Tag Archives: Transfer

How Do You Train Others to Fill Your Shoes? Four Points

Situation: A CEO of a small but rapidly growing company needs to transfer her knowledge and experience to current employees and new hires. This includes project management, IT management and engineering. To support the company’s growth, she needs to focus on business development and closing sales to important clients. How do you train others to fill your shoes?

Advice of the CEOs:

  • Quash any skepticism associated with the release of control of areas that were previously overseen to grow the company to its current state.
    • Selected individuals with the capacity oversee these operations. As the working relationship develops trust will replace any existing skepticism about these individuals’ ability to take on these roles.
  • Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Focus on team management.
    • Hire sales people who will be tolerant of the odds and ends of prospective client behavior. Focus on effectively managing the sales team.
    • Train them to bring the CEO into key points in the sales process where that input can assist – after they have completed initial client development and know that a potential client relationship exists.
  • From time to time, it will be necessary to refocus the efforts of others. What can be done to facilitate this?
    • Ask questions. Try to refocus the conversation.
    • Seek clarification of what is said – “Let me summarize what I heard” – then refocus the conversation.
    • Adjust perspective. When an individual starts to ramble, they may divulge important information without considering the implications. Make mental or written notes and look for opportunities. Their talking can become a gold mine of information.
    • Use the conversation to make a personal connection. People love others who will listen patiently to them and infer trust and connection from this.
  • As CEO, the job is to help others succeed. The result is the success of the whole enterprise.
    • Remember that there are different levels of sophistication. Adjust the mindset and exercise tolerance over these differences.
    • Focus on passions and strengths. Get others to assist in areas which are not your strengths, but which may be strengths for them.

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How Do You Reduce Interruptions in the Office? Three Points

Situation: A CEO of a small company finds it difficult to focus of company strategy and direction because on continuous interruptions to handle customer and company issues. Frequent phone calls and employees coming in to ask for guidance or to talk about issues make it difficult to focus on plans for the future. How do you reduce interruptions in the office?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The company has grown to the point that it is time to build a management structure to facilitate decision-making. It’s time to delegate.
    • Identify promising individuals within the company who have the capacity to take on management responsibility. Provide them with the training to assume managerial roles and to handle direct reports.
    • If the talent is lacking in some areas, hire managers to oversee these areas.
  • The phone is the #1 problem – interruptions to deal with customer issues.
    • Hire an assistant to manage incoming calls and to transfer these calls to the appropriate department.
    • Learn to say no. For example, if an opportunity requires the CEO to be off-site to evaluate and estimate a project, that individual could not answer the phone in the office. Similarly, it is necessary to carve out concentrated time for strategic and critical tasks when in the office.
    • Explain to the team the challenge, and the benefits of spending uninterrupted time each day working on strategic direction. These benefits include additional growth and opportunity for both the company and employees.
    • Establish an official time – during regular hours – that the CEO is not available to respond to calls or other immediate needs. During these times, have an assistant direct these requests to the appropriate department or schedule time later in the day to handle an issue.
  • Any executive in a Fortune 500 company plans time for planning and other essential work when they cannot be interrupted. Working without interruptions is essential to efficient, high-quality work.

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How Do You Create a Succession Plan? Three Points

Situation: A CEO, planning for his future, wants to create a succession plan. Done correctly, this should also promote the growth of the company until it is time for him to retire. The challenge is that the company is highly decentralized, and a clear successor has yet to be identified. How do you create a succession plan?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Tie succession planning to growth. This will benefit the company whether the CEO’s retirement is in the planning horizon or the more distant future.
    • Consider geographic transfers to provide growth opportunity for key managers and to proliferate the success of highly successful regions into less successful regions.
    • Develop a leadership generation engine. Consider GE as a model for this as noted in Jim Collins’s books Good to Great and its predecessor, Built to Last. GE’s success is a model for building long-lasting value substantially beyond the current value of the company.
    • Create a vision of what the company could be and the organization chart to fulfill this vision. This will guide and support the two points, above.
  • As new talent is acquired, conduct this with an eye to growth.
    • As the company identifies and hires top prospects, conduct the hiring process to fill the organization chart of the future company that is envisioned.
    • Look at outside hires for growth positions to complement home grown talent.
    • If business or company acquisitions are being considered, be aware that the leadership of the acquired business or company and its top talent may depart. Include retention clauses and incentives in any acquisition contract.
  • This effort must be approached as a long-term development process – it does not happen through quick-fixes but through a commitment to excellence in acquiring and developing talent.

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How do You Develop and Retain Talent in a Competitive Market? Six Points

Situation: A company must acquire new engineering talent to sustain its growth. However, there are few local engineers who are experienced in company’s key technologies, and the cost of living in the company’s location makes it difficult to bring in new talent. The CEO is considering developing a remote office where there are experienced engineers that they could attract to the company. How do you develop and retain talent in a competitive market?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • There are a number of issues to consider: location, management of the culture, leadership and potential unintended consequences that must be mitigated.
  • The COVID pandemic has forced companies to adapt to remote employees. Has this been considered as an option?
    • High definition, large screen systems can be set up for $2-3,000 per site.
    • Web cams, projectors, etc. can be set up for several hundreds of dollars per site.
    • Add to this design and analysis tools, with technology for prototyping.
  • Consider where within the organization the remote people will fit?
    • How will the organizational structure impact the integration of design engineering and manufacturing engineering?
    • What policies and procedures are needed to assure that there is no clash?
  • How will leadership be implemented for the remote group?
    • One CEO feels that there must be a sponsor from the home office to assure smooth and consistent transfer of company culture to the remote operation. This may take 1-2 years to achieve.
    • Another CEO hired a qualified individual locally for their remote operation. The important point was that this company has a very tight process and found that they could package this process sufficiently so that the new individual could pick it up quickly.
  • Look at developing a remote office as essentially the same challenge as a mini-acquisition. Like an acquisition, the key resource being gained is new talent. Think through the integration process and trade-offs as though it were a new acquisition.
  • Developing a remote location can be a good solution for advancing the company’s ability to outsource. It will teach the company:
    • How to design using a combination of internal and remote resources,
    • What infrastructure is needed in terms of policies and protocols around designs, and
    • What works from a communications standpoint to assure knowledge transfer between sites.

