The biggest thing I miss not running Toy House is my staff. I miss the daily interactions. I miss the camaraderie. I miss the laughter and jokes. I miss the smile stories we shared at the beginning of each staff meeting. I miss the “Aha” moments during those staff meetings when light bulbs went off or new ideas sunk in.
This was one of our staff meetings where we discussed different toys for special needs.
Of all the things we accomplished at Toy House over the years I am most proud of creating a team that other people recognized for being at the pinnacle of what retail is all about. The day we announced our closing I fielded several phone calls from people wanting to know how soon they could start hiring away my staff. Every single caller said the same thing … “I know the quality of people you have on your team …”
A few weeks ago a wise woman said,
“The greatest thing we can give is good people back to society.” -Mary Ben Woolbright
She was talking about being parents as we watched a mutual friend’s daughter graduate college. She could very well be talking about our role as managers of people, too.
Mike Rowe does a television show about Dirty Jobs, but we all know retail and its kin sister, food service, are the lowest rungs on the employee food chain.
If nothing else, we owe it to our staff to give them the tools to better their lives, whether that’s through education, learning new skills, or simply learning how to be “good people”. If we don’t do that for them, we do them and our business a disservice.
If we do that for them, we create a culture where everything is possible, where people want to work, people want to shop, people want to be. If we do that for them, we give good people back to society and help individuals achieve their dreams.
This is a mindset. Not every employer has that mindset (but wouldn’t it be great if they did?) If you don’t have that mindset, tomorrow’s post won’t be for you.
If you do have a similar mindset, tomorrow I will share with you some of the things I did to try to give good people back to society (hint: it helps to start with good people in the first place, but then you have to nurture it, too.)
This mindset served my team well. Every person on my team that wanted work, found it quickly, and in many cases found better work than even I could offer them. It also served my customers well. That’s why my phone was ringing off the hook. Other employers liked the standards we set and wanted the people who met those standards.
When I look back on 2017, that is what makes me happiest.
PS Go read my free eBook Understanding Your Brand in the Free Resources section of my website. I’ll reference it tomorrow, but to give you a heads up, you can read it today.
PPS Please forgive my humble brag. We weren’t perfect. Far from it. There are so many things I wish I had done better. So many things I left undone (or even unstarted). I wasn’t always the best boss. One thing that made it work, though, was that we always strove to be better. Start with that. Start with where you are right now and figure out small incremental steps to get better. You’ll be amazed how quickly steps turn into leaps.
Back in the early 1990’s I ran a wilderness trip program out at YMCA Storer Camps. I had a team of trip leaders who would plot out backpacking, biking, rock climbing, and canoeing trips around the Midwest and Ontario. One of the planning stages for the trip leaders was to build an itinerary showing what they would be doing each day, where they would be camping each night, and what goals they hoped to accomplish on the trip.
Papa Moose and family on the Missinaibi River, Northern Ontario 1987
Before each trip I would go through their itinerary with them, making sure the trip looked sound on paper. Then I would have them fold up the itinerary, place it in a Ziploc bag, and stick it in the bottom of their rucksack to only pull out if necessary.
Rarely if ever did a trip turn out exactly as it was written on paper. Flat tires, flash flooding, lost canoes, or other unexpected obstacles would always throw the itinerary off track. Sometimes the itinerary had to be adjusted to meet the needs of the group. One of my bike trips added an extra 100 miles to their trip because the kids had the skills to make that extra jaunt. There was always something.
What I learned through this exercise was one simple lesson—the future will not turn out exactly as you planned.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan for it. The two most important days of the itinerary were the first and last. The first set the tone, the last got you home. What happened in between was subject to change at a moment’s notice. A skilled trip leader knew when to adjust the itinerary to make the trip fun for everyone. A skilled trip leader expected to make changes mid-stream and was prepared to do so.
So here is my best New Year’s advice to you.
2018 will not turn out how you planned.
I’m not being a Debby Downer here. In fact, 2018 may surpass all your wildest dreams. Or it may take a hard 90-degree turn down a path you never imagined that might be the best path you ever could take. It may be close to what you thought, but there will be plot-twists, obstacles, detours, re-routes, and even a dead-end or two along the way.
