Checker

This personality is more focused on checking off items on his “to do list” than the real accomplishment of important items. Focusing too much on small tasks rather than the critical (and yes, daunting) ones is a dangerous approach because it gives the false illusion of achievement.

The Manic Multi-Tasker

This personality is convinced that one has to do 2-3 things at a time to be efficient. This person often can’t distinguish what can be multitasked versus what can’t. This can set her up for negative consequences (e.g. quality lapses, errors) that result from lack of attention and concentration.

For more where this came from, check out the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Where Do You Learn Business Acumen?

You’ve probably heard that most businesses fail, but the reasons why are not always clear. Lack of managerial expertise may be one factor. After all, most inexperienced people who get jobs in large corporations aren’t put in charge right away. Rather, they may be given small responsibilities until they have sufficient business acumen to be trusted with larger ones. On the other hand, small-business owners are often overconfident that they’ll be great at everything at launch.

I recently asked three successful small-business owners how they acquired the right mix of entrepreneurial skills to guide their companies effectively: Michael Bremmer, CEO ofTelecomquotes.com in California; Clarence Bethea, CEO of Upsie.com in Minnesota; and Holly Epstein Ojalvo, founder of Kicker in New York.

What are the most essential skills a new business owner should have?

 

Clarence Bethea: [Small businesses] are always changing. Having the ability to listen to your users/customers and adapt to their needs is important from the start.

Michael Bremmer: The ability to listen to a customer and ask intelligent questions based on their concerns is a critical skill. And even more importantly, you need to have the willingness to walk away from opportunities that don't make sense morally or financially.

Holly Epstein Ojalvo: I’d say that you need a combination of flexibility and resilience. That's because you need to stay strong and focused, yet be responsive and adapt to changing circumstances and challenges. You also have to be resourceful. Few new business owners have ample resources, so you have to make a little go a long way. You definitely need to be a strategic thinker and mostly fearless, with a healthy appreciation of potential threats.

How did you acquire these skills?

Bremmer: I dedicate myself to improving my skills constantly, which means I've probably read a thousand books and studied 50 to 100 of them like college courses. 

Epstein Ojalvo: One key thing is to see yourself not just as an expert, but as a learner. I work really hard at learning things I don't know. I also stay focused on my mission and keep reminding myself of the sage advice to feel the fear and do it anyway. 

Bethea: I got thrown in the fire early and learned on the job. I also had great mentors around who I saw as great examples.

How can small-business owners supplement skills they don’t have?

Epstein Ojalvo: Two ways. First, surround yourself with colleagues and advisors who have complementary skill sets and knowledge bases. Second, make it a point to learn by reading articles and books, participating in webinars, taking courses and so on. We all have gaps. It's only a problem if you stay stuck in those gaps.

Bethea: Hire smarter! The faster you become self-aware, the faster you figure out that you don't know everything. Hire your weaknesses and get out of their way.

Bremmer: Today, we hold the world's knowledge in the palm of our hands. Go on YouTube, iTunes University, Skillshare or just Google to learn what you need. If you're watching something, learn something. 

For the rest of the article, check out the AMEX Open Forum.

Friends Versus Clients: Where Do You Draw the Line?

By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, according to a recent Customers 2020 Report. Increasingly, customers of small businesses may be expecting owners to know their individual needs in detail and go out of their way to personalize offerings and the shopping experience. When this is done properly, repeat business can be the result.

But what happens when you please the customer so much that your relationship becomes personal? Claudia Mora, owner of The Beauty Vault salon in Fairview, New Jersey; Jeanne Nohalty, founder of design boutique Alley Cat Décor in Oak Park, Illinois; and Jason Sherman, CEO of dating appInstamour in Philadelphia reveal how they manage this situation.

Briefly tell us about an experience where a friend became a customer, or a customer became a friend.

Claudia Mora: Owning a beauty salon is a tough job. You have to be a best friend, a therapist, a stylist and so much more. You see the same clients at least once a week and they become friends, almost family. You talk to them about life, business and, of course, love. I go out for drinks with customers, and they often text me to make appointments instead of calling the salon.

Jeanne Nohalty: We’ve for sure had customers who have turned into friends. It’s wonderful and validates that you are doing your job well. Our key business focus is outstanding customer relations. We treat our customers exactly like friends and therefore see no difference in terms of how we provide service to a friend or a customer who walks in off the street.

Jason Sherman: Often, when my friends need help with their businesses, they turn to me. I tend to be careful, as one wrong move could end the business relationship as well as the friendship. In one case, I agreed to help a friend work on a new product website. 

