A friend of mine just emailed me today to let me know he’s just been promoted, is now taking on a much larger leadership role where he works, and sales are doing well BUT he’s having ‘people’ issues.

Well who isn’t, right? All businesses have issues with unproductive, combative, and poor-communicating employees. But before you can address how to fix those problems, you need to know why people are that way. It’s my firm belief that the vast majority of people don’t want to suck at their job. If that’s the case, why do so many businesses have so many personnel issues?

Here’s a quick litmus test to see if your business is creating personnel issues or you just happen to have a few bad eggs.

Personally I’m not a big fan of the term “managers” as “managers manage resources and leaders lead people”. A hundred little things, like your titles, added together form a culture for your team and team members (not employees) that can affect everything about your culture, including financial results. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, so I’ll get more into what’s required of a leader in number 4.

1. The first step is defining the culture you want… Mine is literally called our “14 Points of Culture” that set the ground work for our team expectations. While you’re laying the ground work for your team and culture, you may already have a Vision and Mission statement, but if not, that’s foundational so create that as well.
2. From there you need to develop a Team Organizational Structure chart with the hierarchy of the leaders in your business. Keep in mind that the 3 points on a successful business triangle are made up of Sales/Marketing, Finance/Administration, and Service/Operations so your Team Structure should make sure someone is excellent at each of those things and has the supporting team to get better. At it’s most basic level, your Organizational Chart would include a Team Leader (CEO) above the Sales/Marketing Leader, Finance/Administration Leader, and Service/Operations Leader who all report to the Team Leader. Underneath each of those leaders will be their supporting teams. Keep in mind that the Team Leader should always dedicate half of his time to sales/marketing and the other half of his time to everything else!
3. Create job descriptions for every position in your Team Organizational Structure. The descriptions should include expectations, benefits, Key Performance Indicators and benchmarks tied to incentives. No one on your team should ever be able to say “I don’t know what’s expected of me or how to do my job well.” More importantly, you must fit each team member’s skill-sets and passions into the position that will best allow her to express those passions.
4. Now you start changing the culture by actively leading your team. You provide opportunities for open communication like regular team meetings (even going to the point of picking fights between people and departments). You provide regular and consistent feedback with quarterly performance reviews based on the 12 Questions Marcus Buckingham outlined in First, Break All the Rules. You rearrange your offices according to the rules of proximity. Make sure each of your leaders knows how to use NLP and then train your people. When you come up with new products, ideas, promotions, etc. you work hard to provide systems, procedures, scripts and all the pieces your people need to be successful at implementing new programs. You develop a culture of innovation by requiring people to come up with new ideas without fear of reprisal for “bad” ideas that don’t materialize… And rewards for the ideas that do yield results. You ensure that your leaders all develop relationships with their team members because the most important factor in employee satisfaction is an employee’s relationship with his direct superior.
5. The fifth piece is probably the hardest, yet most important. You fire, let go, or force out the people who don’t fit into your culture, vision, structure, or job descriptions. You get rid of the people who aren’t contributing to the team and culture immediately. The lost time and energy in trying to “fix” them can almost never be recouped. However, if you haven’t provided for them an environment to succeed (with all of the 5 pieces), you’ll really have no idea if they’re good or not because you haven’t defined the rules of the game, yet. If you’re the leader or manager, this is your responsibility. If your leader or manager isn’t providing this type of atmosphere, maybe you should read my last blog on moving on.

Obviously I just presented a whole lot of ideas and pieces that make up a complex problem in a rather succinct manner. The myriad links throughout this blog will provide additional details on certain topics, however don’t try to make this TOO complex. Problems that are TOO complex get pushed to the back-burner, avoided, and ultimately never solved. Take these 5 pieces at relative face value, work on each of them, and enjoy the results.

For further resources, I recommend the following 3 books to help you change your culture:

1. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham
2. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
3. Instant Team Building by Brad Sugars

To your culture-creating success, Bryan

P.S. Though it should go without saying, before you do anything else you should foster a highly ethical business environment. Without an ethical foundation, everything else will be overshadowed.

It is much harder to leave security than it is to take a risk.