That’s okay.
It is impossible for you to foresee that much of the future to meet every challenge perfectly prepared, knowing what will happen before it happens. (If you had that skill, you likely wouldn’t be reading my blog.)
With that said, you still need to plan your itinerary. You still need to plot out where you are today and where you want to be at the end of the year. You still need to put down a plan for how you will get from Point A to Point B. Without a plan, I can promise you won’t get anywhere close to Point B.
A skilled retailer will plan the following:
Marketing: What events, what advertisements, what other ways will you draw traffic to your store? At the same time, how will you measure new, unforeseen opportunities as they come along? What will you need to see to jump at an opportunity or take a risk with your advertising and marketing?
Staff Training: What skills do you want your staff to learn and strengthen in 2018? At the same time, how will you deal with the sudden change should you lose a key employee or two along the way?
Customer Service: Where are the holes in the service you provide and how will you raise the bar for 2018? At the same time, how will you spot new opportunities to surprise and delight customers in the future as their bar of expectation rises as well?
Inventory Management: How will you raise margins and turn ratios (to increase cash flow) while keeping prices attractive and keeping enough inventory on the shelf to maintain sales levels? At the same time, how will you respond to fads? What criteria will you use to jump in whole hog when something is going hot (or jump out quickly when something has died?)
A skilled retailer like a skilled trip leader knows that the goal is to start the year out on the right foot and make it to the finish line intact. What happens in between will never match the plan, but if you’re prepared, will be a helluva lot of fun.
PS Those four categories will be the main focus of this blog for 2018. My goal for the New Year is to prepare you to see the opportunities, the detours, the 90-degree turns, the obstacles, and the dead-ends for what they are so that you can navigate through them or around them. Sound good?
When I was a kid, I loved riddles. I especially loved the gotcha riddles where if you didn’t pay attention to everything you were sure to get it wrong. One of my early favorites was,
“What weighs more? A pound of feathers or a pound of gold?”
Once I learned the devil was in the details, I would never answer a riddle until I heard it several times, always paying attention to every little detail. Another of my favorites was,
“You’re the driver of a bus. The bus goes west one mile before turning right. Then it travels two miles, drops off one person and picks up three. The bus turns right again and travels 4 miles, dropping off six and picking up five. The bus turns left and goes a half mile dropping off two and picking up nine. What is the bus driver’s name?”
Miss that first detail and you miss the whole riddle.
The Toy House Team during our Summer Fun Sale
This Friday, every year, was a detail day. Tomorrow you will be as busy as any day of your year. You’ll likely have to fight to get a break just to eat some cold leftovers (unless you were smart enough to cater lunch for the team). You’ll feel overwhelmed at times. You’ll feel pulled in several directions at once. The last thing you need tomorrow is to have to take care of problems that can be nipped in the bud today.
The night before a big day we replaced all the cash register receipt tape with fresh, full rolls. We checked the ink levels on the registers and in all of the pens nearby (and made sure there were plenty of pens nearby). We restocked all the giftwrap paper we used to wrap gifts and had extra rolls on standby. We checked all the tape dispensers, refilled all the staplers, and made sure there were plenty of our yellow note pads at every register and phone.
Those all seem like simple things that should be done every night, but on Friday nights especially, the team is tired and wants to go home. Those few minutes spent, however, make a huge difference when there are lines at the register the next day and everyone in line has somewhere else to be, too.
I’m not a detail guy by nature. But I understood at an early age the importance of paying attention to the details and seeing how they would payoff in the long run.
Tomorrow is going to rock and roll. You’ll have your moments. And if you take a little time tonight to take care of some little things, those little things will remain little things and not blow up into big things tomorrow.
PS Murphy’s Law states that the register will run out of receipt paper at the worst possible time. Doesn’t it always seem like it takes twice as long to change the paper when people are waiting in line staring at you than it does when no one is at the counter? That is stress making you feel that way. You have enough stress already. Eliminate that one before you even get started. You’ll have plenty of days in January to use those partial rolls of paper.