What were the challenges associated with this situation, and how did you cope with them?

Sherman: It was challenging because she wanted a great deal of customization. The situation became very difficult. During this process, we became less friendly and more like business acquaintances. I even tried to reinforce our friendship by building a custom site for her anyway to show her how it would look, but she ended our contract anyway.

Mora: When I first opened up shop, I offered all my friends the "friends and family" discount, and sometimes I'd comp their services. One day, one of my best friends, who was a customer, said, "I don't need money off. Charge me as a regular client. I should pay the same price I’d pay anywhere else.” That was the last day I offered the “friends and family” discount.

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

Essential Qualities of the Best Project Managers

Over at the American Management Association, Tom Kendrick, author of 101 Project Management Problems and How to Solve Them, asked readers how to assess if they have what it takes to be successful project managers. We’ve been talking a lot about certification here, but Tom approached the issue from another angle: what qualities do the best PMs most frequently display? Here are the top ten.

Extroverted

The best project managers are people-oriented and quickly establish effective working relationships with their team members. Introverted PMs, on the other hand, may find their projects wandering out of control because they are insufficiently engaged with the people responsible for the work.

Analytical

Great PMs have a preference for observable data over intuitive information. Projects are usually best managed using facts that can be verified and tested, and they tend to proceed most smoothly when decisions are based on consistent, data-driven criteria.

Organized

The best PMs are detail-oriented and can keep straight many disparate activities at a time. Individuals who are more flexible and spontaneous are important for innovation, but as PMs they may lack a perspective on the big picture and projects may be chaotic and directionless.

“Technical Enough”

Tom commented that for large programs, project managers are seldom masters of every technical detail, but generally are knowledgeable enough to ensure that communications are clear and status can be verified. Unless a project is particularly small and technical, it requires an effective leader who can motivate people and delegate the work to those who understand the nuances.

Pragmatic

Great PMs understand that striving for perfection is fruitless. Instead, they focus on how to most efficiently deliver business value, recognizing that there will be trade-offs between time, scope, and cost.

For the rest of the list, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Do You Know Your Sales Terms?

You know the feeling. You’re meeting with someone from sales or marketing and you’re listening attentively as they passionately describe their project. You want to understand what they’re talking about, but you don’t have an MBA and some of the vocabulary is just lost on you. However, you don’t want to sound clueless, so you don’t ask. We hope this post with common sales terms definitions offers some relief and can serve as a handy reference in the future!

AIDA

An acronym that stands for Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. These are the individual steps of the sales funnel (see below), in which your pool of potential customers moves from large to small as prospects get closer to a sale.

BANT

An acronym used for qualifying leads, which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. Salespeople use this to assess whether a prospect has the money and the decision-making power to result in a sale, and also whether your product or service solves a critical customer problem in the right timeframe. In other words, BANT helps salespeople determine if all the stars are aligned for a deal to take place.

Buyer Persona

Based on research and outlining what, where, when, why, and how a customer buys. Buyer personas are often provided to salespeople to educate them about the ideal prospect and about the most effective way to approach that prospect.

Churn Rate

A metric based on the value of the customers you retain. To calculate churn rate, you take the number of customers you lost in a given time period and divide it by the total number of customers you had at the very beginning of the period. For example, if you had 100 customers at the start of the year and only 80 customers at the end of January(discounting brand new customers), your churn rate would be: (100-80)/100 = 20/100 = 20%.

Closing Ratio

The percentage of prospects that a salesperson closes successfully. This ratio is used for all sorts of things, including individual salesperson performance, evaluation of profits, and sales forecasting. The better qualified a salesperson’s leads are, the less likely they are to be turned down (and the higher their closing ratio generally is).

Qualified Lead

A prospect that learned about your product or service, was interested, and contacted your organization to receive additional information. This kind of lead is most likely to result in a sale because half of the work is already done!

For more where these came from, head on over to Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Start Your New Hire's Year Off Right

In her book You’ve Only Got Three Seconds, Camille Lavington writes that people form a permanent opinion of you based on a very brief initial impression. The same phenomenon can occur when fresh hires show up to their first day at a new job. If things go well, they may return home brimming with enthusiasm for this next phase in their life. And if things don’t go well, a seed can be planted. This seed whispers that they've made a terrible mistake.

As an owner or manager, here are five steps that can help ensure a positive outcome for the people you’ve spent so much time and energy hiring.

