Eric combines cutting-edge knowledge about leadership with practical lessons and anecdotes.
Performance Principles™
Performance Principles is an e-letter written by Eric Herrenkohl that focuses on creating the business you want by building the organization you need. This is copyrighted material. However, you can copy, reprint, or forward these newsletters in their entirety so long as any use is not for resale and the following copyright notice is included intact: Copyright © 2012, Eric Herrenkohl, Herrenkohl Consulting. All rights reserved. www.herrenkohlconsulting.com, 610-658-9790.
Are Your Great Danes Surrounded by Chihuahuas?
As I relate in my new book How to Hire A-Players, I know a financial analyst who recently received the highest performance review of anyone in her 400-person department. In fact, she was the only person in the entire department to receive a “superior” rating. While this was great for this individual, it was not a good sign for the company. When only one person out of 400 receives a superior rating, it says to me that the leader of the department is really quite happy to employ average performers. Hiring A-players happens accidentally in this group. It made me wonder how long a high performer would want to stay in such an environment.
When I related this to this woman she smiled and said: It’s funny you should say that, because I just decided to get my resume out on the street and see what else is available. Six months later she was gone, even though the senior vice president tried to keep her. It was too late for a counter offer – this young woman was now convinced that she had to move to another company in order to move to the next level in her career.
Performance Principle: If you surround a Great Dane with a lot of Chihuahuas, your big dog is at risk. If you employ a small number of A-players surrounded by a large group of average performers, take a hard look at the following issues:
- Is there a clear career path for your superior performer? Does he or she see light at the end of the tunnel? Is this A-player convinced that there are more and better challenges ahead? Maybe you recently hired someone who clearly has leadership abilities – start talking with that person about how they can further employ those skills. Whoever the person and whatever the plan, take the time to put your arm around peoples’ shoulders, tell them that you’ve been thinking about them, buy them lunch, ask them questions, listen to their goals, and talk about their careers. You will solve a lot of retention problems just by taking these steps.
- Are your A-players paying an undue price by being surrounded by sub-par performers? If you’re not careful, you can burn out your A-players by making them pick up too much slack for average employees. To some degree, your A-players will always do more than others – that’s part of what makes them so good. But you risk losing your Great Danes if you continually pile on the work the little dogs can’t handle. Remind yourself that your first priority is ensuring that your A-players love coming to work every day. If they don’t feel that way, what steps are you going to take to make things better?
- Are your best performers learning from and challenged by their peers? A-players in every industry want to learn, grow, find new challenges, and attain the next level in their careers. Peers are one of the most important catalysts for this kind of development. If your A-players are surrounded by people with less talent and ability, they are learning less than they could if they worked with more talented peers. One of your most important roles as a leader is to get enough quality people working together that your team takes on a positive life of its own. If your A-players don’t have this kind of positive peer reinforcement, it’s your responsibility to find, recruit, and hire better people and add more big dogs to your team.
- Are you dropping your standards to fit the performance of average performers – and leaving your Big Dogs resentful and unrecognized? Managers often take their A-players for granted while spending the majority of their time trying to “fix” their weak performers. Your best performers should be the pace setters for your team. Set standards that challenge your Great Danes – and then let your big dogs raise the standards for everyone else.
Executives often say to me that you can’t have an entire company of A-players. What they mean is that you can’t have a building full of Type-A people who insist on special treatment for their superior abilities. However, I would say that for every company with this problem there are 10,000 that pin their success on the abilities of a few superior performers. Make sure that you take care of your A-players. Meet with them regularly. Provide them with the resources they need to excel. Work with them to create personalized plans for accelerating their careers.
Finally, consider how you can find and hire the next big dog for your team, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t turn a Chihuahua into a Great Dane.
Thanks,
Eric
Now Reach a Little Higher
I sat with a group of consultants waiting for a training session to begin. The presenter, instead of clicking to his first PowerPoint slide and beginning to drone, turned to us and said, “I would like each of you to put your right hand up in the air as high as it will go.” He then waited as we obediently raised our hands high.