I hope someday to be world famous. I could almost say that I already am world famous. I do have a follower in Russia. I have another in Serbia and one in Austria. I have a couple followers from the southern hemisphere. I have shipped my Hiring and the Potter’s Wheel book overseas on several occasions. I’m not exactly a household name, but getting there.
Some places claim to be world famous on even less than that. Some places truly are world famous. I talked about two of them yesterday.
Here is another worth mentioning.
World Famous Pike Place Fish Market
Pike Place Fish Market, the retailer highlighted in the excellent training book FISH!, wasn’t world famous at one time. They were just a fish market in Seattle trying to carve out a niche in their market. Business was okay. Like every retailer on the planet, they wanted it to be more than okay. The staff and management got together and decided they wanted to be World Famous.
Deciding you want to be World Famous is powerful. Acting on that decision is the true magic.
When the team at the fish market made that decision, the first question that popped up was the one that would change their fortunes forever.
“What does a World Famous Fish Market look and act like?”
The simplest answer was that it doesn’t look and act like all the other fish markets out there. It does things differently.
A World Famous Retailer …
Offers services no other retailer in their industry offers
Treats customers better than they could ever imagine
Has hard-to-find products no one else sells
Makes an emotional connection with their customers
Makes people feel good about themselves, about their purchases, and about life in general
Is an experience, not just a shopping trip
Is prepared for crowds (heck, they are prepared for anything)
Foresees problems before they happen, and nips them in the bud
Fixes problems right away without hassle, and to a level better than the customer expected
Being World Famous is a mindset first, a recognition second, and a designation third. The path to World Famous is pretty simple. Decide you want to be world famous and do everything on that list consistently year-in-and-year-out, or open up a few thousand stores. Either way, you’ll become World Famous.
PS I was looking through one of the Memory Books we had for people to sign when they visited Toy House. (People love to sign books like that at World Famous locations, hint, hint.) Found this one …
“Awesome store! What a pleasant surprise! Greetings from the Netherlands, Europe”
Right below it was …
“Thank you for such a wonderful evening and such a wonderful store. -Amiye, Cairo Egypt”
You don’t have to be World Famous to act World Famous. Do the acting part first and the rest will take care of itself.
PPS You can call yourself World Famous before you actually are, but then you better perform like it. Anything less and the marketing will be all for naught.
Long distance runners and long distance swimmers know that somewhere in the middle of the race is where you separate the pros from the amateurs. The amateurs have either gone out too fast and really start to feel it in those middle miles, or their minds start to wander and they lose focus on their pace and strategy.
This is that midpoint for holiday retailers. The run from mid-November to Christmas is a marathon, with many peaks and valleys. The week of Thanksgiving is the start of the race. The week before Christmas is the final sprint to the finish. It is in these middle weeks where focus tends to wander off.
Hire fun-loving people and they’ll raise your attitude, too!
You’re tired. You’re a little down because the sales, while good a couple weeks ago, have ebbed a little prior to that final push. The hours are longer while the days are shorter, and it doesn’t seem like you have enough hours in the day to do everything you want to do. Plus, you have all those seasonal staff that aren’t quite up to the level you had hoped for them. You feel like you need to work on both their Attitude and their Aptitude.
If you have to choose between Attitude and Aptitude, choose Attitude first. Focus on raising your team’s overall cheerfulness, friendliness, and joy.
A customer will overlook the lack of skill of a friendly staff person trying her best much more than they will overlook the surly attitude of a competent but frantic or unhappy staff person who acts like she doesn’t want to be there.
Plus, when you raise the the level of positive energy in the store, you make your staff better prepared for learning new skills.
How do you “raise attitudes?”
Check your own. The staff feeds off of you. If you’re still showing a happy, cheerful, friendly demeanor, they are likely to be happy, cheerful, and friendly. If you’re showing the stress of the season, they’ll feed off that, too. You might have to fake it to make it. Go ahead and fake it. Do whatever you have to do to make sure you are the cheeriest of them all.
Praise them. Give your staff praise every time you see them do something well. Praise them early and often, even if they make a mistake. Praise the parts they did right. Praise is right up there with food and water as being essential to their well-being. Praise them and they’ll want to learn and do more for you to get more praise.