In Thomas Stanley’s book, The Millionaire Next Door, he points out that the profile of your average millionaire generally includes getting FIRED from his previous job and starting his own business. That’s right, the ultra-risk-taking macho entrepreneur millionaire you know generally became successful because, quite literally, he had no other option. Of course their are the guys, like me, who seemed to have everything going well but that just wasn’t enough and we had to venture out on our own and forge our own paths in business and in life. But don’t kid yourself, that give-up-something-great-to-get-something-better mentality is the VAST exception.

Keep that in mind the next time you’re reading a book or blog by a successful person who just happens to be in the minority who was just naturally programmed to never except “good enough”. If that’s not you, you need to learn how to get over your current “security” in order to venture out on a “risk”. (I put both of those in quotes because they’re often not reality, but just figments of our imagination.)

So for the majority of people who have a job, house, family, car payments and a steady income, how do you decide to make the jump and take the risk of leaving your steady paycheck behind and trying something else?

1. Risk-taking is just a lack of knowledge. – If buying a business, writing a book, starting a band, quitting your job to take a new one or just being the first one at your work to try a ground-breaking new idea seems like a risk to you, then you simply need to study more. You need to make sure you understand how to take that business to a level of profitability before you buy it. You need to know how to effectively market your book or band and develop a following. You need to know that you have options for your livelihood before you tell your boss off and walk away (something I never recommend). And if you’re simply trying to get everyone at work to get out of their rut and change, you better be able to backup your reason for the change with some hard evidence as you’ll undoubtedly be met with nay-sayers. Whatever it is, you can always trace an increase in risk to a lack of knowledge on the subject matter and vice-versa. Let me make this even more clear. If you consider a “standard” medical operation like removing an appendix as safe, would you consider the same operation under the same conditions safe if it was performed by your plumber? What’s the difference? The risk is mitigated when the procedure is undertaken by a knowledgeable doctor.
2. Hedge your bet. – One of the cardinal rules of marketing is ONLY the consumer knows if the marketing is effective or not. They vote on their choice for great marketing by spending money. The same is true in almost any venture where you’re going out on your own. You really don’t KNOW that your customers, readers, listeners or coworkers are going to love the idea until it’s out there, right? Well then, in addition to becoming knowledgeable, make sure you have a backup plan… Or 2 or 3. Of course we all know of the stories of people overcoming impossible odds to make their ideas work. Heck, the entire 3m success can be built on the concept of passionate people overcoming all odds to bring their ideas to fruition. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team as a sophomore. Albert Einstein’s first 2 graduate thesis’ were rejected. A successful business owner friend of mine told me he was turned down by 27 banks before finding one who would loan him money for his first business. My point is not to throw the towel in because of adversity. My point is that consumers are impossible to predict, so if you’re going to bet the farm on an untried idea, you better have a few tried and true ideas in your back pocket to fall back on. Most entrepreneurs you speak with will tell you about their myriad failures that were necessary before becoming successful. They always had another plan and another way to succeed. Even at 3m where a culture of risk-taking and never accepting no is programmed into the culture, everyone knows there’s little risk of losing your job for pursuing that passionate idea. In other words, 3m developed that culture with a built-in hedged bet to encourage innovation.
   
3. What is your time worth? – Though this is third item, this one is the most important. Most people grossly over-estimate what they’re capable of in a year but also grossly under-estimate what they’re capable of in 10 years. So what does that mean? We are likely to set goals for the next year that are unreachable but then either not set goals for longer-term or set drastically underestimated goals. If you always spend less than you make, you will never run out of money. But no matter what you do, you will run out of time. So how do you determine if you’re going to stay at your current job, position, or business? If you’re learning on a regular basis from those around you AND your given an opportunity to express your own talents and ideas then stay. The former is more important than the latter, but you should be able to do both. Keep in mind that you should be learning things that you couldn’t otherwise learn on your own. Notice, I did not say that you have fun at work or you have a reasonable wage with lots of perks. Those temporary benefits are important for someone who will live forever and so has plenty of time to find something better later on. However, if you’re not immortal, and you’re not learning at work on a regular basis, it’s time to move on. The reason for this is because with the knowledge you can be learning at an underpaying job, you can leverage that at your next job, business, or passion. That’s why people underestimate what they’re capable of in 10 years. It’s sometimes challenging for us to step outside of our situation today, whether good or bad, and view it as a step forward or backward in our 10 year goals because we’re just trying to make it day-to-day.