“Do you have your hands raised as high as they will go?” the speaker asked
We all nodded.
“Great!” he said. “Now, I want you to raise your right hand a little higher.”
Every hand in the room went up at least another inch or two.
Performance Principle: Most people are not giving everything they can give to their efforts. In some situations, 80% effort is ok – it is enough to achieve the results you need, and there is no need to kill yourself to do more. However, A-players know when and where to stretch beyond merely acceptable performance to efforts that make them stand out from the pack and create distinctive value. Here are a few situations where you and your people can likely stand out and create more value by stretching just a little bit higher:
Understand that business is about relationships. You can’t get anything done if people don’t like being around you. Human beings instinctively group themselves as “us” and “them.” When highly effective people come into a new group, they understand that they must win the right to be heard and respected by the existing members of the group. Without an awareness of such basic human dynamics, otherwise knowledgeable and skilled people spin their wheels. Then they blame their lack of results on “those people” who wouldn’t listen to their great ideas.
Seek to understand rather than seek to be understood. Some people feel they must demonstrate how knowledgeable they are by talking about their own ideas and making sure that everyone in the group understands how smart their strategies are. However, people who are great at leading and facilitating teams don’t do this. Instead, they emphasize listening to and understanding what others in the group want to achieve. A-players are confident but not cocky. They know they have the knowledge and skills to get the job done. So they put their focus on understanding what success looks like to the people around them, knowing that the easiest way to get ahead is to help others succeed.
Complete the last 20% well. Architects will tell you that they often spend 20% of their time on the first 80% of a project – and then spend 80% of their time on the last 20% of a project. Most people are bored of a project by the last 20%, and they want to move onto other things. However, customers are far from bored during the last stage of projects. That is when they get (or at least are supposed to get) the results for which they paid. A-players understand the importance of last impressions and make sure they finish projects well. That differentiates them from the majority of people who end projects with a whimper. It also creates satisfied customers who become repeat clients and enthusiastic referral sources.
Think, don’t just do. Last night I emailed my web designer Kym Costanzo a request for a small update to the website for my new book. She emailed me back and said, “I made the update you requested but was thinking that there might be a better way to do this. Here’s my idea, let me know what you think.” This is why I am a fan of Kym and her business (www.thewebscaper.com). She thinks about what I ask her to do while she does it, and she often comes back to me with better ways to accomplish my goals. Like most of you, I am busy. I neither know nor care about the subtleties of website design and management. I know what I want to achieve – I want someone who has smart ideas and great execution about getting there. This is true of every job and service in every business.
Plan, Execute, and Follow Up. Business people spend a huge amount of time in meetings, and A-players know how to use them to move the ball forward. I assume most people know the steps to actually get results out of meetings, but I can ensure you that a minority of people actually follow them. Prepare by determining what you want to achieve. Create an agenda that focuses on this goal. Send the agenda out before the meeting, ask for changes and updates to it before the session starts. In the meeting, follow the agenda. Ask for commitments: Who is going to do this? By when? Have someone write these commitments down and email them to all participants within 24 hours of the meeting’s completion. Hold people accountable to their commitments. Follow these steps and watch the productivity of said meetings improve.
Conclusion: Success is defined by spending your time on activities and efforts that have meaning and value. Don’t try to reach a little higher on everything in your life – you won’t make progress. Identify the priorities for your life and your business, and then push yourself and your people to reach a little higher in those areas. You will become more valuable and stand out in the process.
How to Work Hard Without Burning Out
Chris Carmichael, Lance Armstrong’s coach, tells a great story about meeting a bike racer who bragged about having ridden or raced his bike every single day for years. Carmichael looked at him incredulously and asked how his body was holding up. The bike racer then deluged him with a list of injuries he had suffered but had “ridden through.”