Ask them. Ask them how they are doing. Ask them what has been fun so far. Ask them what you can do to make it better for them. Asking shows that you care, especially when you listen to and act on the answers they give you. They will never care more than you. So the more you care, the higher the ceiling for them to meet.
Give them some small token of your appreciation. It can be food or snacks in the break-room, an unexpected gift card to a local restaurant, a gas card, a poinsettia (especially from the stash your sales reps have been giving you.) It doesn’t have to be expensive to be impactful. The act of being generous to them helps them to pay it forward to your customers.
Not only will doing those things raise the attitude of your team, they will help you raise your own attitude so that you don’t have to fake it. A truly good attitude will help you stay focused on the strategies you’ve laid out to be successful in these last couple weeks.
PS I have had competent and unhappy people on my team. I have had happy but not yet competent people on my team. I’ve never had a customer complain about the cheerful employee who tried but failed. I’ve had several customers complain about surly attitudes. An entrepreneur I met once, who has started several successful companies, had a simple hiring/firing philosophy … Fire the unhappy people.
In 1990 I wrote a description of Team Building practices to help my facilitators understand the process when working with our groups. My program at YMCA Storer Camps utilized low and high ropes course initiatives and rock climbing to foster team building. The goal of every group was to get to a new level of Trust among the members. Sometimes we got there, sometimes we didn’t.
That’s me leading a rock climbing expedition to Rattlesnake Point in the summer of 1991.
The process, however, was the key. Even the groups who never got to a level of fully trusting each other did learn to communicate better, did learn to cooperate better, and saw the power of coordinated effort. Those are often seen as the Three C’s of Team Building.
I want to add a fourth C to that list, one that I think is most important …
Caring.
That was the differentiating characteristic between groups that made it to Trust and groups that did not. Only when a group started to put the needs of others ahead of their own did they show they cared. Only when a group looked at everyone’s emotional and physical safety as being the top concern did they show they cared.
Caring was the stepping stone to Trust.
You don’t get to Caring easily. It takes a whole bunch of other C’s. You have to first become Comfortable with each other. Then you have to learn to Communicate effectively. Then you have to learn how to Coordinate your efforts and Cooperate with each other. Even then, Caring is not a certainty.
When I was training my facilitators we often talked about the Transformation. Caring happened when the focus of the group shifted from “getting to the end of the task” to “getting everyone to the end of the task.“ Caring happened when inclusiveness was more important than successfully completing a task, even though inclusiveness was often the best way to complete a task
There are several ways to complete any task. The first is to have a powerful, talented individual who gets the group to the end line through sheer brute force of their abilities and/or leadership. The second is to have every member included, every member supported, and every member working together. The former disappears as soon as the individual leader is gone. The latter stays around and becomes the culture that continues success even as the parts change.
That’s why our true goal of every team building activity was to cross over the bridge from Cooperating to Caring. That leap was where the transformation occurred and changed the culture of the team. The step from Caring to Trust was much shorter and easier.
Of course, this was all theory from my own practices and observations in Team Building, until Google went about proving it.
Google did research of their teams to see if they could figure out why some teams were more successful than others. They found “five key dynamics that set successful teams apart”. Those five key dynamics in order of importance are:
Psychological safety
Dependability
Structure and clarity
Meaning
Impact
Psychological Safety is Caring. It is making the group and the individuals within the group feel supported. A group of individuals who are feeling supported are more willing to think out of the box and take better risks, which leads to better performance in the long run. This was the most important dynamic for successful teams.
Dependability is Trust. In team building terms, we get to Trust after we get to Caring. But once we get there, we have the two most important dynamics found in Google’s study.
The other three items on the list match up nicely with Daniel H. Pink’s book Drive and his three keys to motivation. Pink says your team needs:
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose
Structure and Clarity is the same as Autonomy in that you have given your team the guidelines to do what they need to do and have left them to do it within those guidelines. Micromanaging takes away that structure and clarity because everyone is second-guessing the rules, waiting for you to change them on the fly.
Meaning and Impact are the Purpose of what you are doing. Make sure your team always knows Why you do what you do and how that affects the customers and the company.