Be Prepared for Arrival

HR may offer an orientation session, but that doesn't let you off the hook. You should be on top of exactly what will happen on your new hire’s first day. Have a workspace, supplies and any IT functionality ready for them, and make sure someone can greet them and show them around right away. Don't have them start on a day when their immediate supervisor (or worse, everyone with whom they'’ll work) is out of the facility—leaving them to stare at the four walls in a general state of confusion.

Do an Expectation Bootcamp

Managers can consider many aspects of work life—such as how to dress, when to arrive at the office and how to greet the CEO or owner—common sense. The reality is that many new hires, especially young ones, may not understand these basics. Take your rookie to lunch or coffee and lay out protocols with respect to culture, time, communication and behavior. For example, if it’s not acceptable to wander in at 10:30 a.m. even if you’ve worked until midnight the evening before, say that outright. Your rule of thumb should be, when it doubt, spell it out.

Assign a Buddy

Every new hire should be paired with a happy and satisfied employee in a similar life stage, ideally a year or two ahead of the hire in rank. Task the seasoned employee with helping the new hire get acclimated, answering questions and incorporating them into the office’s social scene. Your new hires may form their strongest opinions of your workplace based on their peer relationship with this individual, so try to make it a good one.

For the rest of my suggestions, have a look at the full article on the AMEX Open Forum.

Want to Keep Your Rep? Better Answer That Email

I’ve talked before about how responsiveness – or lack thereof – can make or break your reputation at work. Typically, I complain about people who never answer emails unless there’s something in it for them at that moment, or who take weeks to do so. However, it turns out that most people’s definition of responsiveness is even stricter than I would have thought. It turns out that your colleagues don’t want to wait for you at all.

Same Day Response is the New Normal

MailTime is an app that converts email to a text message format via the smartphone. The founders recently conducted a study of 1,500 professionals to evaluate email etiquette in 2014-15. What they discovered may surprise you.

Most people (52 percent) expect you to answer work-related emails within 24 hours, and 19 percent want that response within 12 hours. The more time that goes by, the less people tolerate. Only 3 percent think it’s appropriate to answer emails within a week. More than that? Forget about it.

Wi Fi: A Blessing or a Curse?

As technology becomes more and more instantaneous, it’s no longer acceptable to pretend you didn’t see a message right away, or even to cite the “I was traveling” excuse. Wi Fi is everywhere, so except for those precious few hours on the plane (for now, while you still have to pay extra fees), you’re on the hook to get back to co-workers within hours. Unless you’re 80, the 90s model of checking email once or twice a day is long gone.

Slow Responders Reap the Consequences

There was a time when people thought email was going away, but things have evolved quite differently. For the time being, email is still the default method of communication inside the global business world.

What happens when you take too long to respond to a message? To start, you could lose business. In my own line of work, prospective clients frequently email several speakers/writers at once and go with the person who sends back the most satisfactory response in the least amount of time. Second, you’re in danger of a misunderstanding. The sender may think the lapsed communication means you are trying to ignore him, or that you don’t think he is important.

When you get into the habit of failing to respond in a timely manner, people start to question your competence, level of organization, and work ethic. They resent having to chase you down for an answer, and they start to avoid working with you. Word gets around, and pretty soon, your overall reputation is suffering.

For more on the hazards of delayed responses, have a look at the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Do You Reject Candidates Politely?

Once your first choice has accepted the job, how do you close the loop with the other candidates who have interviewed?  My first piece of advice is to contact them and let them know of your decision.  This may sound obvious, but it’s shocking how many organizations don’t do it and just leave candidates hanging.  If a candidate takes the time to interview with you, you at least owe her the courtesy of a phone call or email.  Here are some general best practices:

Err on the side of overcommunicating

You can get things off on the right foot by explaining your selection process before or during an interview.  When you provide this information, the candidate will know exactly when they can expect communication from you and will be less likely to check in repeatedly about offer status (or sit and stew about why they haven’t heard from you).

Yes, you must use a phone

Now that most organizations have an applicant tracking system and/or career portal that can send automated emails to candidates at various stages of the recruitment process, there’s no excuse for allowing a rejected candidate to disappear into a black hole.  However, if they went through the trouble of coming in for an interview, you should really call them as soon as you’ve given an offer to someone else – if not sooner.  You’d be surprised how fast word gets around in local job hunting circles.  If your call gets sent to voicemail, leave one.  They might be one of those non-checkers, but that’s not your problem.  A voicemail is better than no call at all.

For the rest of my tips, head over to the SilkRoad blog.