Tag Archives: Leadership

How Do You Forge an Effective Relationship with a Buyer? Five Points

Situation: A CEO’s Company was recently acquired. She is getting little, if any, guidance from the acquiring company in terms of leadership or management of her former company. What does the group recommend that she do? How do you forge an effective relationship with a buyer?
Advice from the CEOs:
• You’re Lucky: We all wish we had that problem. Many buyers interfere with the operations of the acquired company and make the transition very difficult. This leads to all sorts of problems including employee departures.
• Employee Feedback: Hold an employee meeting, gather their thoughts and concerns, forward those to senior management. This demonstrates a willingness to work with the buyer to forge the best relationship possible.
• Memo: Draft a memo with all of your thoughts, options, and recommendations, send it to the management of the acquiring company and you have satisfied your moral responsibility. No guilt.
• Consult: You may end up consulting to new management sent to you by the buyer to help them figure out how to evolve from practitioners/managers to full-time managers.
• Don’t Worry: The purchase was a good deal to you because you were able to negotiate a favorable deal for yourself and your managers. The future is more a concern for the purchaser than it is for you.

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How Do You Develop and Train Leaders? Ten Suggestions

Situation: Many CEOs face challenges developing and training leaders within their ranks. What guidance can the group give to help guide them improve leadership development? How do you develop and train leaders?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • On the hiring end, pick good people and support them.
  • Empower employees and encourage self-management.
  • Constructively manage the company’s growth rate rather than just “grow as much as you can.” Some growth rates are unsustainable.
    • Estimate the risks and rewards.
    • Consider the pros and cons of growth and manage growth to maximize the pros while minimizing the cons.
  • Respect personality types – not everyone is or wants to be a potential leader.
  • Mentoring – pair leadership candidates with proven leaders.
  • “Response to error” is one of the key values to define. If errors are always used to evaluate individuals, people tend to hide their mistakes or deflect blame. If errors are viewed as a “company resource”, people are more willing to bring them out into the open. Furthermore properly addressing errors are the best opportunity for correction and improvement.
  • Design the compensation system to reward both innovation and leadership.
    • Focus rewards on long-term results. For example, reward sales people on follow-up and quality of service or product actually delivered rather than on just booking the sale.
    • Align rewards with company culture and objectives. This may include profits, sales and production. Alternatives to consider – team vs. individual goals and bonuses, process improvement vs. focus on dollars, and percent of salary represented by bonus or award.
  • Ask the employees what is important to them. Don’t try to guess.
  • Evaluate and adjust the company’s career growth opportunities.
  • Make management thoughts and goals visible. Mentor the next level of management by demonstrating executive thought patterns rather than just sharing the final decision.

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How Do You Improve Your Time Management Skills? Four Recommendations

Situation: A CEO is finding that reduction in staff over the last two years combined with expansion of business have left her in a quandary trying to manage too much. While the prospects of bring in new staff are improving, she wants to improve her time management skills to support company growth. How do you improve your time management skills?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Delegation and communication around delegation is about “monkey” management – getting the monkeys off you back and onto the backs of others. In addition, it’s about not letting others put inappropriate monkeys on your back.
  • Think about the difference between:
    • Empowerment versus involving yourself in all aspects of the business.
    • Empowerment is more effective and frees up time to focus on new opportunities and growth.
    • Involving yourself everywhere quickly leads to a time crunch and is less effective.
  • Set quarterly goals for yourself, just as you set quarterly goals for the company. This drives achievement and growth. It helps you to:
    • Clarify your role – where you should be focusing your time, and to
    • Let go.
  • Think of your staff as your customers. Like customers, the more you give and recognize them, the more they love you. Effectively, this is serving your staff just as you serve customers. This is called Servant Leadership and builds both empowered employees and great employee loyalty.

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How Do You Continually Raise the Bar on Personal Performance? Five Points

Situation: A CEO is continually focusing on company performance to improve results and efficiency. At the same time, she wants to assure that she is always raising the bar on her own performance as an example to both management and employees. What advice do you have for this CEO? How do you continually raise the bar on personal performance?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Take a lesson from Marcus Buckingham’s book – Now Discover Your Strengths. The Gallup Organization is a leader in social science research on performance. Rule #1 is to focus on improving and sharpening strengths, not on overcoming or improving areas that are not so strong.
    • Look for ways that your strengths complement each other and build on these combinations. This will naturally raise performance and will also bring greater satisfaction.
  • Build personal objectives that will help to sharpen your strengths.
  • Conversely, develop work-arounds for those areas which are not as strong. Look for talent among the others in the organization that address areas where you are not as strong.
    • Have them assist you in work pertaining to these areas.
    • They will enjoy this work because it complements their strengths, and the company will gain the results that are needed. It also allows them to excel in areas where they are the strongest.
  • Take time to reflect and to recharge your batteries. Check your direction and make sure that you are heading in a direction that compliments your long-term goals.
    • Make sure that you are focusing on the right priorities for YOU.
  • Find a mentor – in or outside of your industry. Someone with experience who can provide you with guidance and clarity as you address both day-to-day and long-term challenges.