Google’s research is fascinating because it confirms exactly what I started teaching 27 years ago, and validates everything Daniel H. Pink wrote in his book about motivation.
So how do you get that kind of a team?
First, hire individuals who care about others, who show empathy. Caring is a tough character trait to teach, so look for it in your applicants.
Second, train them. Team building doesn’t have to be a corporate-retreat-three-day-weekend-activity. Team building can happen over the long run, fostered by the other C’s of being Comfortable, Communicating, Cooperating, and Coordinating. Work on those skills in your training. The better your team learns to communicate and cooperate, the more likely the leadership of those who care will take the team to the next level. You’ll see the transformation when it happens.
PS Yes, I still do Team Building for groups when you want to kickstart the process. I also do training for Managers, teaching them the basics of Team Building and how to foster short-term and long-term growth in their team. The cool thing is Google just confirmed that what I have been teaching creates the most effective, successful teams.
PPS What should you do about your team members who don’t care about others? Unless you have a job where they work completely on their own with no interaction with the team or the customers, fire them and start over. Seriously. They’ll never serve your customers the way your customers want to be served. They’ll never let the team get to its highest level of productivity. They’ll never grow your business. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Google.
We all meet interesting people from time to time. For one year I had a person enter my life that gave me a world’s worth of perspective. At the time he was the store manager of one of the big-box discounters in town. While our sons shared activities together, he shared amazing information not only about his store, but about all the big-box discounters in town. It was eye-opening to say the least.
If you have only recently found this blog, you should know that I am a big believer in calculating and understanding your overall market size for your category and knowing your share of that market. The easiest way to find the size of your market is to find national numbers for your industry, divide by the US population and multiply that result times your market population.
For instance, if you are in a $20 billion industry, divide that by 323 million people in the USA to get $62/person. If your market is 150,000 people, then multiply $62 x 150,000 to get a market size of $9.3 million. You can adjust that number up or down based on your local economy (your average household income versus the national average). You can also adjust for other factors like geography (more boats are likely to be sold in Michigan or Florida than Nebraska), or demographics (your percentage of children compared to the national average if your category is marketed primarily to children). It gives you a rough estimate, that if you calculate the same way year after year shows you exactly where you stand in your market.
I’ve been doing this in the Jackson market for decades and measuring our share over the years.
My big-box friend handed me numbers of what the big-box stores were doing in toy sales in our market. Adding them up, the math fit what I already knew about the size of the market in Jackson. The part that made my heart flutter was knowing that I was doing more in my single store than any one of those big guys.
Is it a Vase or Two Faces?
Here’s the perspective part …
All of these stores do way more volume overall than I do because they also sell grocery, clothing, hardware, electronics, and household goods among other stuff. All of these stores have way more traffic on a daily, weekly, monthly basis than I could ever imagine. All of these stores run weekly sales and discounts with huge flyers in every Sunday’s paper to go with their national TV campaigns and other advertising efforts. All of these stores focus on the hottest TV-advertised toys every year, adding the vendors’ marketing efforts to their own. All of these stores get full-blown media coverage, too.
Think about that last one for a second. This holiday season you are going to hear stories about Amazon, Walmart, and Target. All. The. Time. You are going to hear about their sales. You are going to hear about their overall volume. You are going to hear about their strategies to draw more traffic (more discounting—you read it hear first!) Your customers are going to hear all that, too.
Yet locally, without the discounting, without the hot items for your industry, without the national TV campaign and Sunday flyers and vendors marketing for you, without all the grocery-driven traffic, without all the media hype, you’re going to stand toe-to-toe with these big giants and still do amazing numbers in your category, maybe even equal or better than they do individually.
When people tell you it is all about price, and that discounting is the only way to get sales, go ahead and nod your head in agreement until those uninformed people walk away. Then remember that a guy in a small, depressed, blue-collar city in Michigan with all the inherent disadvantages was able to beat all the big guys through better service, better staff, product knowledge, smarter marketing, and higher prices.
