Darren Hicks, CEO of Hicks Consulting, has written a great article for the EO Magazine Octane on how he learned the power of candor as a Navy SEAL and has worked hard to apply it to his business. Good stuff to read, internalize, share, and implement. http://bit.ly/navysealscandor

The A-player janitor: As Auren points out, you don’t need a Harvard MBA to qualify as an A-player, and every role in your organization can be filled with a superior performer. So, I would ask you: what is the A-player profile for a janitor? If you were going to hire a truly superior person to fill that role,what results would demonstrate superior performance and A-player status?

Relentlessly resourceful: A-players in general know how to get things done. They don’t settle for results that are easily obtainable with current resources. They leverage what they have and find new ways to achieve results that go beyond what most other people are achieving.

Getting back to people: I think this is a great point – many highly effective people are incredible at following up and following through. They “close the loop” with people. They write a note to say thank you. They get back to others quickly. I wonder if this is not in part driven by the fact that very successful people often recognize that it is relationships and relational capital as much more than technical expertise that creates success.

More good points in this article, worth your time to take a look.

I recently talked to the president of a marketing business who told me that he wants to double the number of “homerun hitters” that he has in his organization. He wants people who can anticipate problems, see opportunities, and create solutions that serve customers. Another way of saying this is that the most valuable people in his business are those who know how to create solutions for customers and who can lead other employees to be a part of that process.

If you want to increase the number of strong leaders and performers in your company, here are two points to consider:

Every position has a combination of technical skills and behavioral skills required to qualify as an A-Player. What is the A-Player profile for key roles in your company? Don’t assume that people “will know an A-Player when they meet one.” They won’t. Or, worse, every person involved in the hiring process will have a different picture of what it means to be an A-player. Get everyone on the same page regarding this A-Player Profile so you can put on a big push to find and hire the best people.

In addition, not all employees are created equally. You should be investing your time with the A-players you already employ. Keep track of how much time you spend with your A players versus your problem children employees. Don’t spend too much time trying to solve problems for your average to poor performers while neglecting your best people. Your best employees don’t need their hands held. They do need you to provide them with the training and resources necessary to be successful. When you spend your time putting out fires for weaker performers, you do exactly that – spend your time. The only return you get is a resolved problem that should have been taken care of by someone else. However, when you invest your time with A-players, you give your best people the time and attention they need to do their jobs better. They take on even more responsibility and you fulfill one of your priorities – building an organization that has greater capacity to create value for customers and generate strong financial results in the process.

This retention rate would be impressive in any business, but the average turnover rate for “limited service restaurants” is 51%. In other words, a similar franchise owner is losing 50 employees every year while Dave Melton loses 1 or 2. How did he do it? Here are some points that I pulled out of this article that are relevant to any business when it comes to finding, hiring, leading, and keeping A-players.

He knows his A-player profile. In my upcoming book How to Hire A-Players, I talk about the importance of understanding the A-player profile for key roles in your business. You can tell Dave Melton understands his A-player profile. He says in this article that he looks for people who “can work quickly and have nice personalities.” My guess is that there are few other things he looks for as well, but don’t dismiss this basic profile. A lot of people have bubbly personalities but can’t get things done. Some people can get things done but are surly. He is looking for the combination.

Focuses on creating a great customer experience. Melton lists the bad behaviors that got some of his early, bad hires fired. They include “arguing with customers, refusing to wear uniforms in the correct way, visiting friends en route to delivering pizza, and failing to show up for work. What do all of these have in common? They all create a bad experience for customers. Let’s face it, the average retail experience in the United States is not impressive. If you can put a staff together that creates a good customer experience (much less an exceptional one), that is going to show up in your customer retention. It’s pretty easy to connect the dots between an exceptional retail staff and customer retention.