If after evaluating your situation, you’ve now determined that it’s most likely time to move-on, check out a few of my other blogs that might help you get started:

The most important life lesson, and the key to success…

Why not?

The first 3 steps to becoming wealthy

To your success, Bryan

P.S. If the concept of setting 10-year, or even 1-year, goals is a bit foreign to you, check out my blog on The 3 steps to become successful at anything…

Oh… You don’t have any customer complaints? Right. I don’t either. This is just for other business owners…  Now that we have that out of the way… Let’s go through our 4 step process for converting complaining customers to raving fans.

This may be the quickest and simple business “fix” I’ve ever discussed and yet may have the greatest impact, so be sure to implement this immediately!

1. Convince your team to get “on-board” – This step is easy. At your weekly Team Meeting present your team with the number of new customers in the last year who had some sort of previous service experience with your business before purchasing. These would be referrals, current customers making another purchase, leads generated by your service department, or if you have a franchise like me, possibly people who have dealt with your franchise somewhere else. In my business, about 60% of our new sales in 2009 came from people who had heard something about our service. What!? You don’t track your lead sources??? For now you’ll have to guesstimate at this number. Then simply ask your team, “Why are customer complaints bad for us and how many people do you think are affected by each customer complaint?” My team’s answers ranged from 3-30 people. Since I like numbers, they expected me to have an exact number for them. I did not. I just pointed out that even if only 3 people hear about each instance of poor customer service, how many potential new customers are we losing each year? They got the point.
2. Track Customer Complaints – I don’t care if people are upset you gave them a bad haircut, cheated them out of money with outrageous lawyer fees, think your plumber smelled repulsive, or just doesn’t understand your bills. If the customer is complaining, it’s a complaint. Now that we’ve defined what constitutes a complaint, we need to actually track them. In my office, the same software we use for lead-tracking, scheduling, conversations, and billing has an option to track Customer Complaints along with the contact, time, details, and follow-up person. We can then run reports on all of the complaints by department and/or a time frame.
3. Address and Fix the problem – All customer complaints should immediately be assigned to someone who can fix the problem. Of course, that person should then fix the problem and update the details of the complaint in your software program. The customer should be notified by telephone about your resolution. Moreover, we address every customer complaint at the weekly Team Meeting in order to keep everyone abreast of poor customer service issues and to come up with ways to prevent issues in the future.
4. Send a “Thank You” letter – Have you ever been upset at a business? After voicing your dissatisfaction, did you have a few of those companies address and fix your problem? Now, of all of the instances where you actually had your complaint corrected to your satisfaction, have you EVER received a letter afterward thanking you for continuing to be a valued customer??? Me neither. My customers, however, have. It’s a weekly responsibility for one of my office administrators to run a report of the customer complaints, print it out for me to review, and then create “Thank You” letter addressed to each customer. Obviously each letter includes coupons to encourage them to patronize us in the future and almost universally those coupons get used. Can you afford to NOT send those letters and risk losing a long-term paying customer at the cost of $.50 per letter??? As Team Leader, I sign each letter.

Now what about those instances where the complaint isn’t justified, wasn’t our fault, or the customer is quite frankly someone we’d rather not have as a customer any longer? Well whoever takes care of Step 3 should have the foresight to determine that and “resolve” the issue accordingly. I’m a firm believer that not all customers are profitable and certainly don’t want to encourage the customers who suck the life out of my team and I to come back. Moreover, when I review the Customer Complaint report in Step 4, if any are “unjustified” I cross them off the list and so don’t send a letter.

I’ll point this out once again, people who are upset enough about something to complain will tell their friends and family about their dissatisfaction. If you don’t address, resolve, and then follow-up with a “Thank You” letter, your business is undoubtedly losing potential new customers and long-term existing customers.

To your “customer-loyalty” success, Bryan