PS Calculating Market Size and Market Share can be incredibly helpful, even if your business is growing. If your market is getting bigger, but your share is decreasing, then even though you are growing, you are still losing out to competitors. Something needs to be fixed. It can also help you understand why sales are decreasing and when to get out of the market. We saw our market shrink to a size that wouldn’t sustain us in our current model. Our options were to shrink to fit the market, move to a different market, or close. We chose the latter so that I could spend my time helping a bigger market … you!
PPS That store manager left Jackson the year after we met to run a larger store in another part of the country, but not before leaving me with a wealth of knowledge and a perspective for which I am eternally grateful.
We sold a ton of dot-to-dot books over the years. I bought them by the number count – 10, 20, 50, 75, even 100-count dot-to-dots. I loved dot-to-dots as a child. My favorite was to try to guess the picture before putting pencil to paper, seeing the image in my mind. A few years ago there were some dot-to-dots designed for adults with up to 1000 dots in a single picture. (Yes, you needed a magnifying glass and a super thin mechanical pencil to do some of the more complex pictures.)
Today I want to connect a few dots for you in the hiring process.
If you have read my book Hiring and the Potter’s Wheel, you know that to find the best employees you need to find the right character traits for the job. For instance, if you are hiring a sales person, you want someone friendly, engaging, and able to solve problems. If you are hiring a bookkeeper you want someone organized, detail-oriented, and task-driven. The best person for the job has to bring those traits to the position. You can’t train those.
Yet, the first thing I do when I work with a client to help them write a job description and list of the traits they need to hire for a specific position is talk to the client about his or her personal Core Values. If you are the boss, the owner, the final decision maker, your Core Values become your company’s Core Values. What is important to you personally will be what is important to you professionally. It is where you will spend your most time, energy, and focus. Roy H. Williams and David Freeman taught me that.
It is not just enough that the people you hire possess the traits necessary to be successful on the job. To truly become an asset on your team, they need to share some of the same values you and your business share.
The Toy House Character Diamond – our Core Values that drive our business.
For example, my core values are Having Fun, Helpful, Educational and Nostalgic. While it isn’t important that you match those values perfectly, the more you match, the better we will get along.
Fortunately for me, a toy store attracted mostly people who like to Have Fun. I also hired specifically for the trait of being Helpful. My office manager had traits I will never have of being ultra-organized and detail-oriented. But she also was amazinglyHelpful. On top of that, she celebrated the seasons and holidays even more than I did. My key jack-of-all-trades guy had a level of Curiosity that surpassed my own. My event planner took Nostalgia to new levels and was always trying to Teach others. One of the most common phrases I heard her say was, “You can do that. Here, let me show you.”
When your staff doesn’t share your values, you get frustrated. You feel as if they don’t get you or what you are trying to do. Oh, they get you. They just don’t put as much value on the things most important to you. They may have all the other traits perfect for the job and may even be performing to a high level based on those traits, but if you don’t value the same things, you’ll always feel disappointed by them.
Connect the dots.
I saw a snippet of a training my good buddy Tim Miles did for business leaders managing their people. The slide had three words. “Walk the talk.” Tim goes on to tell you that you have to be consistent in what you say to your team and what you do personally. We all know that hypocrisy causes distrust. The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do style of leadership doesn’t last very long. The strongest organizations are those where the leaders walk the talk. Your Core Values come into play here, as well.
When you let your Core Values guide you, you will always walk the talk, because you are starting and ending with the very essence of your being. Your consistency will never be questioned because even in moments of stress, your Core Values will guide everything you do. Your staff will know exactly where you stand at all times.
When Tim mentions that you should walk the talk, he isn’t saying that you have to have done every single thing you ask your staff to do. He is asking that you lead through consistency, that your actions match your words. I don’t like filing papers away. I hired a bookkeeper who loves filing papers away. What we both share is a deep desire for being helpful. It isn’t as important that I know how to file as it is that I show her I will be helpful to her and ask that she be helpful to me in return. Her way of helping me is by doing the stuff I cannot or don’t want to do. It just so happens that she has the traits of being organized, detail-oriented, and task-driven to go along with the value of being Helpful.
Connect the dots.