As Carmichael says, this is an example of a guy who doesn’t understand that you have to have some easy days (and some days off) in order to push yourself to the edge on your tough workout days. Most bike racers have difficulty accepting this and so, as the saying goes, their easy days are too hard and their hard days are not hard enough. Because they refuse to pace themselves, they also are unable to push themselves to the edge when they should.
During this last year, my “hard days” got harder because I was writing a book – but my easy days got harder too. I simply ran out of time to get everything done. Then I realized that I had to stop trying to control everything that was going on. I was getting overwhelmed. Instead, I had to schedule in some easy days to let me recover and help me keep working hard and smart.
Performance Principle: We all have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. Here are a couple of practical steps that have helped me do this during the past year.
First, I am doing my best to bring closure to each day. When I walk out of my office at the end of the day, I am working hard to have completed at least the most important tasks of the day so that I can have a sense of closure.
Second, I am working hard to keep my weekends work-free (or at least my Sundays, I am writing this on a Saturday morning).
Third, I have started to schedule an occasional strategy day out of the office. I did this a couple of weeks ago, and it was amazing. I had a breakfast meeting out of the office, and I just did not go back. I took my laptop, went to a coffee shop, and thought, strategized and planned. I couldn’t get my wireless connection to work, so I didn’t even have wireless access – and it made the day better, not worse. Fewer distractions and no email helped me create a to-do list and set my priorities. I did that planning three weeks ago and I have been more productive since because I have a plan to follow.
So, think about some ways to schedule some easy days into your schedule that will make you stronger and more endurable for the work you have to get done.
We Have to Manage Ourselves
In his classic Harvard Business Review article Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker talked about the importance of managing yourself well if you hope to achieve meaningful success. Among other great examples, he described how Dwight Eisenhower was renowned for conducting effective press conferences as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. His aides insisted that all questions be submitted to him in writing at least 30 minutes beforehand. He read the questions, considered his answers, and then answered the questions eloquently.
Fast forward five or six years. Eisenhower is now the 34th President of the United States. Both his predecessors Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman loved responding to live questions from the press without preparation. Instead of changing the format of these press conferences to play to his strengths (he was a reader, not a listener), Eisenhower tried to provide answers without requiring pre-submitted questions. As a result, the same reporters who lauded him just years before now considered him incompetent.
Performance Principle: We have to manage ourselves; no one else is going to do it for us. For example, I have learned over time that I learn by talking. Literally, unless the words come out of my mouth, I don’t really know what I think. Furthermore, I make better decisions if I talk things through with others before I act. The combination of “learning by talking” and getting the feedback of someone I trust yields consistently better results for me.
Learn how you learn. Pay attention to the setting, situations, and environments in which you thrive and spend more time there. Identify the circumstances that play to your weaknesses – and re-engineer them. You have to set yourself up to succeed.
If you have not read this classic article by Drucker, you should. You have to pay for the download but it’s worth it.
Thanks,
Eric
You Can’t Fake Passion
I just attended a fantastic event in New York City led by a number of very bright people in the publishing and promotion world. After an evening of great material, each panelist was asked to provide one final piece of advice. Matt Holt, publisher for the Business Division at Wiley, said that he looks for authors who are completely committed to their books and to making them a success. If an author does not believe passionately in the value of his or her book, why would anyone pay $20 to read what he or she has to say?
This quote reminded me of the fact that the one thing you can’t outsource, synthesize, or fake is true passion. The biographer Robert Caro states that when Lyndon Johnson was Senate Majority Leader and had a new piece of legislation he wanted to push through, he would go into his office and repeat to himself – repeatedly and out loud – all the reasons why this legislation was the right thing to do. He would literally work himself into a passionate furor, and he did this so often that his staff had a name for it. Johnson is “winding himself up” again, they would say.
Johnson did this because he knew that it was impossible to sell something without believing in it completely and passionately. Music producers will tell you that in this digital age they can synthesize almost any musical element they want except for emotion. If artists can’t or won’t sing from the heart, and if they are unable or unwilling to connect with their audience emotionally through their music, no amount of post-production work can instill heart into a song.