Creates an Internal Talent Incubator. You wouldn’t think that a Domino’s Pizza franchise could be a talent incubator, but read this article and you realize that Melton has accomplished it. He starts all his employees as hourly workers who make minimum wage + tips delivering pizzas by bicycle. But they can end up as Store Managers making $70,000 annually.

Shows People a Career Path. Again, you don’t associate the concept of Career Path with working at a place like Domino’s, but Melton realizes that you don’t have to send someone to Wharton to provide them with a career path. Melton and his wife Angie (who helps to run the franchise) encouraged one of their employees to take a New York City food safety certification course to “enhance her credentials.” The employee’s initial reaction? “I was a little skeptical. I don’t like tests. But I took it and I passed. I did well. I got a raise and I got a bonus for passing the test.” (She also got promoted to assistant manager).

Promotes Internally. Melton promotes from within when he has a job opening. When a company can promote good people from its ranks into leadership roles, you know they are doing a great job of hiring the right people, developing them, and keeping them around.

Taps into undervalued pools of talent. The article quotes Zia Shah, 35, a native of Pakistan with a degree in business who came to New York at age 26 looking for more opportunity. He started delivering pizzas for Mr. Melton’s Domino’s franchise and today is a manager of one of his 5 stores. Here is a very sharp, educated guy who was “overeducated” for his initial role but hung on because of the opportunity that was ahead of him. I am sure he was a lot hungrier for opportunity than many of his 26-year-old American peers. Sometimes finding and hiring A-players is like being a value investor in stocks. You have to find people who have been undervalued by the market and give them a chance.

Gets entry-level hires from employee referrals. Today, this Domino’s franchise gets most of its employees from employee referrals. I make the point in How to Hire A-Players that recruiting is just marketing and sales in different garb. We all know that positive word-of-mouth is critical in marketing and sales. The same thing is true in creating a team of A-players. If you hire great people and give them opportunities to succeed and win, they are going to tell their friends! Your job is to get your employees engaged in this A-Player mindset.

Grew his business organically. Melton grew his business from 3 stores to 5 in part because he already had groomed the talent to do so. Show me your business plan for growth over the next 3-5 years, and I will ask you if you are developing the talent today to fuel that growth.

You can find the New York Times article For a Franchise, Success is in the Hiring here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/jobs/06homefront.html?ex=1357275600&en=ce3f2f59f1063b24&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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.

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.”

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:

1. What specific challenges or obstacles keep arising for your team?
2. Instead of focusing on “overcoming” the obstacle, have you defined what success looks like?  What is the goal toward which you are aiming?
3. How can you and your team stay focused on the success that you want rather than on the problems you want to avoid?

1. Define each person’s roles and responsibilities. You should absolutely make big decisions jointly, but stop trying to make every decision a joint decision. Define each partner’s area of responsibility, and agree on the issues that each will make without consulting the other. This will improve the velocity with which you make decisions. It will also help your employees’ productivity by giving them clear reporting structures.

2. Have a weekly Starbucks meeting. The two of you should meet weekly at a Starbucks or other off-site location. Review the key issues facing your business, agree on next actions, and create a to-do list for each of you. Not only will this make each of you more productive, it will help you to communicate with your staff more effectively.

3. Start planning your exit from your business immediately. This is sound advice for any business owner including couples who own businesses. By planning your exit from your business today, you force yourself to design and build a business that runs without you. In the long-run, this is the key to building a business that can be sold for a meaningful sum. In the short-term, this perspective will help you to design a business that attracts strong employees to whom you can delegate meaningful responsibilities.

5. Keep your personal drama out of your business. Nothing creates a negative work environment like a couple that bring their personal problems to the office. The best employees do not want to be a supporting actor in the drama of your life. Leave your personal issues at home.

People don’t follow you because you are trying hard to be a leader. People follow you because you have a picture of where you want to go, an expertise regarding how to get there, and an appreciation for how others can be part of the accomplishment. In the end, you really can’t get people to follow you. You have to be yourself, stand for what you believe in, invest in other people – and they will follow of their own accord.