Daniel H. Pink, in his book Drive, says that to get the best out of your employees you need to offer them three things—Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Autonomy allows them to do the job their way without the feeling of being micro-managed. Mastery means they are getting the opportunity to gain skills, learn, and become proficient at the task. Purpose means they understand why they are doing what they are doing.
Your Core Values come into play here as well. Of the three motivational elements, Mastery and Purpose are easy. Give them training and experience and feedback and they’ll become masters. Purpose is simply understanding your Core Values and what greater goal you’re trying to accomplish. Autonomy is the hardest of the three.
For you to be the kind of boss who checks in with your employees rather than checking on your employees, you have to develop a level of trust. It is far easier to develop that trust with people who share your Core Values than it is without. You know at the end of the day that their inner voice speaks to them in a similar language as your inner voice, so you trust that their decision process, while maybe not as experienced as yours, will be similar enough to meet the goals of the organization. Autonomy is tough when you don’t trust the employee. Without it, you won’t get the highest level of productivity. As a side note, if you are quick to trust, but your values don’t meet, you might get the wrong kind of productivity.
Connect the dots and you will see how your Core Values come into play in creating your own Dream Team.
PS Go back and look at all the best teams you’ve ever been a part of. I can promise that you’ll find the individual members of the team shared many of the same core values. It took me a while to notice that in my own life, but in hindsight it is as easy to see as the arrow in the FedEx logo.
PPS When I say shared values, they don’t always have to be a perfect match. My jack-of-all-trades guy had the value of Curiosity. Not exactly the same as my value of Education, but close enough to be the kind of fit that made our team rock.
I’ve been looking at different job titles and job descriptions lately. The two that seem to grab my attention the most are the Marketing & Advertising jobs and the Managing People jobs. At first glance I figured I was drawn to those because those were two of my favorite things to do at Toy House.
Another thought hit me this morning on my drive home from dropping my son off at school.
Those two different jobs are really the same thing. Stop and think about it.
Awesome Customer Service is about figuring out your customer’s expectations and then exceeding them with surprise and delight.
Top-Level Selling is about figuring out your customer’s needs and then fulfilling them better than she expected.
Powerful Advertising is about figuring out your customer’s desires and then offering a solution better than she expected.
Amazing Events are about figuring out what your customer likes and then offering her more than she expects when she attends.
Incredible Managing is about figuring out what tools your team needs to be successful and then giving them better tools that take them beyond what they thought was possible.
It’s all the same thing.
Figure out what she desires, needs, and expects.
Give her more than she desires, needs, and expects.
That is the formula for a successful retail business. That is the formula for a successful service company. That is the formula for successful manufacturer. That is the formula for a successful advertising campaign. That is the formula for successfully managing your team. That is the formula for being successful as an employee.
The first part requires research. The first part is about studying human nature, watching market trends, thinking like a customer. The first part is about asking questions, listening, and analyzing what you hear. The first part is about testing and clarifying and testing some more. You’ll get it right some times and you’ll get it wrong some times. The better you do your research, the more often you will get it right.
The second part is about having that character trait in you that wants to help others. When you hire and train your team, look specifically for that trait and you’ll find the second part of the formula becomes second nature to your company. Your team will already want to give. You just have to show them what to give.
PS An employee that figures out exactly what the boss wants and then gives the boss more than she wants will always have a meaningful job. A manager that equips her team with tools to make them better than they thought possible will always find people wanting to work for her. A marketer that can figure out the true desires of the customer base and speak to those desires will always move the needle. A salesperson who can figure out the exact problem a customer is trying to solve and then offer a solution better than she envisioned will always make more sales. A manufacturer who anticipates the needs of both the end user and the middleman and sets up a business to exceed both their expectations will find growth.
PPS I answered my own question. My Core Values include Helping Others and Education. I already have that character trait of giving (that’s why I write this blog and publish all the Free Resources). The Education side of me wants to do the research to figure out what to give.
As I was putting my resume together, I was thinking back on some of the Team Building activities I have created over the years. My favorite one was the Drainage Ditch Determination. That was 26 years ago. I wish I still had the original notes. I know we didn’t call it by that name but I cannot remember exactly what we called it. I do remember the activity and the lessons. I can take you back there in a heartbeat.