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How Do You Improve Internal Processes and Procedures? Five Approaches

Situation: A CEO’s company has experienced margin erosion due to designs that did not transfer well to manufacturing, and inefficiencies in the transfer process between design and manufacturing engineering. He wants to transform the culture without losing technical performance while meeting cost targets and delivery timelines. How do you improve internal processes and procedures?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Reinventing the culture of a workforce is an organizational design challenge.
    • The heart of the challenge is understanding the motivations and desires of the individuals involved – particularly the natural leaders within the groups.
    • Learn this is by speaking with them one-on-one, either as the CEO, or through individuals with whom they will be open and trusting.
    • Once their emotional drivers are understood, design accountability and incentive solutions that will align their personal reliability and accountability drivers with their emotional drivers.
  • Tailor the language of communication with the organization so that it responds to the emotional triggers discovered during the 1-on-1s. For example, if there is a negative reaction to sales within the engineering teams, use a different term like client development.
  • Expose the designers to the “hot seat” that gets created when their designs produce manufacturing challenges. The objective is for the designer to see the manufacturing group as their “customer.”
    • Involve manufacturing engineering in design architecture meetings. Do this early in the process so that they can communicate the framework and constraints under which manufacturing occurs and suggest options that will ease manufacturability.
  • Shift from individual to team recognition on projects. Instead of recognizing the contributions of the design component or the manufacturing component, recognize the contributions of the team of design and manufacturing engineers that produced a project on time, on budget, with good early reliability.
  • To kick off the new process:
    • Identify some of the waste targets.
    • Involve individuals who are known to be early adopters.
    • Have them look at the problem, develop and implement a solution.
    • Deliver ample recognition/rewards to these individuals.
    • Next use these people to mentor the next level of 2nd

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How Do You Manage Through a Difficult Period? Six Solutions

Situation: The CEO of a company is wrestling with issues concerning change orders and high labor and materials cost. To get back into good financial shape, they are considering options including reduction in estimator time and selling equipment; however, either of these could gut the business. How do you manage through a difficult period?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • It is critical to get on top of change orders. This is potentially a big profit-loss swing for the business.
    • Does everyone understand what’s happening?
    • If the answer is yes, teach them more about the business nuts and bolts so that they can help develop solutions? Share a portion of the savings in the form of spot bonuses for those who develop solutions.
  • Take a lesson from The Great Game of Business. Let employees know about the challenges and challenge them to help develop solutions.
    • As an example, look at change orders and the percent of change orders that are not correctly completed, approved and invoiced as a critical number. Let’s say that 50% of change orders are not completed, approved and/or invoiced correctly. The objective for the year is to reduce this to 25%. Calculate the value of lost billings from the past year. If this can be reduced by half, the value will be $X. If the company can meet this objective, consider making half of $X available for distribution as gifts or prizes.
    • To support this, allow each new project to design its own minigame to reduce the number of incomplete and uninvoiced change orders.
    • The idea is to have the project and inside teams design the minigames and come up with ways to reduce incomplete and uninvoiced change orders. They will learn new ways of being more efficient from this process. This is the long-term benefit to the company.
  • If it is necessary to reduce staff, cut early instead of later. This is painful but laid-off employees can be hired back on a contract basis as necessary.
  • A common solution during a difficult period is to cut back to core, reducing overhead as a survival strategy, and focus on winning as may bids as possible to rebuild the business.
    • Look at all departments and the gross margin that each produces minus the overhead that each requires. Focus cutbacks on those that are not positive.
  • Increase annuity contracts – contracts with major companies that are growing and frequently require the company’s services.
  • Transfer equipment to a separate corporation. Lease it back as business requires. This increases cash flow flexibility – for example, don’t make lease payments when cash is tight.

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How Do You Eliminate a Them-Us Cultural Divide? Six Thoughts

Situation: A company acquired an office in a new geography at no cost – just a commitment to keep the office going. The immediate challenge is transferring the previous owner’s client base to the new owner’s service. The people in the distant location are OK, but it will take coaching for them to deliver the new owner’s level of service. However, these people are proud and resistant to change. How do you eliminate a them-us cultural divide?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Involve the person who facilitated the acquisition in the integration process. Get his opinion of what is needed.
  • Your prime commitment is to the client base and past practices that built the client base. Maintain or surpass this level of service.  As long as the team meets this level of performance, they are serving your objectives.
    • You and the key manager of the newly acquired office should meet with their most important clients. Help the manager convert those clients for you.
  • Your other implied commitment is to the manager and employees that you inherited through this deal. Educate them on your approach – “we will do all that we can to create success for our clients.” Connect with the manager, understand how this person serves clients, and coach the individual.
  • Be fair – the fairest method of managing is a meritocracy.
  • Manage by results, not process – if the core values between the two sites are similar, allow for cultural differences in local practice.
  • If all this doesn’t work and you want for “them” to become “us” you will have to have someone from the home office move to the distant office and manage it.

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