Situation: The CEO is moving a key employee from head of engineering to a more customer development focus. To support this, she will have to bring in or promote another employee to fill the position of leader/supervisor/manager of the engineering group. The CEO seeks advice on the best way to approach finding a replacement for this key job. How do you replace a key position?
Advice from the CEOs:
• First, it is necessary to develop a timeline for finding and transitioning the replacement. Realistically, count on 6 months to find a replacement and transition the responsibilities to a new person.
• Keep in mind that anybody you find or promote will be different from the individual who currently occupies the position, and will not handle their new responsibilities the same way as the current individual. Their motivation and their approach to their new responsibilities will be different, at least at the outset, and they will not handle their responsibilities the same way that the current individual does.
• Seek an individual, either currently within the company or an outside hire with strengths that, over time, will add significant value to the organization. Prepare for this by brainstorming and developing a profile of the ideal candidate.
• If you have qualified candidates, the ideal person will come from within the organization. This has the added advantage of demonstrating to other employees that they, also, may become candidates for future positions to grow both their skills and income.
Tag Archives: Necessary
What are Attributes of a Highly Effective Sales Force? Three Points
Situation: A CEO wants to improve the effectiveness of her sales team. As CEO of a young company she faces a choice between using contract versus direct sales reps. She seeks the advice of other CEOs as to what has worked most effectively with their sales approaches and teams. What are the attributes of a highly effective sales force?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Spend time vetting either contract or your own sales reps:
- The choice of contract vs. direct sales reps is driven by market conditions and end desires.
- Utilizing a contract rep is an effective way to gain entrée into the customer. Even though they are 1099s, they must be managed as though they were company employees.
- It is important to spend considerable time vetting candidates for direct sales. Attitude, desire and commitment are much more important than experience and technical prowess. Spend as much time as necessary to make sure that you are hiring the best people. Test them, check references from employers and customers alike. Leave no stone unturned.
- Measure:
- What gets measured get done. Determine what behaviors are necessary for success and develop metrics for these behaviors. This enables you to manage success.
- For one CEO, the biggest challenge is selling above the gap – selling high and wide within the customer organization. Most reps concentrate their efforts on a few people in the client organization – generally low and mid-level people – and fail to establish relationships with senior management.
- It is important, and rare, to have those senior relationships. Getting them requires deep understanding of the customer’s business combined with confidence, determination and persistence.
- Respect and manage reps:
- Many companies treat sales as a “necessary evil,” setting up an antagonistic and ineffective relationship between sales and other departments. This causes the salespeople to hide much of their information or spend time “scamming the system” rather than working as part of the team.
- The best companies treat sales as a revenue engine and encourage, value and respect input from the salespeople. This encourages sales to be part of the larger team.
- There can be challenges transitioning people from a pure product sale to a long term service business relationship – a transition from Hunter and Farmer. Most believe that these are two very different personalities. It may be better having hunters who bring in the business and then transition the customer relationship to account managers to maintain long-term relationships.
- It may be necessary to design two compensation plans to incentivize the desired behavior of each group.
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How Do You Encourage Employees to Take Full Responsibility for their Jobs? Five Points
Situation: A CEO is discouraged because employees are neither taking initiative nor holding themselves accountable for results. They see potential problems, but don’t act to either prevent or resolve them. They continually bring situations to the CEO and expect the CEO to solve the problem or save the day. What have others done to shift responsibility and accountability to staff? How do you encourage employees to take full responsibility for their jobs?
Advice from the CEOs:
- There are two important questions to ask:
- Is this a situation that includes a large number of employees or just a few? If it’s just a few then these situations can be handled individually. If more than a few then systemic changes may be necessary.
- Are all employees clear on their responsibilities and what is expected of them? Is there written documentation on responsibilities associated with specific roles or individuals? Has this been communicated to individual employees during performance reviews?
- It is essential that direction and individual responsibility be clearly stated and understood. Encourage dialogue once direction or instruction is given to test understanding. Important direction should be documented in writing.
- Have clear core values been established that guide both the company and individual responsibility and decisions? Have these core values been publicized and posted in break areas as well as work areas? Use the core values to assess employees’ work to reinforce emphasis.
- Assure that employees are clearly empowered to make decisions. This is particularly important if employees have been subjected to micromanagement in the past.
- Ask for and encourage dialogue, both in one-on-one situations and in team and company meetings. Make employees part of the decision process so that they feel ownership over their responsibilities. Assure that excellent performance is recognized, rewarded and publicized.
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