(Thump-thump)
That’s me holding the ropes on a rock climbing trip back in 1991
After a day of basic team building activities, the group was given a new challenge. A handful of canoes needed to be transported at dusk from one location to another. The only map available showed a lake and a drainage ditch that led from their current location to the destination (approx 2 miles). The map also showed hiking trails leading to the destination (approx 2 miles) but had the disclaimer that although the trails were well-defined, they were unmarked (and crisscrossed the region.)
The group was then split into four subsets.
Leadership. They got the final decision on what the group did.
Logistics and Planning. They were responsible for determining the options, presenting them to the Leadership group, and making sure everyone had what they needed to complete the task.
Communication. One of the rules of the activity is that there was no verbal communication on open water. This group had to plan out all communication and how it would be implemented including internally and externally.
Safety. They had veto power over all the other groups if ever they felt an activity was unsafe. They also had to set the parameters for safety such as wearing life jackets in the canoes, etc.
The challenge itself was fairly straightforward. The most obvious choice based on the information given was to paddle the canoes as far as possible and carry them the 40-50 yards necessary to the final destination. What the map didn’t make clear was the difficulties traversing the drainage ditch because it didn’t show the barbed wire fence or culvert obstacles to be overcome. What made it even more interesting is that the activity began at dusk. By the time the group reached the drainage ditch, it was fairly dark and only one flashlight was permitted.
You can probably see where this activity went. The first issue usually arose on the lake when members of the group realized some of them didn’t know how to paddle a canoe (and they had no verbal communication for giving on-the-spot instruction.) We had eye-opening conversations about the importance of making sure everyone has the basic skills necessary to complete a task and whether that was a leadership problem or a logistics problem.
Once in the drainage ditch, issues of safety, logistics, and decision making all came into play. On top of that, there was the issue of perseverance.
One group I facilitated got within ten feet of a split rail fence. Their destination was just on the other side of that fence, but because of major breakdowns in communication, concerns for safety (emotional and physical), and low morale, Leadership threw in the towel. We had a powerful talk about what to do when morale falters, and the importance of emotional safety. (Note: it was the right decision for them to quit when they did. In Team Building, completing the task is always secondary to safety and never necessary to learn the lessons.)
Even the groups that successfully completed the task had breakdowns along the way. It was in the failures that the best learning occurred.
We had discussions about how the division of powers, while fine on paper, tended to be fallacy in practice. Everyone had to be on board for safety. Everyone had to be on board with the logistics and plans. Everyone had to be on board with the communication. Leadership simply had to make sure everyone was on board. If someone didn’t understand or didn’t want to go along with the group, completing the activity was in jeopardy.
We had discussions about the importance of Leadership listening as much as leading. When Leadership didn’t listen to Safety or Logistics, that group was doomed to failure.
We had discussions about the importance of being able to stay calm and solve problems when unforeseen obstacles got in their way. Climbing out of a canoe in a drainage ditch to avoid a barbed wire fence in the dark was a challenge most people had never faced. One group mapped out a new policy for unforeseen obstacles for the next time they faced one on their real job (they were a group of Resident Advisors for a college dormitory.)
Back in 1991 my boss and I facilitated several groups through this activity that ranged from high school groups to the corporate leaders at Domino’s Pizza (including Tom Monaghan himself). I doubt the insurance companies would allow such activities any more.
Good thing you and I can still learn the lessons from the groups lucky enough to slog through that ditch.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”-Eleanor Roosevelt/Groucho Marx/Sam Levinson (depending which quote site you prefer)
PS One thing I have always found head-scratching in business is the knee-jerk reaction to immediately fire someone who screws up. Screw-ups happen. Wouldn’t it be better to keep the person who has already learned the lesson the hard way rather than hire a new person who hasn’t yet learned that same lesson? Just some food for thought.
PPS You might recognize the subset groups better by their corporate names
Leadership = Management
Logistics and Planning = Sales and HR
Communication = Marketing
Safety = Legal
Go back and plug those words into the post and see how those lessons become even more apparent.
It’s all the same thing.