Performance Principle: You can’t fake passion. You have to look at your work and your product and figure out how to get some passion for what you do every day. Good work alone is not enough to grow your customer base or expand your “following.” No one can or should care more about your work than you do. If you’re not passionate about what you do, how can you expect customers or others to commit their money and attention to your products or services?
Here are some questions to consider:
- Do your customers feel your passion for what you sell, or do they sense you are just going through the motions?
- Does your team know that you have a gut-level excitement for what you are doing?
- Do you have a vision for your work that goes beyond the day-to-day tasks that you complete every day?
Often, regaining passion for our work does not require changing what we do. Rather it means shifting how we view what we do. If you are in the insurance business, you don’t just sell insurance – you help people provide for the financial security of their families. If you are in the hotel business, you don’t just rent rooms – you help others get business done. If you are in the consulting business, you don’t just sell billable hours – you help people build great businesses. This kind of perspective helps you to regain your passion by viewing your current business through a new lens.
So, get away from the daily grind of work and think big and strategically about your business. You can schedule a weekend strategy retreat with your team. When I lead these sessions for clients, I often find that people emerge re-energized about their business. Or, maybe you just need to take that vacation you have been putting off. Finally, you can schedule a trip to New York City, hang out with some great people, and find some time to think – really think – about your business. It worked for me.
Ten Years to be an Overnight Success
A client of mine sold the first of several businesses he started and pocketed about 30 million dollars at the age of 35. He received a fair amount of attention in his industry for his accomplishments and some media attention as well. It was easy for people to look at him with jealousy and see a young, overnight success who had made easy money.
The fact is, he and his partners worked for 10 long years to start and build this business. For most of that time, they worked like dogs and got very little credit or attention. He told me once that, “There are some things that I had to do to build this business that I will never, never do again.” These were not illegal or unethical things. They were incredibly demanding times of all work, not sleep, and complete risk.
Performance Principle: It takes a long time to be an overnight success. Accept the fact that there are no shortcuts.
Researchers have identified what they call the ten-year rule when it comes to becoming a world-class performer. As Fortune magazine said, “Even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.” (“What it takes to be great,” Fortune, October 30, 2006).
If you are toiling away at an area where you don’t have any talent, no amount of time will be enough to make you a success. But if you have ability, then here are some principles to keep in mind for becoming a master of your own craft:
- Master the basics. Every craft – business, medicine, art – has its technical skills and mastering those technical skills can be tiresome. But you have to master the basics if you want to be world class.
- Cultivate relationships. Technical ability is rarely sufficient to get you to the top. Be intentionally about developing relationships and staying in touch with people throughout your career. Keep your Outlook or other contact management software up-to-date. Look for opportunities to connect and reconnect with others in and out of your field. These relationships are just as much the currency of success as are your technical abilities.
- Use compounding interest to your benefit. If you can improve your results by 10% per month, in 7 months you will be 100% better than you were when you started. Don’t be afraid to make small improvements and allow those improvements to build on one another. Before you know it you will be an expert.
- Enjoy the work itself. Many of us are motivated by the financial rewards, power, and respect that achievement brings. That’s fine when kept in perspective, but to sustain a long-term commitment to our work, we have to find some rewards in the work itself. At the end our careers and lives, the only one who is going to really care about what you accomplished at work is you.
- Get the word out. All of us are in the marketing business. It’s not enough to be good at something. You have to be able to communicate the problems that you solve through your expertise, and to build a brand for yourself and your abilities that creates credibility and draws people to you. If this smacks of self promotion, take a moment to consider how many truly talented people there are whose skills and abilities are underutilized because they could not figure out how to build a following.
- Don’t ever quit. As Ross Perot purportedly said, “Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success.”