How Do You Manage Culture as You Grow? Six Solutions

Situation: A tech company has grown to twenty people. The CEO is concerned that if they grow much beyond this their culture will start to change. The principal question is whether team leadership structure will remain tight and focused, while teams will continue to be flexible and have fun. How do you manage culture as you grow?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Other companies have grown to twice this size and continue to increase their number of employees.
    • One uses component owners as leads, with people under them. Leads are more technical than managers and aren’t expected to be superb managers.
    • They grow middle managers organically instead of hiring from outside.
    • If an individual’s plate is full, give them the ability to delegate work to an up and comer.
  • Active communication has number limits.
    • The optimal functioning group is 7-12; higher functioning teams are even smaller with 7-8 members.
    • Create flexible teams that maintain communication pathways and culture.
    • Consider using reconfigurable space.
  • When one company grew from 25 to 60, they noticed that at 30 people it became difficult to track people; they needed to develop systems and internal management tools.
    • Much more attention was needed on sales forecasting and expense elasticity. The solution was to study peaks and valleys and built a model that could function within historic peak /valley limits.
  • How do you maintain the contractor pool?
    • Keep a list and actively communicate with them about current and anticipated needs.
    • One company’s rule: consultants are 100% billable – functionally they are only able to realize 98%, but the rule keeps this number high.
  • Use contractor pools to supplement project tasks. If your primary differentiating focus is on successfully closing projects, focus contractors on ramping new projects.
  • Hire people who embody you and your culture. Hire in your own image.

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How Do You Create a Value Proposition? A Three-Round Process

Situation: A company wants to effectively position itself for a recovery. The CEO believes that it is time to sit down with his team and focus on those areas which will help them to emerge during the recovery not only stronger than they were when the recession started, but ahead of their competition. How do you create a value proposition?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Creating your Value Proposition starts by analyzing and understanding your most important strength. Is it Product Leadership, Operational Excellence, or Customer Intimacy?
  • No company can succeed today trying to be all things to all people. Choosing one discipline as your most important strength is the choice of winners.
  • To set your Value Agenda, ask your team “How do we compete and win in our marketplace?” This is not a single discussion, but requires three rounds – best done as three different sessions.

o  Round 1 focuses on understanding where you stand in your marketplace.

o  Round 2 focuses on understanding what your customers perceive as your “unmatched value.”

o  Round 3 focuses on building an operating model that enhances your unmatched value and helps to consistently communicate this to your clientele.

  • Once the three rounds are completed, formulate the top findings of each round into your Value Agenda for the company.

o  A Value-Driven Operating Model gives your company the ability to deliver on your Value Proposition.

o  Your Value Discipline is the combination of operating model and value proposition that will allow you to be the best in your market.

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How Do You Discourage Personal Work on Company Time? Three Solutions

Situation: A company recently hired two employees. In their first weeks of work, they were observed using company computers, on company time, to do personal work – in one case to monitor a personal web-based business. What is the best way to communicate company policy to these individuals?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Everything starts with the orientation on the first day of employment and the atmosphere established in the first weeks of work.
    • Particularly in a small company, new employees should meet with the CEO whose job it is to describe the culture of the company, the vision for the future and broad expectations of the role and contributions expected from employees.
    • Matters concerning personal work on company time and with company equipment should be clearly addressed in the employee handbook. Key points should be reviewed by a representative of upper level management, along with a conversation to assure that these key points are clearly understood.
    • Particularly during the initial weeks of work, new employees should have frequent meetings with their immediate supervisors to assure that they have the resources they need, that any questions they have about their work are addressed, and that they are performing to company and role expectations.
  • Given what has been observed, you, as CEO, should definitely speak to them about the behavior observed, and give them the opportunity to explain what is happening.
    • Clarify expectations of all employees, and ask whether these individuals understand these expectations.
    • Document the meeting. If the behavior continues, take action.
  • What is being done by other employees, and is there a broader issue to be addressed? Are other employees behaving similarly? If so, the new employees may just be responding to what they perceive as allowable behavior within the company.
    • Start with a company meeting or a letter to all employees. Highlight relevant passages from the employee handbook, and speak in terms not only of company culture but of the destructive impact that this behavior has on company performance and viability. The future of everyone in the company is tied to company performance and success.

Key Words: Leadership, Team, Expectations, Personal Work, Company Time, Policy, Orientation, Culture, Expectations, Employee, Handbook, Evaluation Period, Supervision, Documentation

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How Do You Help Managers Think Bigger? Four Guidelines

Situation: A company is transitioning from a time and materials to a fixed price bid model. Estimators and project leads find this transition difficult. We need them to think like business managers. How do you help managers to see and think in terms of the big picture?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • First, set up a framework that repositions projects in a business framework.
    • All projects are business go/no decisions with expenses, minimum profitability targets, and incentives provided for beating initial projections.
    • This will help generate more consistency in bids and final gross margins per project.
  • Next, teach managers and employees industry and company standards within your new model.
    • Do post-mortems on all projects. Did we make or lose money versus initial estimate? How much? How did we perform against estimated time and expense? Were client expectations met? Were they exceeded? What was good or bad about the project? Were there errors in the original estimates? Where could we have saved cost?
    • Use this information to improve your estimating process over time.
  • You have a long history of T&M projects. Categorize these by project type. Look at the hours required to complete the projects – both engineering and management time – as well as other costs. Establish range and averages within each category.
    • Look for key variables among the project categories: scope of project, learning curves, efficiency of team members.
    • Work through known costs and outcomes on past projects as examples to teach the process.
    • For new projects, calculate best, medium and worst case hours and costs. Bid based on your worst case as you develop your learning curve.
    • Make sure to include a project management fee on top of your T&M estimates. Eventually you want to develop an overhead percentage to cover project management.
  • Team your estimator with the project lead both for project input, and performance against the bid.
    • Evaluate and compensate both based on project outcome.
    • The critical measure will be gross margin generated versus gross margin estimated on the project.

Key Words: Leadership, Project, Time and Materials, Fixed Price, Bid, Framework, Consistency, Standards, Variables, Estimator, Lead, Incentive

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How Do You Chase A Moving Ball? Three Fundamentals

Interview with Michelle Bonat, CEO and Founder, RumbaFish Technologies

Situation: Early stage companies focusing on social commerce and analytics face an unpredictable market. Nobody can accurately forecast market direction or even who the players will be in 2 to 3 years. What are best practices for chasing a moving ball?

Advice from Michelle Bonat:

  • In a rapidly evolving market it is critical to have laser-like focus on the needs of your customers. You must create value for them by understanding their needs, businesses and challenges. While technologies and markets change and evolve, human behavior is remarkably consistent over time. By focusing on rewards, sharing and customer motivations we better understand their needs. We see three fundamentals in working with customers.
  • First, focus on understanding needs versus wants. If Henry Ford had asked what customers wanted for better transportation they would have said “a faster horse.” They needed a faster way to get from Point A to Point B without getting rained on. We invent solutions that are incrementally better at addressing fundamental customer needs by leveraging technology and social commerce.
  • Second, work collaboratively with your customer. As we develop an understanding of needs versus wants, we develop an arm in arm relationship with customers and partner to evaluate solutions that work for them. We use short versus long release cycles with frequent checkpoints to assure that both sides are on the same page and that we understand the features that are most important to the customer. As a result, our customers become evangelists not only for the resulting product or service, but for us!
  • Third, go into any project with the customer’s success foremost in your mind. We focus not only on getting the solution right, but on assuring that the solution optimizes the customer’s primary objectives. That way we all share in the win.
  • The bottom line is that customers want to be treated as individuals and want their individual needs met. We honor this and make it central to our customer interactions. This way, no matter where the market goes, we will be a player.

You can contact Michelle Bonat at [email protected]

Key Words: Strategy, Leadership, Social, Media, Commerce, Analytics, Predictability, Unpredictability, Market, Direction, Player, Customer, Value, Needs, Wants, Behavior, Engage, Share, Understand, Technology, Social Commerce, Collaborative, Relationship, Success, Solution, Individual

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What’s My Role as CEO? Five Perspectives

Situation: The CEO questions whether he is the right person to lead the Company. The Company has solid revenues and profitability, but growth is lower than expected. How can the CEO improve his situation and solidify his leadership?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The primary functions of the CEO are to assure the maintenance of company values, to provide vision, and to monitor resource allocation within the company.
  • Identify your strengths, and the most important areas where you need help. Create an organizational chart not of positions but of strengths that are needed within the company. Compare these positions with your own strengths, and focus your own activities on your strengths. Promote or hire talent to support you in the latter areas.
    • As you hire or promote and delegate, make sure that you are allowing those with new responsibility the latitude to run their areas of responsibility.
  • Should I consider hiring a CEO or COO?
    • Maybe. If you do, first identify the key leadership traits that we most want to see in a candidate.
    • If you hire a CEO, this individual should have skin in the game. They must be perceived as a leader, and there must be a clean hand-off.
    • Consider hiring a COO. This can be someone willing to take this role with the understanding that your long-term objective is to replace yourself as CEO. A person unwilling to come on as COO and to develop into the CEO may not be the right candidate.

Key Words: Leadership, Role, Strengths, Delegation, Organizational Chart, Values, Vision, Resource Allocation, CEO, COO                                                             [like]