The Downfall of My Favorite Restaurant
I went to my favorite restaurant in West Philly yesterday for lunch. I found this place a couple of years ago. The food was phenomenal and it was always packed with Penn students and faculty. Business was good enough that, this past summer, they closed down for a month and did a complete renovation. They gutted the place, redid the dining room, and brought the décor of the restaurant up to the level of the great food they served.
There is only one problem: yesterday, the food was mediocre. Some of their best dishes were missing from the menu, and the food was not up to its usual level. It was on the whole a very average dining experience. I sat in the restaurant and thought to myself: you can do whatever you want to the decorations, to the point-of-sale system, even to the staff. But the food had better be excellent. Because it was not yesterday, I am on the lookout for a new restaurant.
Performance Principle: Understanding what makes a fantastic customer experience and creating that experience every time is one of the secrets to a successful business. In the end, if you create a fundamentally strong customer experience, you can make a lot of other mistakes and still survive. Conversely, you can do all the peripheral things well, but if your customer experience is lousy, your business is in trouble. Here are some points to consider in this light:
Are you doing fundamentally high-quality work? If you are selling computer supplies, do the right products arrive at your customer and do they arrive on time? If you are selling professional services, do you create the results your customer is looking for? If you sell kitchen & bath remodeling, do your clients get the kitchen of their dreams for a price they can afford? These are the fundamental value propositions of your business. While there are things you can do above and beyond these deliverables to turbo-charge a business, you won’t be around to do them if you are not delivering on the fundamentals.
Every business rises and falls on word-of-mouth. We all want to make buying decisions based on the reference of people we trust. To the extent that your customers are singing your praises, you will maintain strong revenues and profitability. In order to guarantee this, you have to make sure that everyone in your business is committed every day to making the basic quality and delivery of your product excellent. You must ensure that the customer experience surrounding the purchase and use of your product is extraordinary.
There is nothing more important than serving customers. In some businesses, employees want to “graduate” from serving customers to doing more “professional” things like buying product, talking to vendors, or creating marketing events. Of course those things are good, but you need a business filled with people who have a passion for serving the customer. That should be the best job in your company.
Keep Your Eyes Downhill, and Your Skis Will Follow
Occasionally, I get to downhill ski. On our last trip, I finally learned how to handle the black-diamond mogul runs. When skiing one of these steep slopes in the past, I usually ended up flat on my back. If not, I was off on the edge of the slope, my skis pointed into the forest, completely sideways on the mountain. I could not figure out how to make progress down the hill.
Then it dawned on me. I was going sideways because I was looking sideways – literally. I was so worried about the moguls that I was watching them the entire time, and then inevitably skiing right into them. I realized that if I wanted to get down the hill, I had better start looking down the hill. I did, and sure enough, my skis followed.
Performance Principle: Keep your eyes fixed on where you want to be, and the rest of you will follow. Obstacles have a tendency to draw our attention. We get focused on the problems rather than the objective, and then wonder why we are not making real progress.
Questions to Consider:
- What specific challenges or obstacles keep arising for your team?
- Instead of focusing on “overcoming” the obstacle, have you defined what success looks like? What is the goal toward which you are aiming?
- How can you and your team stay focused on the success that you want rather than on the problems you want to avoid?
You Have a Beautiful Home
When my wife and I sold our home in St. Louis to move to Philadelphia, we interviewed a number of realtors. One of my standard questions to these realtors was, “What are the problems with this house? What do we need to change or neutralize in order to sell it for the maximum price?”
Most of the realtors immediately plunged into a long description of the flaws and imperfections of our home and provided detailed descriptions of what they would fix. One realtor, however, would have none of this. Her only response was, “You have a lovely home.” She absolutely refused to be critical of our house until we agreed to list our house with her. We didn’t choose her as our realtor (we chose a realtor who was referred by someone we trusted, the ultimate sales tool) However we were struck by the fact that this woman was a sales pro. She had a process that she used to persuade homeowners to list their homes with her, and one part of that process was to never provide criticism or consulting until after people signed a contract with her.
Performance Principle: Save your consulting for after the contact is signed. Don’t try to begin new business relationships by telling people all the things they are doing wrong. Instead, clarify specifically how you can help them and what this is worth in dollars and cents. And save your feedback and criticism for the client until the contract is signed.
Here are some points to remember and steps to take to improve your consultative selling process:
1. People assume you know what you are talking about. Experts of all stripes believe that they must convince people of their expertise. Prospective clients generally assume that you know what you are talking about unless you convince them otherwise. So stop giving away your expertise in a low-percentage ploy to increase your credibility.
2. Clarify objectives and value, don’t discuss methodology. Instead of spending your time describing how you will solve someone’s problem, focus on clarifying what problems you will solve and how much value this will create. The quality of your questions will go a long way to revealing your expertise without getting you bogged down in discussing technicalities which no one finds valuable.
3. Define specific key results. Clients often talk in overarching terms about their objectives. This helps you to understand the big picture from their perspective, but you have to get more specific as well. You must define specific key results that will indicate if your work together is being successful. These should be specific, measurable results that are tied to your work (our customer acquisition numbers increase by 20%; we operate 5 new programs in the first half of 2009).
4. “Dollarize” problems for clients. Translate every key result that you discuss with a client into dollars. If you are going to help a company overhaul its IT infrastructure, how much money will that make or save for your client? If you are helping a professional services firm implement a new sales tracking system, what is that worth to the client? If you can’t connect the dots between your actions and these hard dollars, you are not going to getting hired.
5. Ask people to work with you. You have to invite prospective clients to work with you. After clarifying key results and “dollarizing” problems, I say something like this: “Joe, I invite you to work with me on this, I think we can make a lot of progress together.” Short, sweet and effective.
6. After the invitation, stop talking. After inviting a prospective client to work with you, you have to stop talking – a feat many of us find difficult. Give the other person an opportunity to agree to become your client.
Until next month,
Eric
Building a Farm Team in a Down Economy
In a recent talk to Philadelphia executives, I explained how to build a “farm team” of strong potential employees. Farm team is a baseball term. Every major league baseball team has multiple minor league teams made up of players ready to be called up to the big leagues with little notice. In business, a farm team is your active list of strong performers who currently work for someone else but could be enticed to work for you if the offer is right. By taking the initiative to find and interview these people now, you build your own farm team of strong potential employees.
After the talk, a banker came up to me and said, “I am going to implement this farm team idea immediately. I get phone calls every day from job hunters, and I have been telling them that we are not hiring. Now I am going to tell them that we are not hiring right now, but I want to interview them anyway.”
Performance Principle: A bad economy is a great time to build your own farm team. In the midst of short-term pressures, take the time to interview and network. Here are some specific payoffs from building your own farm team right now:
1. Good people are available in bad times. Great performers shake loose in times like these. Now is the time to make connections with these people even if you don’t hire them immediately. Joel Spolsky in his book Smart & Gets Things Done estimates that one truly gifted computer programmer is worth at least five times as much as a competent programmer. The ratios may be slightly different in your business, but the principle holds fast across all companies and industries. If your interviewing yields just one terrific person, it is worth it.
2. Interviewing does not necessarily mean hiring. You are not making a commitment to hire anyone; you are simply meeting with them for an initial interview. The only cost to you is your time, and the investment of time is worth it.
3. Build your own network. Every person you interview today is someone that you add to your own network. If you treat people with respect and stay in touch, that relationship may well be valuable whether or not you hire the person.
4. Market intelligence. Having a regular schedule of interviews keeps you apprised of what is going on in the marketplace. Building your farm team makes you more intelligent about your marketplace and better connected within it.
5. Confidence to deal with poor performers. One of the primary reasons that managers don’t confront poor performers is that they do not have anyone to take their place. If your executives and managers have active candidates who can fill positions in their departments, they will be more willing and able to deal quickly and directly with sub-par performance.
Until next month,
Eric
